writers’ piece

Four writers muse on the highs and lows of motherhood.

You know the stuff kids make in kindergarten and primary school? Hand-paintings, macaroni jewellery, Grandparents’ Day cards? I’m obsessed with it. In my shed, I keep five huge containers of things my offspring have brought home. It’s hazardous, and not just for my heart – opening any box releases clouds of ancient glitter.

I’ve never been much good at making. When I was a kid, Mum sent me to idyllic Saturday morning classes, but despite (or maybe because of) my best efforts, I never got beyond just fine. Better than stick figures… just. But my daughters’ art is a treasure trove.

When they were babies, motherhood was actually pretty boring. They squeaked and drooled and pooed. My days were spent trying to decipher the different grunts, hoping they were having a secret conversation with me. I didn’t know if they had hopes and dreams, what they thought about the world, whether they were cat or dog people (good news: they’re cat people).

But then, they talked. It was mindblowing. Somehow, it made sense to have produced arms and legs and hair – that’s just biology. But language introduced a whole new dimension to what I understood about motherhood.

I wasn’t just literally sustaining tiny versions of myself, but whole separate humans who could think for themselves and, shockingly, be better than me.

It wasn’t long before they started using other ways to communicate. They did less shouting for cheese and more drawing pictures of what they saw. Once they learnt to read, they wrote small stories about birds and trees and trains. Every day there was some new piece of their creative expression.

The first thing I remember was a Mother’s Day card. If you’ve ever had a kid in kindergarten, you’ve probably got the same one:

So here’s a special handprint Just so that you can say This is how my fingers looked When I placed them here today.

Underneath, a pair of hands, thick blue paint smashed into cardboard. Lord help me, I’m crying even typing it now, 10 years later.

They had drawings of dinosaurs, beads on woollen threads, a styrofoam solar system. Decorated quizzes guessed at answers about me (“Mum’s favourite food is space”) and mused on what they would be when they grew up (“tired”). My most prized possession is a drawing of a “poo-and-wee fairy” which, as the name suggests, is in the process of relieving itself mid-flight.

As they got older, the art changed. I started thinking back to my own art classes and was stoked to realise they were much, much better than me. They developed their own styles. They experimented with different mediums; asked for expensive markers. The poo-andwee fairy became a tough girl with a sword. A dinosaur drawing was now a furious statement on climate change. Every page existed for the best possible reason: to tell the world who they were. Not through words, which were my language, but art. And they were good.

They’re teenagers now, and I have to be more ruthless. Our house is drowning in faces on scrap paper, notebooks half-filled with characters, every kind of pen, pencil and texta imaginable. I choose the creations that seem like them, maybe without their even realising, and slip them into the containers in the shed.

Occasionally, I find a discarded scribble and pop it into my wallet, just for me.

And on the days when I need to remember – just sometimes, when motherhood is tougher – I pull out the plastic boxes of gems. The crayon scribbles. The fingerpainting. Laid out side by side, they tell a story. Art that changes and ideas that evolve. A couple of little girls who had something to say, and whose way of saying it grew as they did.

Like all mothers, I’ve had some challenging moments – chronic sleep deprivation, mastitis, being forced to watch repeat episodes of something called (I think) Unicorn Rainbow Sparkle Princess Highpitched-voice Puke-fest-hell.

But the day I found out someone else had given their daughter the same name as my daughter was the most brutal of them all. I was shell-shocked. Numb. I couldn’t believe that someone else’s brain had also realised ‘Winifred’ is an excellent name. I went into a period of mourning, and five years later, I still don’t think I’ve come out of it.

Naming anything whatsoever is a privilege, but when it’s a Galápagos tortoise or a human being – both of which have a potential lifespan of 100 years – the stakes are incredibly high. So, I think it’s completely rational to care about baby names.

At least, it’s rational when the baby being named is your own, and you’re the one who’s going to have to repeat their name over and over at an ever-increasing volume. But the problem is that I also care – a lot – about what other people call their children. Whenever I meet a new baby, I try to keep calm, but then I go home and rage about the kid’s totally normal and common name. WILLIAM! Why would you call your kid William?

I can have the most civilised and respectful dinner-table discussions about climate change, refugee policy and gender politics. But start talking about baby names, and I’ll start clanging dinnerware and standing on the table, raging about how “bloody Cate Blanchett took all the good boys’ names” (Dashiell, Roman and Ignatius – you would never catch The Blanchett naming a child William).

There’s a fun side to being a lunatic – I mean, a baby name obsessive – and that’s knowing all the small details about celebrity names: that Lizzo is short for Melissa, that Nicolas Cage’s name has no ‘h’ in it, that Sacha Baron Cohen’s surname is Baron Cohen and not just Cohen. This is the kind of intel that makes me really fun at dinner parties – that is, until I start verbally abusing all the Williams in the room for their name and demanding to speak to their parents, because “someone must be held to account”.

But, while I may pour scorn on names that are popular in the country I live in, I don’t mind when kids have names that are popular in other countries. My son’s name, Jeronimo, is currently the second most popular name in Colombia, but that doesn’t bother me a bit, because in Australia it’s rated at approximately #23,967,345. And just to make sure it stays really low, I go onto baby name forums every week and vote it down even further in popularity. You can never be too careful.

I’m trying to recover from my idiotic investment in baby names, especially now that I live in a post-vasectomy household and won’t get to name any more children. As part of this letting-go process, I’ve decided to release all my ‘good’ names out into the world, in the hope that they go towards happy and long-living humans – or at the very least, some really deserving Galápagos tortoises.

So, here they are. The names I’ve nursed close to my chest for decades, but will now never use. If I ever meet people with these names, I’ll hunt down their parents and demand a finder’s fee (I mean, I’ll congratulate them for their excellent choices).

My best-ever names for girls are: Griselda and Babette. And the best boys’ names are obviously Gilbert and Sylvester. For a nonbinary name, I would recommend basically any nice-sounding word whatsoever: Poem. Blue. Galápagos.

There. Done. Now, off you go and name some interesting babies. I’m relying on you all.

“IF YOU HAVE UNPROTECTED SEX, YOU WILL HAVE 10,000 BABIES” was the message drummed into my brain by society, but it turns out it’s actually super-tough for me to have even one baby, let alone 10,000.

When I first spoke to my IVF doctor, I had no idea what was involved. IVF is one of those things that’s never really spoken about, and I never thought it’d be something I’d have to experience. Even when I signed on the dotted line and transferred a chunk of money to the clinic, I still didn’t really get it. It first sank in at the mandatory counselling session.

“So, Billie, if you were to… perchance… die after we take your eggs, would you consent to your husband using the eggs with his new partner?” Wow. I laughed and looked at my husband, who seemed horrified. That’s a lot to think about over a tepid glass of water at 10am. Yes?

It sank in a bit deeper as I sat at my kitchen table after finishing my porridge, with a needle full of hormones in one hand and a hunk of my stomach flab in the other. Surely a medical professional needs to do this, rather than letting me do it completely unsupervised. What if I accidentally inject it into my liver or spleen? Where the hell is my spleen? What even is a spleen? After reading the instruction leaflet approximately 33 times, I did it. And then I did it every day after that (sometimes twice) for the next few weeks, until it was as much a part of my morning routine as boiling the kettle.

Once an ultrasound confirmed my eggs were finally big enough, I had to administer the ‘trigger’. I picked the special injection up from the pharmacy and was told it needed to be kept in the fridge, which was

perfect, because I was on a break at work and no one knew I was doing IVF! I had a choice between the office lunch fridge and the office drinks fridge. I had a vision of someone unwrapping my injection in the staff kitchen after confusing it for their leftovers, so chose the drinks fridge. I sticky-taped the bag shut, wrote my name on it in all caps and tucked it behind some tinnies.

The trigger injection had to be administered at a specific time, exactly 36 hours before the – wait for it – ‘egg harvest’. Yes, my body was now a farm. With extreme precision, my husband counted the seconds to 7pm, then I pushed the liquid into my stomach. It felt like we were interns working at NASA, charged with controlling the first mission to a new planet.

I don’t remember much about the actual harvest, except the sombre realisation that the general anaesthetic was wearing off, and snapping back into the room when the nurse told me, “You took a while to start breathing normally again.” My apologies!

The most mind-blowing part of the process was the egg transfer. I lay semi-reclined on a hospital bed, legs splayed, looking up at a TV. On the screen, I could see a live video of my fertilised egg, now an embryo, being examined under a microscope in the next room. I was asked to check my name and date of birth on the slide containing my egg, before the embryo was sucked up into a pipette and brought through the door to be physically inserted into my uterus.

Suddenly, under fluorescent lights, sans romance, I was pregnant. Science is goddamn incredible.

IVF stories like mine are not the norm, unfortunately. It can be mentally and financially devastating, consuming years and years of people’s lives, sometimes without success. Hopefully, sharing details of the process makes it easier for others to talk about and reduces the mystery around it.

There are a lot of tropes about motherhood. That you don’t know true love until you’ve had a child. That you don’t know true exhaustion until you’ve had a child. That mothers sacrifice a lot, are selfless. That it all adds up to being a better person. Parenting does change you and your life, no doubt – but I think, in truth, my kid has actually made me a worse person.

There’s the image of the mother always putting herself second, tending to her child’s cuts and bruises, protecting them. I do most of that stuff, and it’s made me more impatient with others. Meaner. Selfish. Before I had a kid, I don’t think I would ever have hypothetically thrown a child off a cliff. Now, I can imagine tens of scenarios where I’d throw tens of children off a cliff, if it meant saving my son.

It all comes down to that so-called ‘ultimate love’ – but my child is also the most annoying person I have ever met in my entire life. You know when you were a teenager, realistically old enough to determine if you could go to the movies by yourself, but you still had to ask your parents? That’s what having a toddler is like. Only this time, your life is dictated by a very small, very uncoordinated moron.

Before my kid was born, I had a pretty decent reserve of sympathy for other people. I would listen to their concerns, their daily hardships, what kept them up at night. Now, a lot of it seems so trivial, especially if they’re child-free. “How difficult it must be for you,” I think. “With all of your money and free time and sleep, thinking about your own needs and wants.”

This is an arsehole-y way to feel, I know, and I don’t want to turn into a cliché who thinks having a child is the hardest thing in the world (it’s not), but the simple fact is, he’s turned me into more of an arsehole.

There’s also the judgment towards other parents. Every parent secretly thinks that, unless you’re parenting exactly the same way they are, you’re an idiot. Few are honest about it, but it’s 40,000 per cent true. Parents are obsessed with milestones and slyly letting you know how advanced their child is, but as one friend observed: “I never got why people are excited when their kid walks early. It’s not like they’re going to be so much better at walking than the child who walked six months later. You don’t look at a 25-year-old and think, ‘Wow, what an amazing, well-rounded walker’.”

Few get to witness how deeply juvenile I can be now that I’m a mother. Just the other week, I rang my husband to complain about what a p-r-i-c-k (I spell it out so the kid doesn’t know I’m calling him a prick, #mumhack) our toddler was being. “I don’t give a shit that he’s two years old, I’m not speaking to him,” I complained. “We’re no longer on talking terms.” Not talking to a toddler – that’s what I’ve been reduced to.

And that’s the most terrifying aspect of parenting. Soon, he will see all of this and understand. He’ll know all the worst parts of me: the parts we keep mostly hidden from the world. He’ll know I’m hypocritical, that I complain about petty things, that I can slam a door over something as stupid as running out of cheese.

It could be that I was always a slightly short-tempered, meanish person, but now that I have a mini me to witness it, I can see it clearly for the first time. Luckily, he has to be on my side, because I’m his mum.