since my last birthday I witnessed a birth

cw: birth, labour, mental illness, ecological collapse

It’s my birthday again and I am now definitively in my late mid-30s. Or, arguably, my early late 30s. It doesn’t really make a difference, does it? Whatever it is, it’s not young.

–///–

Maybe not “old” old, but certainly older.

When my baby was born I was terrified that I would feel nothing.

This was my overwhelming anxiety in the weeks leading up to the birth.

Obviously, I was worried about my lover going through labour (a famously dangerous thing) and, obviously, at the same time I was worried about the right wing Labour party winning a massive majority and using it to double down on the Conservative government’s neoliberal, extractive policies rather than replacing them and reinvesting in the country and the future.

That second worry came to pass (today they’ve announced that Railcards will offer smaller discounts lol) exactly as I worried it would, but thankfully the other thing I was sleepless about in June didn’t.

–///–

At just before 8am one morning in late June, I first saw my baby Whamathan’s face irl, rather than through the distorted medium of an ultrasound monitor.

His was facing the sky, eyes wide, mouth open, staring…

his face pale and wet and exterior, while most of him remained, for a few moments, still inside my lover…

His tiny, beautiful, perfect face, marked (though it faded very fast) by the forceps that were used to help him out (he has a very large head for a baby (though it’s still much smaller than mine)), with a full head of hair and wailing, confusion, staring, personhood all in his eyes, even in that moment when he was still mostly inside one of his parents…

Yes, he was born with hair, but I had lots of hair as a baby, too, so it doesn’t mean anything.

Hopefully he will not be cursed with hairlessness as I have been, but we’ll have to see.

Whamathan, if you’re reading this and you have prematurely balded, I’m so so so so sorry.

I think it’s very unlikely the internet will survive long enough for you to be reading it without hair, and I’m sorry if I’m wrong. If this (*gestures at the world*) crap (late stage capitalism) is still going in 30 years’ time then the total ecological collapse of the world is inevitable and I hope you’re ready, I hope you’re ready, I hope you’re ready.

Baby Whamathan, if you’re reading this in the future, I hope that I have helped to prepare you for the dystopia to come.

I hope I have made sure you know how to make a bow and arrow, how to care for those you love and how to be ruthless, ruthlessly cruel, to those you don’t.

I hope you have a lifetime supply of iodine and don’t feel that things were better before The Collapse. They weren’t: I’m here now and it’s awful.

I wish you well on your travels. Now put this screen down and get back to killing people for the liquid in their blood!!!

–///–

So, no, I didn’t feel nothing when I saw that startled head hanging out of my lover’s vagina.

I felt an overwhelming rush and intensity of feeling that was unlike anything, really, I’ve ever felt before. (Sorry to everyone I’ve claimed to love before but ultimately if I don’t look at you and start crying, we’re just friends.)

I wept and I wept and I wept and I wept in that moment and not because I wanted to die, not because I wanted to disappear, not because I wanted black empty nothingness.

I wept because the feelings were good and they were unfamiliar.

I wept this morning, too, for the same reason.

I woke up, cuddled the baby and he did a tiny sick on me, I did some exercise with the small splatter of milk on my pink cotton pajamas and I listened to a country music playlist instead of a depressing podcast and I wept again.

I don’t feel scared of the future (not even The Collapse, which I welcome with open arms (though I do wish it could have happened a little sooner (but I do thank it for waiting until after I’d seen Varanasi and started doing live performance again))), but I am keen to get to a different and enjoyable present, but that feels a lot closer than it has for a very long time…

–///–

35 was my first full age unmedicated for mental illness in a very long while, I think. And though maybe I’m undermedicated now (and was definitely overmedicated before), and prone to sadness and apathy and indecision, I’m also wrought with a keen knowledge that me being a sad bitter loser going forward doesn’t just affect me: a baby with a hopeless parent cannot be a hopeful child. And, after The Collapse, hope will be the thing that keeps you all together, Whamathan (that and quicker reflexes than other rival groups in your region).

Misery is not an inevitability and I cannot and will not raise my baby to think that it is.

It is a deep, deep cruelty to raise a child to be ignorant of the realities of the world but also of hope and joy and wonder.

A tolerable life is a possible thing, a good one is possible too (unless you’re defining “good” in purely material terms, in which case you’re setting yourself up for problems).

–///–

I didn’t feel nothing when my baby was born.

I felt everything, suddenly, so much.

A yes to life.

A yes to the future.

A keen and unignorable need to fucking sort my life out to the point where, sure, I can be stressed and anxious and sad and worried and all the other negative emotions, sure, but I will no longer continue to live as if I believe life is an utter waste of time.

It’s not.

Baby Whamathan, I love you very much.

Honestly, I’ve never regretted anything less.

Happy birthday to me.