Overwhelm In The Age Of Celebs In Space
Katy Perry, Little Fires Everywhere, feeling overwhelmed and a conversation with a midwife about a rolling pin
Welcome to Baby Brain, a space where I – Charlotte, hi! – write about family life with three small children – Poppet (m, 5 years), Pickle (m, 4 years) and Peach (f, 1 year.) Those are not their real names. These are real stories from our days.
Last week, Katy Perry went to space inside a massive penis. Back here on earth, I hung out with all three of my children, alone, for the first time in ages.
Equally impressive, I’m sure you’ll agree.
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When Poppet was small, I read and watched ‘Little Fires Everywhere.’ There’s a quote in the book, paraphrased in the movie, that goes as follows:
We take motherhood for granted sometimes, that they’ll love you forever - that they’ll love you at all. When they’re little they need you so much, they hold you and grab for you and you cuddle them. She used to burrow into me. I was the thing she needed most in the world. And then they grow up and you don’t get to hold them, touch them like that, even if you want to. It’s like learning to love the smell of an apple, when all you want to do is grab it and hold it, devour it, seeds and all. And then you realise that it wasn’t just that they needed you. You needed them.
I remember weeping when I heard these words, experiencing a mild existential crisis in front of Amazon Prime as my baby slept in my arms, praying the day would never come that he’d refuse my desire to devour him whole. I have thought about this quote on and off ever since.
As a mother of multiple children, years later, a different scene plays out in my head.
It happens a few episodes in. Until this point we’ve seen the mother, Elena (Reese Witherspoon), as an aspirational character, someone who has it all together – her only fatal flaw being a shaky relationship with her youngest daughter, which we have not yet explored. In the scene my mind goes to, Young Elena (AnnaSophia Robb) is caring for her four children. The baby – the youngest daughter – is crying. Elena, holding her, is crying. We go to a grocery store and, as Elena blinks furiously, overstimulated, the baby is crying. We move to the kitchen, and the baby is still crying. One of the older three children is crying. Elena is trying to tend to everyone’s needs as they all grapple for her attention and she’s managing to keep it all together until, trying to turn on the tap, she sees that her water has been cut off. She lets out a guttural scream, and phones her husband at work. “I don’t give a damn about your partners, Bill,” she says, “I need you.” Crashing around in search of help in the form of a plastic nipple, “WHERE IS THE FUCKING PACIFIER?” she shrieks, before accidentally breaking a plate. She pauses for a second, and begins breaking plates on purpose.
When her husband finally arrives home, Elena – surrounded by broken china, broken herself – hands him the still screaming baby. “Four (children) is different than three,” she growls, and leaves.
My husband went to work on bank holiday Monday, and we had a similar conversation. I didn’t break any plates, but I was fuming nonetheless.
“Why does everyone else have a village?” I said, “why am I expected to be able to do it alone?”
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