Nine Days of Birthdays and Healing
Two days after my surgery, Isla turned four.
Nine days after my surgery, Arthur turned two.
I had spent weeks worrying about those numbers before the operation. I had looked at them on the calendar as though there might be some way to stretch the days between them if I stared for long enough.
There wasn't.
So this year, August arrived all at once.
Surgery. Recovery. Summer holidays. A fourth birthday. A second birthday. Two children who did not particularly care that Mummy had recently had instruments inserted through her belly button and still expected their lives to continue at their usual speed.
Which, honestly, was probably good for me.
Children are wonderfully uninterested in allowing you to become the centre of the universe for too long.
I came home from surgery to a house where cups still needed filling, somebody had lost something, somebody wanted a snack, toys were still scattered across the floor and my children still wanted their mummy.
Except Mummy couldn't do very much.
That was harder than I expected.
Not the pain.
I expected pain.
I'd prepared myself for incisions and medication and moving slowly. I'd prepared for being tired. I'd prepared for my stomach to hurt.
I hadn't properly prepared for sitting still while my family carried on around me.
I'm not very good at that.
There is something deeply unnatural about watching your two-year-old reach for you and having to think about whether you can lift him.
Or hearing something happening in another room and knowing James has it, but still having every part of your brain automatically go, I should get up.
Then remembering that getting up currently involves rolling sideways, bracing yourself and moving with the elegance of a ninety-year-old tortoise.
Motherhood doesn't switch off because you've had surgery.
Your body can be saying absolutely not while your brain is already halfway across the room.
And then my little girl turned four.
Four.
I had worried so much about that day.
I worried she'd remember me being in bed.
I worried I wouldn't be able to do enough.
I worried that surgery would somehow swallow her birthday and years from now I'd look back at photographs and see everything I couldn't do rather than everything that happened.
But children don't measure birthdays the way mothers do.
They don't stand there assessing whether you created enough magic.
They see presents.
Balloons.
Cake.
People they love.
The enormous excitement of being able to tell absolutely everybody that they are now FOUR.
And I was there.
Not in the way I had imagined when I first thought about her fourth birthday, perhaps, but I was there.
I watched her open her presents.
I saw her face.
I cuddled her carefully.
I listened to the endless stream of four-year-old thoughts that apparently become even more important once you are officially four.
And the day belonged to her.
Not my surgery.
Her.
That mattered to me more than I can explain.
Then there was the rest of summer happening outside the window.
I think that has been one of the strangest parts of all of this.
Recovery would perhaps be easier in January.
Dark by four. Rain against the windows. Everyone quite happy to sit under blankets and accept that life has temporarily become small.
August feels different.
August is outside.
It's children in the garden and shoes being thrown on because the weather is nice and spontaneous plans and days out and six weeks that already feel as though they're disappearing too quickly.
I wanted to be in all of it.
Instead, some days my biggest achievement was showering.
Some days I could do a little more.
Some days I'd do a little more and discover afterwards that my body had very different opinions about whether I should have.
Recovery isn't a straight line, which is incredibly inconvenient when you are impatient.
You wake up feeling better and immediately start negotiating.
Maybe I could...
Dangerous words.
Because feeling better while lying down and feeling better after walking around for several hours are apparently two entirely different medical conditions.
I've had to learn that one repeatedly.
And through all of it, James has just... done it.
Us.
The house.
The children.
Me.
The things I normally notice before anybody has said them out loud.
The things that need packing.
The food.
The lifting.
The getting everyone where they need to be.
The thousand tiny pieces that make family life function.
There have been moments where I've looked at him doing something I would normally be doing and felt guilty.
Then grateful.
Then guilty for feeling guilty.
Very relaxing emotional cycle.
But mostly I've watched the man I married become the person our family needed without making me feel like a burden for needing him.
There is a vulnerability in being cared for that I don't think I understood until I couldn't just get up and do everything myself.
I don't particularly enjoy needing help.
I like independence.
I like knowing I can sort things.
I like being Mummy and being the person my children come to.
But marriage can't only be about loving someone when everybody is functioning at full capacity.
Sometimes one of you is standing.
Sometimes one of you isn't.
This summer, James has stood for both of us more times than I can count.
And slowly, I've started joining life again.
I went to the zoo.
That felt enormous.
Probably not to anybody else walking around the zoo that day. To them, we were just another family with two small children wandering between animals.
But I knew where my body had been days earlier.
I knew how carefully I was moving.
I knew the strange tight pulling feeling around my belly button.
I knew I was still healing underneath clothes nobody else could see through.
And I was outside.
With them.
Having a summer day.
Not the summer I would have designed.
But ours.
Then Arthur turned two.
My baby.
Although at two, he would probably object quite strongly to the suggestion that he is a baby.
By then I was further into recovery. Still not myself, still having to think before doing things I'd normally do without thought, but further away from the operating theatre than I had been for Isla's birthday.
And there was something emotional about reaching his birthday.
Nine days.
The number I'd been counting before surgery had finally passed.
Both birthdays had happened.
I'd made it through the bit I had been so frightened of.
And do you know what?
They still had birthdays.
They still had summer.
They still laughed.
They still played.
They still had cake and presents and cuddles and their dad being ridiculous and their mum telling them to be careful approximately four thousand times.
Nothing stopped because I couldn't give one hundred percent.
I think that's something I'm having to learn about family life.
For a long time I've carried this idea that creating a good childhood requires constant effort.
Maybe because I know what it feels like when childhood leaves you carrying things into adulthood.
I want so desperately for theirs to feel different that sometimes I put an impossible job description on motherhood.
Make it happy.
Make it safe.
Make the memories.
Be there.
Do everything.
Don't miss anything.
And then my body forced me to stop.
Summer carried on anyway.
My children were still loved.
Actually, they were surrounded by it.
Maybe that's what I'll remember when I think about this August.
Not that I couldn't do everything.
That I didn't have to.
Their childhood doesn't rest entirely on my shoulders.
It happens in James making them laugh while I'm resting.
In birthday wrapping paper across the floor.
In the trampoline outside.
In ordinary afternoons.
In Mummy being sore but still there.
In Dada taking over without making it feel like something has gone wrong.
In us adapting.
In our family bending around something difficult without breaking.
I wouldn't choose to have surgery two days before my daughter's fourth birthday.
I wouldn't choose to spend part of the summer holidays measuring my days by painkillers, incisions and how far I could comfortably walk.
There have been moments I've hated it.
Moments I've felt trapped inside a body that simply wouldn't move at the speed my life required.
But when I look back at this summer, I don't want to remember it as the summer I couldn't.
Because we did.
Differently.
Messily.
More slowly.
With a lot more help from James.
But we did.
Isla turned four.
Arthur turned two.
I started healing.
And summer happened around all of us.
Not perfectly.
Just together.
I think that was enough.
— Lia x
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