A tyranny of
infant proportions
We’d danced to the beat of the spice girls
the last of the expressed milk
had been voraciously snuffled.
I had run out of options; bereft
I had changed the nappy, examined the skin
for protuberances, pins -
nothing!
His rage uncontainable, I’d phoned the mother;
suddenly the spasms subsided - he lay
in my arms with an eerie stillness, gazed
with a probing eye that left me
a novice at the shrine of his power -
just as she swept through the door
wondering. Then hunger restored him
shrank him to a soft pink parcel of dependence.
“My patience, resolutions and beliefs are tested to the limits – sometimes daily.”*
Right at this moment one of my challenges is the constant, tuneless whistling from my elder son. When my boys were babies it was getting them to sleep or trying to figure out why they were crying. On any given day now, it might be squabbling, fighting, teasing, screaming, shouting or rudeness. Who’d be a parent? We might well question ourselves after the event, but we can’t very well put them back! Just how we find those inner resources, how we constantly demand more of ourselves, how we keep marching up that hill with a smile on our face and gladness in our heart at the sight of our ‘babies’ is one of life’s mysteries.
* © from Being Mummy by Anne‑marie Taplin published April 2007