My baby’s sleep cycles are exactly thirty-seven minutes, I know this because I can time his naps to the second. Thirty-seven minutes isn’t long enough to write anything substantial and even if it were, coherent thoughts have been few and far between, so the idea of putting any of them to paper feels laughable. 

So, instead of an essay, this edition is a selection of vignettes written in the notes app of my phone over the six months since my son was born. (Mostly in the middle of the night, so punctuation is patchy).

Sometimes, in the dream state of night feeds, I see the next 18 years flicker in front of me like a zoetrope or one of those clever flip books.

I see him in a high chair, face smeared with unidentifiable mush. I see him waddling around, unsteady but beaming. It skips to him wearing a rucksack full of packed lunch and new stationery on his first day of school, and then hunched over the kitchen table, his Dad helping him with maths homework. The years race by: he learns to ride a bike and seconds later, he’s leaving home.

All of me wants to reach out and stop the toy from spinning, stop the book from flipping, but I know my fingers will only get caught. If only a paper cut was the price to slow down time.

Babies learn to speak by watching your mouth move. I read that you are meant to start with vowel sounds, as those are the easiest for their little lips to replicate. Of all of the vowels, he seems to have an inexplicable preference for ‘e’. ‘Eeeeeee’ I say maniacally, very close to his face (his eyesight still not great), and the widest grin blooms across his face. It is completely intoxicating and I do it until the muscles in my face are twitching. I would do it, happily, until my entire face fell off.

I have always loved changing his nappies. Contrary to popular opinion, I believe a baby’s best, most potent, smell comes from their tummy, rather than their head. Changing his nappy is a chance to unwrap him, freeing the warmed aroma of his perfectly rotund belly like opening an oven door when you’re baking a cake.

I have a recurrent dream. I dream that I have fallen asleep while feeding him and that he is now lost in the bed, most likely suffocated by the duvet. I wake up frequently in the middle of searching the sheets in my sleep. Occasionally I wake my husband by patting him urgently as I try to work out, in the pitch black, if his mass is him, or my baby’s lifeless body.

Sometimes when I hold him very close to me, I feel like my heart is pounding. I run through a mental checklist - assuming anxiety the root - of my current worries, until I realise it isn’t pounding at all. It’s the force of my heart and his compounded. So close, so in sync, that it feels like two hearts beating within my chest.

When he was four months old, my appendix burst. The surgeon who removed it told me, in all likelihood, my milk would stop. He delivered the news frankly, with no comprehension of the emotional weight it carried. Breastfeeding my baby wasn’t just a means of nourishing him, it was also nourishing me. I wasn’t just nursing him, I was nursing my broken heart from the grief of losing my friend.

It made sense, then, that the nurses understood. They sat with me, all hours, while I pumped. They told me stories of their own pregnancies, labours, and babies. When one in particular asked for my baby’s name (Milo), she said it reminded her of her father’s name (pronounced Meelo, although I won’t presume the spelling). I asked her if it was short for anything and she nodded, replying (again, phonetically): Mee-loc-kro-ton. Her father had been named after a very strong man, she continued, known for lifting the greatest number of cows. What a claim to fame, I said, looking down at the plastic valves suctioned to my nipples, feeling much like a cow myself.

When I came home from hospital I relayed this story to my husband and, as I said it out loud, wondered if the conversation might actually have been a morphine induced dream. I googled various versions of ‘Meelockroton + strong man + cows’ and quickly came to Milo of Croton - a famous ancient Greek athlete and six time Olympic victor. He was indeed a very strong man. My favourite of his supposed feats of strength is that he would hold a pomegranate in one hand, and challenge others to take it from him. Nobody ever could, and despite him holding the fruit very tightly, there was never a bruise on it at the end of the trial.

Allegedly, in the years between Olympic tournaments, Milo of Croton would train by carrying a newborn calf on his back every day until the games took place. By the time the events came round, he was carrying a four-year-old cow on his back. When I read this, I related to it on an almost cellular level. I looked over at my own Milo, still a newborn himself, and thought: yes, my sweet boy, I will carry you anywhere.

My belly button has lost all structural integrity.

When he was younger, his wandering hards traced my collar bones like he was reading braille. Now, he is in his grabbing era: tugging on my ponytail or snatching handfuls of fur on the cats, grasping at me like he’s trying to get purchase on my skin.

Google searches (more than once - in case there has been new research on the topic):

Do babies understand kisses?

When do babies like kisses?

Can you give a baby too many kisses?

Motherhood is a lesson in contortion. I spend most of my time on my hands and knees and I manipulate my body into positions I wouldn’t even attempt in a yoga class. If he falls asleep on me, whether I’m sitting, standing, squatting, I don’t move a muscle until he stirs. During a particularly stubborn week-long nursing strike, he would only feed if I held plank position over him and dangled my breast into his mouth. If twisting myself into a pretzel might elicit one juicy giggle, I would do it with pleasure.

It is a privilege to spend my days like this, I know that in my bones, but sometimes I worry that if this goes on, that if I keep folding myself smaller and smaller like a piece of origami, that I might disappear completely.