In the chaos of new motherhood, an injury led to finding the true ‘me’ again

I was shocked to get in the surf postpartum and find that, while I could lie on my surfboard in the correct posture and move my arms in a paddling motion, I had no capacity for acceleration. My arms didn’t propel me through the water because, between my leaking breasts and my navel, there was an utter lack of muscle, an absence where there had once been power. I was pummelled by a gentle ocean in ways that would have been unimaginable pre-pregnancy.

It was hard to grapple with, this lack of something that had always felt so intrinsically me. Surfing wasn’t just a hobby: it gave shape to my sense of self, and had honed the fabric of my body. I had to work hard to regain that power. It wasn’t that I remade myself into what I used to be – I had to work to find a new shape, one that was both toned and precise with muscle, but softer and rounder with milk and snuggles. I was later to learn that the same would be required of me when it came to writing.

I’d found out I was pregnant with my first child on the day of the book launch for my first novel and was immediately overcome with an unfamiliar nausea. When I arrived at the venue for the launch, a lapel mic was pinned to the neckline of my shirt and I was led to a raised platform. The horror! Would I barf, not only in front of a crowd, but with the belching and squelching sound amplified and reverberating?

Throughout the launch, the nausea sat in my throat adjacent to the mic and muffled the thoughts and ideas I was trying to shape for the audience, or so it felt to me. From that moment onwards, it was as though a growing baby and words could not co-exist in my body.

In retrospect, this might have been because I didn’t know who I was writing for any more. It’s not that I write with an intended audience at the forefront of my mind; it’s that in the depths of my unconscious, I know I am my audience because I write to make sense of the world.

When I was pregnant, I didn’t know what my body was any more or who I was any more, so this stopped: the words didn’t clarify into anything.

I mourned and craved my old life and I was impatient for the next bit: kids (plural) to take camping and surfing, to explore Narnia with.

Then I had a baby, and a life of sleep deprivation and endlessly giving became my reality. I didn’t have time for writing. I didn’t have the mental space. I didn’t create the conditions for myself to have the time or the mental space.

I’m not a baby person. I mourned and craved my old life and I was impatient for the next bit: kids (plural) to take camping and surfing, to explore Narnia with. I wanted to get the baby phase out of the way swiftly so I could get on with living.

Soon, I had another baby. This time the sleep deprivation and a life of giving to two little people manifested in that thing I had, in retrospect, been flirting with for quite some time: post-natal depression.

Depression was awful, educational, clarifying. I knew, once I was in it, catatonic on the floor while my baby napped and my toddler pottered around me, that I was fortunate because my mental health until this moment had been so good, and that depression was a whole other breed of not being okay.

I also knew that this was not me, and I needed to find me again. But the old me didn’t exist any more: I needed to find the new me.

My psychologist’s diagnosis was that my life lacked pleasure, that my depression was situational and the most obvious way to counter it was to change something in my situation. I had to carve out time for exercise, to surf and to write.

One of the problems with being a creative mother is of course economics, particularly for people in my generation at this moment in history. Prioritisation is necessary. It is difficult to justify sending children to childcare, or have one’s partner reduce their (paid) workload, so that one can embark on an endeavour that may or may not reap financial reward. Yet prioritisation was necessary.

Around this time, a gift dropped into my email inbox in the form of a commission: would I like to write a piece of creative non-fiction about giant kelp? I had no idea what I would write, but I said yes because if I needed to find myself, what better way to start than lyrical writing about the ocean?

I asked my partner and my parents: “Give me some hours?”

I planned out an experimental personal essay in which I would play with narrative, and in which I would intentionally lean into being a writer who is also a mother. Then I wrote it.

It was hard work, but productive in more ways than one. After that time of not writing much during pregnancy and then in the sleep-deprived fug of the fourth trimester, my brain had softened: it wasn’t sharp and analytical and creative any more, but was dazed with hormones and exhaustion, and organically reshaped by that mundane thing they call a mother’s mental load.

The brain is plastic; of course, mine has been moulded into something new by the sheer volume of stuff it had to incessantly compute. The challenge, I came to realise, was akin to the one posed by surfing; this time, I needed to sculpt my brain (not my brawn) into a multitasking machine with a writerly edge. This essay was like a chisel sharpening my mind, and it felt good.

My brain had softened: it wasn’t sharp and analytical and creative any more, but was dazed with hormones and exhaustion.

All the while I had a messy draft of half a novel waiting for a structural edit and I thought, “It will be years before I have the clarity and time to wrangle that.” Yet once the kelp essay was finished, during nap times, I couldn’t help but open the document, tidy it here and there. I did have the clarity, it seemed.

So I was getting it ready for when I would have the time. But I fretted I would never be able to find enough time to prioritise something the scale of a novel, yet deferring it any longer was a devastating prospect. Even when I wasn’t actively thinking about it, it was itching my subconscious and my fingertips, jostling to get out.

And then, just as I finished up my edit, I accidentally achieved that mythical thing, what Virginia Woolf referred to as “a room of one’s own”.

The week before, I had finished my maternity leave and returned to my part-time day job. I was half-dressed for work, rushing to get spare toddler undies off the clothesline for a daycare backpack when I stumbled on a Croc of the shoe variety and: crunch, snap. My ankle basically exploded. It was dislocated and broken so badly that even the doctors went “oooh” when they saw the X-rays later that day.

Upon assessing my warped ankle, the paramedic said, “Pack your bag. Good chance you’re in for a bit of a stay at the hospital.” Between puffs on the whistle, I had the clarity to instruct my partner: “Pack my laptop.”

The question of how to make the time to write became obsolete. It was no longer a question of prioritisation. I couldn’t do anything else for three months. My brain was ready. My draft was ready. My book A Catalogue of Love flooded onto the page.

Looking back, I know that it wasn’t only the sudden burst of time that allowed me to submerse myself in a state of writing flow, despite the pain and stress my broken ankle caused; it was also the fact I now knew who I was again. Postpartum, I had sculpted my (admittedly now wounded) body into something new, and I had sculpted my brain.

In doing so, I had also sculpted myself a new identity I was now ready to inhabit: a woman who was a surfer and a writer and a mother – all three, at once. They call this process matrescence: becoming mother. But to become mother isn’t about becoming a caregiver at the expense of all else. It’s to become a complex human being, a whole body charged with whirring synapses, needs, desires and unique capabilities.

A Catalogue of Love (Simon & Schuster) by Erin Hortle is out now.

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