This week I interviewed the acclaimed Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, on the eve of her novel Dream Count being published. It was her first fiction book to be released for more than decade.
“It’s a really frightening place to be, because writing is the thing that gives me meaning,” she explained. “I’m not sure that it was just entirely physiological but something changed, and I just could not get back into that magical place where I can write fiction.”
“I’m a person for whom thinking clearly is so important, and so to be in that kind of place emotionally is very frightening.”
I also remember her telling me in a previous conversation we had on Woman’s Hour that she felt like her brain was wrapped in gauze during pregnancy.
Taking the plunge to write publicly about undergoing six rounds of IVF to have our second child, while it wasn’t working, certainly felt transgressive.
I forced myself to work through it all, needing the distraction. I liked that I could do something familiar, even if my body felt like a pin cushion, bruised from so many needles. At times, working was my saviour, but there nothing left on the side. Extra creativity, such as drawing with our son, went out of the window. And sometimes I couldn’t even access my one true joy: listening to music. I couldn’t bear it. The drugs made me a stranger to myself.
For too long, women’s experiences have been flattened out to make us good or bad, functional or dysfunctional, loving or hateful, stable or unstable.
square EMMA BARNETT
Maternity discrimination is alive and well in Britain todayRead More
When I did, amazingly, have our second child, I also found it wild that in all my reading in and around parenting, pregnancy and motherhood, there were vanishingly few totally honest accounts of maternity leave, a time when exhausted women are trying to scrape the pieces of themselves back together in an order that vaguely resembles what was there before.
Six months after giving birth, getting my mind to focus again was like cranking up an old engine. It felt rusty. Like Adichie, the gauze was there and I was forcing it to loosen. The time constraints of caring for two children, and not feeling like the me before, meant I had to let go of any worry about whether my writing was any good. That was weirdly liberating.
It all came out: how slowly time ticked by at times, in a way I had never experienced time before; my wedding ring still not fitting six months from giving birth; my sheer frustration that I had seen a pile of litter at the end of my street for three days and I still couldn’t find a moment to go and sort it out.
I am still understanding the ways I have been fundamentally altered by trying to conceive, miscarriage and two motherhoods. Ultimately, I am always divided in my mind between home and family and wherever I am when I am not there. I run all decisions through the family’s needs. My sense of self and who I am is still re-emerging two years on, especially as I enter the foothills of perimenopause and board another hormonal rollercoaster.
‘Maternity Service: A Love Letter to Mothers From the Front Line of Maternity Leave’ by Emma Barnett is out on Thursday 13 March
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