Motherhood essay by Grace Pilkington

I am now months away from giving birth to my third child, it’s my fourth pregnancy and  yet again, I feel myself vacate my body and watch as it becomes a vessel. I stare down at myself on the train and see my stomach move and feel the rumble of someone inside of me. I watch as the person opposite me sees feet kick through a borrowed maternity dress, while they munch their M&S sandwich.  It really doesn’t get any less extraordinary, just a bit more familiar.

After almost 7 years of pregnancies, breastfeeding and brief recovery windows, my body is an entirely different creature to what it was. My breasts droop so much that even the greatest maternity bra is painful to wear. They want to go down and I am not going to be the one to stop them. I can’t keep fighting gravity.

I am at a stage of pregnancy that I can’t see beyond my bump, only my feet sticking out. I don’t have a long mirror, and won’t be seeking one out, so I trust the rest of the stuff is still there. My 4 year old daughter assures me ‘it’s hairy’.

My thighs and legs are so sciatic that sleep is near impossible, my stomach is swollen and I burp constantly, and my throat aches with heart burn.

But this  time I surrender to it. To all the beauty of the alien form I have now taken, to all of its sleepless nights and burp and fart filled days (lucky everyone else)!

I am terrified of indulging in self-pity and complaining about it.  I know how lucky I am to feel legs kick my stomach and a little body to sit on my sciatic nerves. In the summer of 2024, the wobbly and rickety seesaw of the motherhood journey, catapulted me off and I lost my son. At the three month scan, I was told he had acrania and wouldn’t live beyond 12 hours if he made it to full term.  And I made the anguishing decision to terminate the pregnancy. But just like my other children, he is forever with me. Woven into the cells of my being and etched into each corner of my consciousness. When I close my eyes, I see his face, watch him grow, and watch him smile as he strokes our dog, and get his shoes wet in the sea, and cries to me as I swoop him up and wrap my arms around him.

What I love about Annie Mackin’s triptychs is that they encompass the connection between motherhood and loss. Grief and joy sit next to each other, their hands intertwined underneath the table. Motherhood is the land of the precipice. In bringing around birth, we also dance with death. There’s the grief of baby loss, the grief of loved ones which you feel more profoundly when a new life arrives, the grief of selves lost, abandoned for a new life of self-sacrifice.

But that’s not the only precipice that motherhood toys with. Annie Mackin’s work also captures the sheer ethereal nature of motherhood. The way it distorts time and reality. Her image of pregnancy, full of abundance and merged with the sea and the sky, with the serpents hissing below.

During pregnancy and birth, I have felt a tribal awakening within, transcendent of time and space. There are moments of euphoria, truly like no other, found in the seconds where the pure selflessness of it is liberating and freeing. Moments where the love is all reward rather than demand. There’s a completely disarming joy of loving another human being to the point of complete self-sacrifice. And being able to watch this person grow and change — from eyes opening, to fingers unclenching, to cries started and settled, to rolling over, to sitting up, to crawling across the floor, to cruising across furniture, to slowly but surely finding confidence on two legs, to starting to speak and finding their independence — is nothing short of magic.

But then there’s also the excruciating relentlessness of the everyday monotony. The post-school/work afternoons where time feels horribly sluggish and I stare at the clock, waiting for bedtime so I can also go to bed. And there’s the pent up rage that every moment is spent facilitating another to sleep eat, excrete and repeat and the total loss of freedom and spontaneity.

Annie’s work shows what postpartum is like —  a body strewn, with umbilical cord dangling, or is she now being sacrificed to the skies? The stars and moon glimmer above her. Is the body now discarded? And what of the mind at this point? Sleepless and deranged by the sudden decline in hormones and often trying to recover from bodily trauma, it has to sacrifice entirely to the needs of the baby. As a sufferer of postpartum depression after the birth of my daughter, I felt how slippery the path to psychosis is. I was convinced of events that didn’t exist. But the line between what’s real and what’s disappears in postpartum brain fog, anxiety and sleeplessness.

All Annie’s work on motherhood reflects the lack of control one really has over the whole process. A greater force has taken hold, and you can fight or accept. For a long time I tried to fight motherhood. In the brief periods when I wasn’t pregnant or breastfeeding, I was so determined to feel like ‘me’ again, I would search for experiences with old friends, drinking too much and trying to act as if I didn’t have these beautiful creatures lurking in my consciousness at all times.  I clung onto my career, taking on more and more work with the hope it would rebuild my identity.  I wanted my old self back, nostalgic about a time I considered to be free of responsibility,  before the world contained people who are entirely dependent on me and who I love so furiously, it’s terrifying.  

But the truth is - I am never entirely present when I am not with them. I may be answering questions on a zoom, writing an email or doing a gym class (rarely) but there’s a corner of my brain imagining what they’re doing at nursery, wondering how to better support the extraordinary beings they are, or how to overcome whatever sleeping hurdle we’re currently trying to leap over with two knackered legs.

And so this time, like the body in Annie’s work,  I abandon myself entirely to it all. I accept it - I have undergone matresecnce and am no longer the ‘Grace’ that I used to be. I am an entirely different human. I am not going to fight it this time. So as I await the birth of my daughter, I put all my weapons down and feel my entire being  re-align and shift once more.