Salt River

Thank you to Ramona Magazine for excerpting this essay after it was longlisted for a prize then sat unquietly with me.

When motherhood engulfs me like a flood, I find myself at the river. Some insistent calling of the water in my cells pulls me like the lunar tide. 

The river I mean is a real one. The Maribyrnong, the saltwater river, where a mineral meets an element and becomes something new. The salt river emerges fresh from the earth in the far-off mountains. By the time the flow reaches me it’s slowed and deepened, the ripples opaque and silty in the wake of slender rowboats.

I walk and walk along her winter banks, my tiny baby strapped to me, desperate that he sleep and that I learn how to be what he should, apparently, reasonably expect. Passersby, I’m sure, are alarmed by my general air of complete personal calamity.

Corrugated clacking of frogs

Cormorants drying their wings like laundry

This place is a floodplain. Fossils of sharks and shellfish made their mark here, far inland. Dolphins, I’ve heard, still sometimes dip and slick across the surface of the salt river. A charming and chubby fur seal called Salvatore pops up his shiny head fairly regularly, too, delighting locals and the Instagram account dedicated to his appearances.

My baby is so small and fragile, yet innocently rules my every moment with a vast and formless power. That minuscule wrinkled fist so delicately around my throat. How can someone I made with my own body be so foreign? 

I don’t know how to grow the mechanism of the inner ear, the vesicles of the heart, the feathery brush of eyelashes. My body in its knowledge is unknowable. I cradle him, staring at the duckling flick of hair at his nape and the uptick of his nose. I adore him and I am afraid of him and I am lost most of the time. I am cut untethered by the whole endeavour. 

1. I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things: ( )As much as I always could ( ) Not quite as much now ( )Definitely not so much now ( )Not at all

– Edinburgh postnatal mental health scale

Overwhelmingly, in those early months and years of caring for my baby, I had the sense of a protective layer having been sheared away. My insides were outside and simultaneously I’d never been further away from anything.

A man in a raincoat with a tartan-lined hood glances sideways at me as I sob openly on the salt river walking track, my baby’s head lolling on my chest, wiping my face with a snot-streaked sleeve. His mop of a scruffy little dog seems more sympathetic. 

Woolly wind blowing across my ears

Papery applause from gum leaves above

(Thank you, yes, I am doing something astounding)

I’m unhinged by sleep deprivation. I have simply lost my hinges. I used to swing easily back and forth between laughter and duty, a normal person doing normal human things, and now I flap about wildly, screeching.

His most basic needs I can meet, just about, with what seems like a ludicrous and heroic round-the-clock effort I still can’t quite believe happens everywhere, every day. It’s my own needs that shrink out of reach.

During pregnancy, I would watch water birth videos on social media. Even then the water called to me. The water called forth the babies too, in rust red gushes and into their trembling parents’ arms. 

Later, my own baby’s sweet bowling ball head would refuse to travel down the canal those other more natural mothers’ water babies did. In a surprisingly calm ‘emergency’ birth, he would emerge directly from my belly, cradled in my no-nonsense obstetrician’s gloved hands. 

The simple cry of joy I offered to this serious woman became the catchphrase of that baby’s favourite childhood story – of his own birth because of course that’s his favourite – ‘My baby! My baby!’

Pungent buckets; father and son holding lines

Palm fronds exploding in snapshot fireworks

When I was a child I dreamed often of being able to breathe underwater. Caves with deep turquoise water and refracted sunlight shimmering across stalactites called to me. I’d dive with a slippery otter’s wiggle and sink, looking upwards to the blurred cavern’s mouth and the bright sky outside. I’d stay at the bottom as long as I could hold my breath, and then just as I knew I needed to kick back towards the surface, I’d find myself breathing right where I was.

I’m not ever formally diagnosed with postnatal anything; no official depression or anxiety. The research stats are one in seven Australian mothers, perhaps one in five. Having experienced the years-long voracious group chats and rages into the void from virtually all the mums I know, however, I am convinced the figure should be much higher. 

But you’re all in such suffering for so long, it’s like a sad inverse of doping in professional cycling: just the playing field you’re weeping on.

I’ve said, fervently and sincerely, to friends unsure about having children: you can be a fully realised person with a meaningful and fulfilling life without being a parent. Of course I only truly know this in the specific, personal, way I mean it because I’ve been both these people. 

If I knew then what I know now – really knew it – I might not have made the choice I did. 

But also I wouldn’t want to have not made it. 

And also I'm angry that I didn’t know what I know now. 

That’s my motherhood in a spiralling paradox. 

Oh, now you’ve done it

Get your bulky pram out of this cafe 

do your slow walking away from this airport

shut that baby up on the plane

stop disgusting us with your leaky breasts 

and wetting your pants and embarrassing yourself with your child melting down on the dirty ground while you struggle with too many supermarket bags. 

Can’t you see you’re ruining it for everyone? 

You knew what you were in for.

Is anger always the top note of something else? Because rage is part of this. Curled up alongside sadness at what I’ve lost, despair at what lies ahead, embarrassment that I fell for it, shame that I’m feeling it all wrong.

Toni Morrison once said that her children only needed three things from her: to be competent, to have a sense of humour and to be an adult. I find myself noting these repetitively as three more ways in which to hopelessly admire her.

I start to experience shooting pains in my wrists. ‘Mother’s thumb’ is the colloquial term. It’s tendon inflammation from picking up and holding your baby so often, as if you’d want to stop but also like you have a choice. The locum GP tells me there’s not much to do but rest my wrists. And by rest, he clarifies when he sees my face, means not pick up my baby as much. ‘Who will pick him up?’ I ask. The doctor suggests anti-inflammatories.

Found in the Maribyrnong, the Pobblebonk is a burrowing frog. With its powerful hind legs, it can dig backwards into the ground where it can remain until it rains. 

Loneliness is the atmosphere of my early motherhood despite never being alone for more than a cat-nap’s worth of minutes. Sinking into the looming emptiness of a day, I am drawn to places where there are people, but to whom I need not speak. The salt river walking path. Shopping centres. I could write an essay about how my local library saved me, and perhaps I should. 

Sitting at my dining table with my own mother: so loving, so supportive. ‘How does anyone do this? How is everyone just walking around like people going through this is normal?’

My mum looks at me with such tenderness. ‘Because it’s women going through it.’

Russet waterweed weaves a carpet

Swans bending their necks (never in submission)

One morning, bright on the river and buzzing static on my heart, a little burst of imagined solidarity with a magpie lifts me. I find myself humphing with laughter, watching this fellow mum resignedly feeding her squawking ‘baby’, who is following her around on the grass, not giving her a moment – fully ninety percent of the mother’s size. 

The downy feathers on the youngster’s chest fluff in the breeze. My own baby’s silky tufts, poking out from his purple beanie, fluff in unison.

Here comes the son of mine… 

The most wilful 

The most beautiful

– Kate Bush, ‘Bertie

Becoming a mother has meant swearing a blood oath to ambivalence.

I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I’d thought I was swearing an oath only to eternal care, to selfless love. I wasn’t particularly daunted by the sociologist Sharon Hays’ criticism of ‘intensive mothering’. Warmth and empathy had always come fairly naturally to me. Why not all the rest?

But my love for my child is not selfless. It is full of self. It’s threaded through with fear and frustration; with shame and transcendence. The care is endless, yes, and it’s also dense with wiry contradiction.

Earlier this year I listened to the essayist Jessi Klein speaking on a podcast about her recent memoir, I’ll See Myself Out, a theme of which frames the work of motherhood as a hero’s journey. 

She’s funny, and I laughed along with her at the epic ridiculousness of parenting. The abject bringing-to-your-knees of it. To anyone who has cried as they wipe up someone else’s vomit from a 3am carpeted floor – hey!

In the interview, Klein mentioned how, when pitching the project, she was worried that being a mother wasn’t an interesting enough subject to write about. Too banal, too ‘done’. But that night I wept silently in the dark, lying next to my somehow-still-sleepless three-year-old, listening on earbuds to her read the audiobook.

It was the end of the first chapter that took me by the sternum. I felt a mortal recognition. Klein writes about how we depend on an obstinate unknowing of the hero, the mother. All we acknowledge are the welcoming arms and warm lap, above which is often raging, unseen and still taboo, a wild and bloodthirsty battle in the mother-mind. 

The hero’s journey is so often written as journeying outwards, towards peril and against incalculable odds – when for the mother it’s all that but inwards, through agony and tedium, finding the quiet courage to stay.

She’s got a bill like a duck and a tail like a beaver  

She burrows like a rabbit as she swims in the river  

She’s got fur like a puppy and lays eggs like a bird  

I think our little platypus is really quite absurd

My mum and my son sing a nursery rhyme together, shaping their hands into duck bills, burrowing and paddling, stroking fur and making a fist for the egg. There are platypus further upstream in the salt river, and I long to see one.

While writing this essay, I had many crises of legitimacy. How could I complain about the gift of my child? Especially when so many people, close friends of mine included, are giving everything they’ve got for those two lines on a plastic stick? 

What about the valour of my truly single-mum friends raising kids with far-reaching needs, the absent fathers casually supping on society’s absolution? 

How can I say all this publicly without real worry of authorities taking my child from me, when it’s my many-layered privileges that allow me that confidence? But then what if, like Clementine Ford’s fleeting 80s-kid anxiety in How We Love, the Goblin King does come and snatch him away for my hubris?

All of these self-silencing fears are why I felt so unprepared to be a mum. Why I went again and again to the salt river with the salt on my cheeks. Why I was bewildered and lost in the parental wilds and am still, often. Why I look at friends choosing to have more children as though I’m an alien observing human rituals.

For whatever reason I’d not heard enough women say what I ended up feeling. Or I’d dismissed those I did – Rachel Cusk in A Life’s Work, for example – as inherently different, much colder, types of women to me.

I’m writing this to shield my own bright little gas flame, as society flickers others all around and tells me I’m not only insane but ungrateful.

The Maribyrnong gradually changes along its length: from a small headwater stream, to a lowland river, to an estuary where it meets the sea.

I had never longed for freedom. I have always wanted the conventional. A white-picket fence and bonny baby sounded just great. My sense of self didn’t reckon much into it.

Then, far from softening me into dozy sweetness, motherhood revealed a self that frightened me. One who would claw and spit to gain a moment of her own. A gasping desperation for that far-off and ice-cold breath of solitude: that’s what becoming a mother meant for me. 

In Leslie Jamison’s essay on being a stepmother, In the Shadow of a Fairy Tale, she asks herself questions like, ‘would a real mother feel like this?’; meaning, among other things, conflicted, uncertain, like an impostor. Presumably others have answered her already, but I’ll add my voice here: yes, she would. 

 2. I have looked forward with enjoyment to things: ( ) As much as I ever did ( ) Rather less than I used to ( ) Definitely less than I used to ( ) Hardly at all

Footscray is one of the areas that lights up first in the time-lapse map of Melbourne at the Museum. But of course this old suburb is shockingly new in the real scheme of things. 

Planting trees by the Maribyrnong at a community day near Footscray Park with my son, now four, I consider what their height will be when my own young sapling is grown. I hope they receive the rain for which they yearn, that they grow straight and true next to the salt river.

Uncle Bill Nicholson, a Wurundjeri Elder, tells us in a Welcome to Country that day of the significance of this waterway. It’s always been a meeting place for clans from around here and peoples from far away. I think of the tens of millennia of women and mothers who have loved, and still do, along these same banks where I have taken such a deep and abiding comfort. 

Perhaps I was prepared in the tentative way you can be for the challenges of the first few days, weeks or months of mothering. Certainly any support our official system does offer seems to peter out about twelve months in. You’re left to the blue glow of Internet forums late at night telling you in perfectly balanced Vitruvian Man opposites exactly what you need to do to fix the problem.

What really shocked me was, three then four years later, to be still battling the sleep battle, the food battles, the put your coat on and sunscreen and hold my hand crossing the road, and please just sit in the car seat so I can strap you in safely battles. I was somewhat prepared for the effort involved in keeping someone else alive, but I wasn’t prepared to face such stubborn resistance in doing so. 

But of course there is resistance. He has a self as wild as mine. When everything is decided for you, what else can you do but choose the option that wasn’t offered?

The early practical battles, I’m dawningly aware and as people just love to remind you, are the simple ones.

Because you have sent out another to face the slings and arrows. Your little fawn in the deep dark woods and across the ruthless tundra. Knowing only once it’s utterly too late that you would do anything to spare him from suffering, and that there is nothing to be done.

Childhood wounds of your own are quick to sting at the sight of a pink birthday invitation in a childcare bag. I want to wrap him up in tissue paper so he never feels a bad feeling. I want to shield him from more pain because I have already broken up his family. 

My love for my child is veined granite. It is river stone. It’s undeniable, warm from the sun, and I continually scrape and bruise myself as I scramble its sheer face.

And where the water moved and shook itself

Like rippling serpent-scales, the light ran on…

– A.S. Byatt, Possession

We glimpse the enigmatic Faerie Melusine throughout A.S Byatt’s intricate story-within-a-story in Possession. She is a mythical siren, a serpent goddess or water fairy, who marries a mortal man on the condition that he never enter her bathing chamber on a Saturday. Of course, he breaks his promise and her transformed serpent form brings down chaos.

I understand Melusine. Floating in the bath most of the evening while pregnant, I longed to do so after giving birth, for those dragging weeks before the cervix closes fully and the risk of infection lowers. The water felt sacred, a mythical place where the weight was lifted. 

Later, when I’d moved to the little flat where I tended to the small, bright fire of a new life, alone fifty percent of the week, I had no bath. So I walked the salt river once again.

Red-rumped parrot, white-plumed honeyeater

Common galaxia; pleasing names for precious things

I’m resisting the urge to spend paragraphs describing how I love my son. Part of the silence that mothers step into is never being fully honest about the brutal complexity of what’s required. The love and the work are discrete. But what if your child reads this one day?

I will say this. Recently I’ve been writing gratitude lists (yes, I know). I used to write down things I was grateful for – clean running water from the tap, a lorikeet, a friend – but now I write down moments. 

Almost immediately I noticed that the moments are often about my child. When I make him laugh. When he calls Sylvanian Families, ‘Geranium Families’. When he says, ‘We’re cuddlers, aren’t we?’ every time at the same point in the same book. Inhaling the cupcake smell of the warm skin beneath his ear. Dancing to Joan Jett in the messy kitchen: he doesn’t know what a reputation is but he doesn't give a damn about his. 

These things co-exist. The suffocating difficulties and lost opportunities of modern parenting, the sleight of hand society pulls to get us to do it only to abandon us as soon as we do, and the moments that go on your gratitude list.

Standing next to the salt river, I think of the turquoise caverns of my childhood dreams. I think of my dive down, down, down, swallowed up by the water, and my rippled view out to the open sky. Of opening my mouth, unsure what will happen. A new reality subsuming you, and that first startling breath when everything is transformed. Because if you don’t breathe, you die. 

During the writing of this essay, the Maribyrnong lost her hinges, too. Historic rains meant flood waters broke the banks. Roads were flooded, bridges submerged, homes destroyed. The high balcony of the Angler’s Tavern perched just above the violent, briny, torrent.

That was me when I kicked my shoe across the room at the sound of yet another reedy cry too early into a nap. That was me when the maternal-child nurse raised her eyebrows at my Edinburgh questionnaire result. That was me somehow muddling through, despairingly rolling my eyes at waiting lists, flooding through the cracks of our lack of accessible care for birthing parents.

After the floods subside, I walk past the wetlands at Edgewater. Crazed and cracked mud that’s more grey than brown flanks the path many metres up from the quieted waters’ limit. The clean-up is almost done, things are almost back to normal, but evidence of the salt river’s rage is all around. Debris nestles under the river red gums at the bend towards Pipemaker’s Park. Some of the sapling trees we’d helped plant are flattened. A battered and solitary cowboy boot is perched on a walking bridge railing. (Babe, I hear you.)

The estuary is the perfect union and a miraculous meeting place.

– Mimi Zhu, Be Not Afraid of Love

My little son smiles at himself in the wardrobe mirror, catches my eye for a moment, then looks back to his reflection and leans in. He cups his hand by his mouth to whisper something I don’t catch.

‘Pardon, sweetheart?’ I ask. He startles bashfully and our eyes meet. He giggles, at me now, and shrugs, his apple-round cheeks sweetly pink.

‘Were you talking just to yourself?’ He nods. ‘Yes,’ he says, seeming glad that I understand. 

‘Sure honey, I don’t need to know what you said.’ That’s just for you. I meet my own eyes in the mirror. I get it.