‘I feel like I'm in a tunnel and I can't see the light at the end of it,' I said to my partner, arms full, boobs full, heavy.

I had longed for a baby for longer than I'd been an adult. The thing about babies is that you can never love them too much. They will never tell you that you're too much, that your love is too much. It never once occurred to me, in all those aching, heart-overflowing-but-no-takers years, that I wouldn't have enough.

I didn't know that the labour of love could be soul-deep trauma. I didn't know that after five long, pelvis-torn days, my dreams of the idyllic home birth would lie in pieces on a hospital-room floor. I didn't know that my body would be wracked with tremors

while, epidural-dull, I felt like I was watching it all from somewhere else as my body prepared to eject everything that had held me hostage the past nine months.

‘Have you fed her yet?' asked a nurse brusquely a few hours later as we were preparing to go home. Was I supposed to know how? Turns out the womanly art of breastfeeding, that beautiful instinct, starts out with a nurse grabbing your boob in one hand and a little stranger's head in the other, and ramming them together like two stubborn pieces of Lego. I wondered when I was going to start feeling more like this was my life and less

like I'd been Freaky Friday-ed into someone else's.

They say endings are beginnings. But that means beginnings are endings too. Everyone expects you to celebrate this little beginning, with little beginning fingers and little beginning toes. But no one ever asks how you're coping with the ending, the ending of the

woman you were before. Everyone expects you to be on cloud nine—no one asks if you're mourning the life that's now nine feet under. Your life—the one that was. No one prepares you for the tunnel, or that your stumbling through it will be devoted solely to the

needs of someone else, and that everyone will expect you to think it's beautiful, while you squint, arms-full, desperate for just the tiniest spark of light.

One day I picked up a camera. Cameras work by collecting light and using it to paint a picture in the darkness. When you click the shutter, light rays dance with whatever is in front of it and speak their truth onto silver or sensor. It's a collaboration—between the eye and the finger and the camera and the light—a collaboration of light.

A camera knows that there's light in the most ordinary of things. It sees the way golden evening rays bounce off baby bottles or wispy curls. It notices the sweet innocence of a sleeping face, the relief of an hour's peace. Seeking places to point my lens taught me to see even the tiniest of sparks—even in dark tunnels. Those sparks were the breadcrumbs, and I followed them like Gretel clawing her way out of the woods, collecting them with my memory card—my light saver, my life saver.

I haven't picked my camera up in years. I can see the light on my own now. The light that bounces off two growing bodies, two sets of trusting eyes, off school badges and love-you-mum drawings and silly jokes about poo. Off the butterfly in the mirror, the woman-after, the mother.

Turns out it wasn't a tunnel at all. It was a chrysalis. And one day it cracked open and all the light came in.

 

 

 

© Emily Rainsford. From Ourselves: 100 Micro Memoirs, published by Night Parrot Press.

 

 

 

Emily Rainsford is (in no particular order) an avid reader, book reviewer, library officer, mother, chocoholic, and drinker of scalding black tea. She is the author of many pieces of poetry on scattered scraps, forgotten notebooks and deeply buried computer folders. You can find her @coffeebooksandmagic on Instagram.

 

 

www.nightparrotpress.com