Note to self
Featured in ‘Sunlight Later’
I don’t want to look back
and realise this whole time I was
happy, when my daughters leave home to get their hearts
broken, and the empty mornings and tidy rooms yawn
wide in scrubbed peacefulness, I don’t want
to look back and realise that I miss being
needed, that I miss being tired, that sometimes
I even miss scraping scrambled eggs off table legs
that I miss the heavy head heavy breath
dark fuzz of hair silk skin tucked under my
cheek, that I miss being adored for who
I am, before they find out who I really am
centred at the centre of their tiny universe
their sea-black eyes orbiting mine.
An extra note
‘The days are long but the years are short’, the saying about having children goes. And there’s truth in it. We had our second daughter when our first had just turned two, and there were days where I was just so worn out, so touched out, so tired of being needed all the time. The days felt interminably long. I craved for time to myself, for my body back, for a tidy flat, for silence. This was written during those early days of having two kids, when our two-year old would come and lie on me when I was breastfeeding her sister, where I was feeding around the clock, where I was trying to manage the emotions of a two-year-old as well as the physical needs of a newborn. And I did need to (and still do need to) remind myself that these exhausting, chaotic, overloaded days are also likely to be some of my happiest. And that when my daughters grow up and leave home to find their place in the world, the early days of motherhood that I longed to escape will be the ones I end up longing to go back to.
If this poem spoke to you, you may also like this substack piece.