Cashews in my pocket
Being a human is hard. Our bodies do does such a good job of regulating so many things, but they also need us to cooperate, to listen to what they ask of us - to rest, eat, drink, sleep, put more or fewer layers on, moisturise. While most of us oblige most of the time, sometimes the wires cross (like the time I ended up in Resus for drinking too much water, but we’ll save that for another day).
Anyone who has breastfed will know that one of the many challenges that come with it is insatiable nocturnal hunger. It’s understandable in the beginning, since you’re feeding two people, essentially. But when you have a two year old, you don’t expect to be feeding them to such a degree that you still feel like you need to eat for two.
Every night, I go to bed after a day of eating within the realms of what’s normal for a health adult human. A few meals, a few snacks here and there, maybe a few more snacks... and I assume my two-year-old squeezes enough nutrients out of his beige toddler diet. But most nights, I wake up before midnight, and I’m starving.
This week, my son’s had a mild cold that hasn’t progressed beyond a couple of snotty sneezes, so, of course, our whole worlds have been tipped upside down. I can’t work, he can’t let me out of his sight, and the fragmented sleep we normally have is a sweet, sweet, distant memory.
A few nights ago, I spent four hours trying to get him back to sleep. We alternated between lying down in bed, and standing at the blind-less hallway window, him curled into my shoulder and me looking outside, rocking him as much as my starved stamina would allow. When I couldn’t take the feeling of emptiness any longer, I took us downstairs in the dark and snuck a handful of cashew nuts in my pocket.
I couldn’t get away with stuffing them in my mouth in-between renditions of rock-a-bye baby, so I took us back to bed and planned to wait until he was asleep. But he soon shot up in bed, wide awake, and decided to list everything he wants to possess when he’s older (including a toaster, iron, elephant and giraffe). We shared the cashew nuts – picking them up off the lamppost-lit bedroom windowsill one at a time – and he eventually fell back to sleep.
It wasn’t long before we were back at the hallway window, him snuggled in, me looking out. I watched the valley below us, the road stretching out across my entire view. There was a pair of temporary traffic lights – installed near each end to accommodate for some roadworks – with opposing red/green forces to ensure there was only one lane of traffic at all times.
After a few more hundred rock-a-bye babies, I started playing the ‘Will the only car on the road for miles stop at the red light at 4am, or just run through it?’ game. But the game was inconclusive; somehow, the lights always turned to green when a car approached, as if people who travel at night can transcend the normal rules that hold the rest of us in place.
The only thing I remember trying to mentally prepare for before having a child was to tell myself to expect parenthood to be a series of little deaths, and that I’d do better to not be tempted into mourning them all. I told myself I wouldn’t be the mother at the school gate who cried for my baby that grew up too fast.
As part of the long process of literal and metaphorical weaning, I really thought my days of breastfeeding hunger were behind me now. We’re not one entity anymore, he doesn’t need my body to sustain him like he used to, I don’t need to shovel seven biscuits in my face every day in the name of helping him grow and develop.
But as I felt his head get heavy on my shoulder, and reached into my pocket for an errant cashew before trying to place him into bed and climbing in next to him. And as I wiped the pocket fluff off it, I’m reminded that I don’t need to always be so stoic, to go so forcefully against my natural instincts in the name of logic, that it’s okay to mourn for things that have passed, because sometimes, the things that you assume will have to stop manage to cheat the system and carry on going into the night.