18 Dec

Milk Machine

It makes me feel like a cow, she said.
Just to look at it now.
Its friendly pastel plastic
Fills me with dread
And I can’t get out of my head
The sound of a robot baby
Taking my milk.
It fills me with dread
When I think of the nights ahead,
The stirring and snuffling noises
That will pull me
From my warm bed;
When I think of the nights,
There’s no light
At the end
Just shattered sleep,
Shattered me,
Overwhelmed with dread,
And with longing
That somebody else
Could do this instead.
I’ll be a cow if it means
It’s not just me
Getting up in the night
To sit in the dark
And long for my bed.
I’ll be the cow,
But it fills me,
It fills me with dread.

15 Dec

Book review: Nobody Told Me, by Hollie McNish

Like many people, the first I knew of Hollie McNish was her poem Embarrassed on YouTube, which suddenly appeared everywhere I looked. I loved the poem for what it said (“I spent the first feeding months of her beautiful life/Feeling nervous and awkward and wanting everything right.“). I loved her delivery and I loved her: she just looked like an ordinary person I could hang out with, and I can see why she became such a poster girl for the ordinary experience of breastfeeding.

Nobody Told Me isn’t just a collection of poems, it’s the journal of Hollie’s transition from pregnancy through to three years, and somehow in her honesty she manages to convey both her own unique experience, and the universality of early motherhood. The reader witnesses the bleakness of the early days: terror, tinged with wonder; and her growth as a mother, into enjoyment of toddlerhood, and finally a recognition of all she has achieved.

Reading Nobody Told Me repeatedly made me weep, as I recognised with real feeling the floundering, bleeding, and nighttime feeding; the absolute reliance on an amazing supportive bloke; and the guilt-ridden enjoyment of a night away from home.

Hollie’s focus grows from the personal to the political (and this felt familiar too), as she experiences social judgement on all fronts, and also fights conventional stereotypes and lack of diversity. People comment on her child’s mixed race, tell her she’s too young to have a child or should be married, and find her overly strident when she objects to all the characters in storybooks being “he” by default. She’s so right, and we should all be rebelling against this – as a poet she is in a position to articulate this nonsense and say it loud.

Hollie McNish is so articulate and her poems hit the nail on the head over and over again. This would be a fantastic book for someone expecting a baby; for me, it’s almost a memoir.

14 Jan

Firstborn by Katherine Gallagher

For years I dreamt you
my lost child, a face unpromised.
I gather you in, gambling,
making maps over your head.
You were the beginning of wish
and when I finally held you,
like some mother-cat I looked you over –
my dozy lone-traveller set down at last.

So much for maps,
I tried to etch you in, little stranger
wrapped like a Japanese doll.

You opened your fish-eyes and stared,
slowly bunching your fists bracing on air.

With kind permission from Katherine Gallagher