Fatigue, isolation, loss of confidence… and a return to life and love. In her work “Nouvelle Mère” (Ed. Leduc.S), Cécile Doherty-Bigara delivers a sincere and moving testimony on motherhood. Extracts.
The feeling of experiencing a metamorphosis
“Delicious isn’t the first word that comes to mind when I think of motherhood. When my baby was born, I took it out of my body myself and at first everything seemed strong, beautiful, normal. Even my fears seemed logical to me since they were natural. And then suddenly there was the vague idea that my nights were going to be fragmented for a few months / years. I, who have always given importance to my basic needs, to my free time, felt something strange rising inside me. Slowly, the effacement of the woman in the service of the mother took place. When my baby was born I felt like I was losing control of my life.
First, I took it in the face that in the eyes of many people, the mother must take charge of all parenting. Feminism was a definition, but for me it became the center of my thinking. How many times have I heard that my companion Johann was a golden man because he took good care of our son, or addressed him with patience and openness? Since then, I have observed this injustice which devours the lives of women. With Johann, as soon as I was pregnant, we decided to become a “feminist” family, that is to say that none of us would have the prerogative of a task and would be unable to carry out one. other. This rule aims for fairness and concerns household and parental work. Because yes, a mother does not know better how to console than a father, nor better to change a roll of toilet paper when the previous one is finished! Fatherhood is not below motherhood. Certainly, the woman is the only one able to bear the child, but then, what to say about the experience of the father when he sees the child born before his eyes and drew from it a unique and impactful experience? Yes, the father has strength, and this strength is not weakened by birth. Johann was therefore as much a father as I was a mother. But there was still so much to question.
This way I had, for example, from the start, of depriving myself of the good fresh fruit that I love to have at home, preventing me from touching it for fear of choosing exactly the one that my child would want a little later! Who is this woman who constantly forgets herself that I have suddenly started playing? Frustrated with her time, her needs, her impulses, her life. Instead of thinking that my development would delight my child, I condemned myself. Through these self-inflicted dictates (which mainly come from the way I was socialized as a woman) truths have emerged to me. For example, I have always tidied up or cleaned, to do like my mother. And then suddenly I realized that I didn’t want to spend all my free time tidying up. Spend my Sunday hunkering down? No way. I understood that being an adult is not inheriting and passing on the precepts learned by one’s family of origin, but creating one’s own rules, that is to say letting go of one’s own mother’s gaze. Installing my rules, guilt-free, didn’t happen in 24 hours.
I felt against the grain of other mothers who seemed to carry on with their former lives, with a baby in their arms, as if nothing had happened. And every time a friend told me about her pregnancy, I refrained from telling her how much her life was going to change. I saw her on the edge of the precipice, and deeply, I sympathized. How to live on the radar, half awake? How do I go and teach my classes, emptied of my strength and struggling with my difficulties as a young mother who works full time?
The feeling of having crossed the void
Passing on life does not exempt from living it.This is what I understood thanks to a talking circle. Between women, we mentioned motherhood. I also went to therapy. The goal was to get out of the concrete in which I felt frozen. Every sleepless night is not resolved by what some mothers say: “In the morning, you look at your baby and everything is erased!” No. Self-exhaustion leaves its mark. The fact of not inviting anyone in the evening to be sure not to disturb your sleep, the fact of never offering yourself an evening with friends when the mind needed it, was undoubtedly a way for me to feel safe. control. But my strategies were not working… My therapy then gave me a decisive image: to become a mother is to let go of a vine and then take time to catch the next. In the interval – between letting go and taking – there is a vacuum. And this is the moment that I went through.
Little by little, I discovered that I had a presence to carry these questions with me. A presence that I decided to call Love, a kind of little inner voice with which I manage today to dialogue on my feelings. This presence of Love taught me to accept and love all the stages that lead to becoming a mother. Time passes, and I am the mother that I am becoming. I will never say that we forget the pains of childbirth, or the time it takes to put your child to sleep! I will not forget anything. I will know, without forgetting it, that I am the woman who lost in order to be able to give, and who gave in order to be able to receive.
Interview by Jessica Busseaume