Pathfinding E-Book

Kerri Andrews

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 310

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The desire to walk is something that defines us, bringing joy, connection and freedom. But what happens to all this when we become mothers? From the author of Wanderers, comes an urgent exploration of what it means to rediscover ourselves through the land we walk and the people we walk alongside. ___ In the wake of the complete metamorphosis of becoming a mother, Kerri Andrews determines to undertake a series of journeys on foot to understand what has happened to her. Alongside a backpack full of supplies, Kerri carries with her the shadow of post-natal depression and the idea that maybe the hills are no longer for those, like her, who bear the mental and physical scars of childbearing and childrearing. Yet, what she soon discovers are tales of mother-walkers that have long been neglected or hidden away. From Mary Wollstonecraft and Ellen Weeton to Kate Chopin, here are women whose urgent stories offer new ways of stepping into motherhood. As Kerri traverses urban, rural and increasingly mountainous landscapes in the North West and Scotland, she is joined by women who have also experienced the profound changes that having children can bring to bodies and minds. Together, they explore the complicated ground of motherhood today – balancing enormous responsibility and upheaval with ambition, rage and hope – creating new paths as they go. ___ 'Left me itching to lace up my boots and follow the call of the path.' Laura Pashby, author of Chasing Fog 'Bold, brave... I had the feeling, as I read, that Kerri Andrews might be clearing a path for us all.' Helen Jukes, author of Mother Animal 'Powerful and unflinchingly honest' Annabel Abbs, author of Windswept: Why Women Walk

Leseprobe

‘A compelling exploration of the creative ways inwhich mother-walkers have navigated matrescence.As Kerri Andrews leads the reader over hills andalong the shore, she reveals how – through walking– she recovered and redefined a self subsumedby motherhood. This book left me itching to laceup my boots and follow the call of the path.’Laura Pashby, author of Chasing Fog

‘What a bold, brave book this is. Andrews’ journeys, writtenwith eloquence, honesty and style, have the feeling not ofescape so much as encounter – with the landscapes shemoves through, and with the lives of walking motherspast and present. Through these encounters, Andrewsseems to find new space for herself. I had the feeling,as I read, that she might be clearing a path for us all.’Helen Jukes, author of Mother Animal

‘Powerful and unflinchingly honest, Andrewsprobes the complexities of motherhood, ultimatelyfinding hope and salvation in companionship,landscape and all those meticulously researchedwomen in whose footsteps she walks.’Annabel Abbs, author ofWindswept: Why Women Walk

To my children, F and E. You taught mewhat it is to love and to be loved.

You have my heart, always.

To my mothers.

Contents

Map: Walks by Location and Chapter

Introduction

1. Body

2. Mind

3. Anger

4. Self

5. Ambition

6. Hope

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

References

Introduction

It is the most perfect early summer’s day in the Scottish Borders: the sunlight warm but not too strong, the sky dotted with scudding clouds on a limitless blue. I hear birdsong bouncing from tree to tree as I step out of my car, the blackbirds nearby sounding the alarm while, deeper into the woods, a chaffinch’s tune bowls along. I’ve finally learned to have my son’s day bag on my back before I open the car door: F has no patience for my sense of parental responsibility and I know that as soon as I release him from his car seat he will be away down the path. He helps me get his arms clear of the straps: he knows perfectly well where we are and he is keen to be on the move. Sure enough, he sets off at a run and I follow him, laughing. He is so fast.

I chase after F, who is all windmilling arms and laughter, and I think of the changes this path has witnessed in the last three months. In early spring my son had barely started walking. Hesitant about his balance, he held my hand as he toddled and he tired after a few dozen yards. I carried him through the woods. As he grew in confidence and let go of my hands, I began showing him what lived by the path: I would gently press his fingers into the soft bristles of the mosses growing on the collapsed drystane dyke that seems to be made more of vegetation now than stone; F and I took turns caressing the spring’s leaf buds that were variously smooth, sticky, dry, pointy; we touched the bark of the trees we encountered, discussing the different textures. While F preferred the rough segmentation of pine bark, taking pleasure in the way it snags his fingers, my favourite was the cold near-smoothness of the beech. It didn’t take long for F to find things for himself and our walks down the path were, for a time, interrupted by his frequent pauses to pick up the pine cones that fell from far above; when the goat willows started dropping their implausibly fluffy catkins onto the path my son ran to each in turn, caressing the softness of their golden stamens before secreting them in the drystane dyke’s nooks, making of the wall a reliquary to the trees. As leaf burst overtook the woods he began to touch the delicate new leaves of the ash, elder and beech, enchanted by the array of fresh greens that seem almost to luminesce with new life. Today, in early summer, the sun renders every colour the most vivid version of itself and I find myself caught short by my poor colour vocabulary. ‘Green’ is simply inadequate to describe the multitude of shades that shift as sunlight catches or fades, and I long for the words to teach F so he can capture the dancing textures of this season. For now, it is enough to gaze at the fresh loveliness, so bright I can feel my pupils contract.

These moments of shared pleasure, the two of us walking and running and laughing, took time to come: the first months of F’s life passed for me in a haze of sleep-deprived misery that would eventually lead to postnatal depression. Only once I had begun to recover did I realise how far from normal my feelings had been. I felt as if I were going through the motions, performing mothering rather than living it, enduring instead of enjoying my son. I struggled to spend time with F alone, feeling the days expand far beyond what I could imagine filling. I obsessed over naps and sleep, panicking if F woke early lest it mean another miserable night. When I returned to work after six months and had more space for myself I began to feel better, and at last it felt as though we might find our groove.

But with the announcement of a national lockdown in March 2020 when F was seventeen months old, the familiar fear rose again in my chest at the thought of spending days alone with my child. What I didn’t understand then was that I had been presented with a magical opportunity to have, in effect, a second attempt at maternity leave: only this time I would be well, and rested, and I would have the chance to watch my son learn to walk. As the year progressed in its frightening, uncertain, unsettling way, I found my confidence as a mother growing in parallel to my son’s proficiency on his feet. The more we walked together, the more I felt connected to him. As we walked the paths of our local woodland we were also, I came to realise, creating pathways for our love.

Going out for a walk after becoming a mother is complicated. If you are, as so many women have been over the centuries, trying to walk and mother at the same time, it might not be possible to walk at all. For every joyous walk of stop-start discovery there will have been innumerable non-walks where you didn’t even manage a hundred yards, or even out of the front door: occasions when, to borrow Chitra Ramaswamy’s apt phrase, we have ‘wished for more of the world than we could handle’.1

Supposing your children are amenable to the day’s plans, you must still demonstrate an aptitude for logistics that would qualify you for the army. Have you got the bag? Is it filled with everything you are going to or might possibly need? Have you got the nappies, wet wipes, nappy bags, spare clothes in triplicate, hats in duplicate, sun cream, drinks, snacks, alcohol gel, and more snacks (small people absolutely march on their stomachs)? If you’re very lucky you’ll have remembered to pack your own hat, drink and snacks, but more likely than not there was no time and you’ll have to make do with the half packet of crisps the children leave discarded.

And then there’s the carrying. You’ve managed to usher the children out of the door and you’re a good distance along the modest route you’ve planned when someone says, ‘I want a carry.’ So, up they go onto your shoulders, the same shoulders that are loaded with the overstuffed bag that could see you through a nuclear winter, now graced with an additional ten or twenty kilos of child. Or you use your hip, sticking one out as a temporary seat, at least until the support arm gives out. Then, muscles burning, you have to decide whether to cut your losses and turn around, or gamble that your offspring’s ability to put one foot in front of the other will return before your back gives way. More often than not, you turn around.

Until I had children I had no idea how difficult it might be one day for me just to leave the house for a walk. I’d loved walking since my mid-twenties when a desire to get fitter coincided with moving to live near the Yorkshire Dales. Discovering the limestone landscape of Yorkshire turned a means of getting exercise into a passion. A first visit to the Lake District confirmed me in my love of walking, while a move to Scotland just before I turned thirty transformed my passion into a calling: over the next eight years I climbed over more than a hundred Scottish mountains, ticking them off with an easy relentlessness I wouldn’t fully appreciate until I had lost it. Walking came to be how I found myself in new places and, I now realise, how I came to find myself at all. Having grown up feeling very lost and alone, walking was how I made myself feel I belonged.

During both of my pregnancies I tried to keep walking, even as my body changed utterly, when it behaved in ways that were completely alien. Growing a baby felt to me like handing control of my body to someone else – who, quite, I was never sure, but it certainly was not me. Bits leaked without warning, body parts changed position and shape of their own volition, and as my babies grew inside me it became increasingly obvious that I was never, ever, alone. The only part of myself that remained truly mine was my mind, and that was under assault from a cocktail of neurochemicals and social pressures. During my first pregnancy I continued mountain climbing, holding onto my deepest love for as long as I could, and summiting my final pre-motherhood Munro some way into my third trimester. With my second baby it was much harder to keep walking because I had a toddler in tow who sometimes needed to be slung on my shoulders, and long before my due date I’d had enough of carrying children inside and outside my body. For the last month or so before my daughter was born, I just gave up.

Worse was to come, though, for both pregnancies. I carried inside myself, along with each of my children, almost all the known risk factors for postnatal depression. As my mental health gradually deteriorated after both deliveries my grief at the loss of who I had been before turned into despair. After my son’s birth, especially, when I first became a mother, I could not come to terms at all with the sudden and total severing of the connection between who I had been and who I was now: between the adventurous walker, at home in the mountains, and the inadequate mother for whom every minor domestic challenge had become terrifying. I was fortunate to find treatment and support before I could put into action my plans to end my despair: along with therapy and help acquiring parenting skills I was paired with a volunteer who happened to love going for walks. On these walks I learned to talk about what I was feeling, and I learned that I would be listened to without judgement. These walks together were trifles in distance and difficulty compared with what I had been used to, but they came to be essential to my well-being. It was on these walks that I started to find my way back to myself.

Walking is about, as the essayist Chitra Ramaswamy has observed, ‘the pursuit of a designated amount of freedom. The freedom to be told where to go and how precisely to get there. To follow obtuse signs on wooden posts knocked into the ground. To intuit nothing beyond what part of the path to give your weight.’2 Once burdened with the cares of motherhood it is rare indeed to be free to think of nothing beyond your own body. Instead, stacked against mothers pursuing even modest amounts of freedom are social forces of terrifying power, from childcare costs that can be more expensive than the majority of mortgage payments, to persistent expectations that women do the bulk of the domestic labour, to scrutiny of the choices mothers make when they do manage to leave the home. Should a mother exercise her freedom too vigorously she is likely to be condemned for it. As the poet and memoirist Helen Mort has noted, ‘for mothers, care is part performative, a public demonstration of caution. Your private risk assessment is never enough.’3 The freedom to walk, if it can be carved out at all from beneath the Atlas stone of domestic care, is often only conditional: permission to walk, to be outside and active, can be rescinded at a moment’s notice by a society that still often jealously scrutinises women, mothers in particular.

At the same time, walking is often recommended to new mothers to promote better mental health. ‘Mood-boosting endorphins’ are advertised as the outcome of going for a walk, the physical exercise releasing feel-good chemicals into the bloodstream. This is all likely true, but sometimes for me getting out of the house for a walk wasn’t about feeling good; it was all that stood between me and an attempt at burning my house down. In the fug of the nursery, with milk-stained pyjamas, and sleep deprivation making every moment a struggle of will and resolve, I found it difficult to recall that there was anything in existence beyond the relentless bombardment of bodily sensations and demands. But on the move once more I felt returned to the world, connected with it through physical sensations I had chosen to experience, through physical contact I desired, and initiated. My horizon lifted; no longer limited to the walls of my child’s room, it expanded as far as my eyes could see. I could usually still hear my baby wailing, but I could also hear the sounds of life continuing: the gurgle of hill becks after rainfall; the susurration of warm summer breezes at play among the wheat; the soft pat pat whump of snow falling on snow.

What I didn’t know then was that I was not alone in finding in walking so much release from the relentless demands of motherhood. Gradually I came to discover, and then devour, writing about mothering and walking going back hundreds of years. I might have been mothering in a different century, in a different country, in a different body with different relationships to the children from these historical mothers, but the resonances between their experiences and my own set me aquiver. Learning that each time I had set off with a child in a buggy or strapped to my body I was setting foot on a companioned path full of women who had mothered and walked and struggled and yearned and tried to find their way forward helped me to start reconciling what I had become with who I thought I had been.

As the days and months of early child-rearing crept past in their crooked, trippy way, I began to wonder if the stories of other mother-walkers could offer me any guidance on what had happened to me when I became a mother, if their stories could help me make sense of my own. These stories were, it turned out, everywhere, though I had to take care to look beyond what was being sold to me as ‘walking literature’, beyond the assumptions of others about who might have found walking valuable, who might have taken the time to document and describe that value. Instead of books by men who were often secret fathers – free to throw themselves off mountains whenever they desire with no mention of who is maintaining the home in their absence – I looked anew at writers I had somehow not noticed were both mothers and walkers. Perhaps it was the fact that I now wore my motherhood across my whole body that brought about this change of perspective, that I could never again tread the world as I had done now that my joints were forever rearranged by pregnancy hormones, my skin forever silvered by stretchmarks. Whatever the reason, I was grateful to discover women who had faced some of the same problems as me, and found their way despite the difficulties.

Walking, of course, is something that humans have always done for all sorts of purposes, from following prey animals to their grazing grounds to bearing the dead to their final rest. In the Scottish Highlands there are many paths worn by women and families moving between homes in the glens and the shielings in the high hills, where animals would enjoy the grassy meadows and families would live for the summer months. Not far from where I live in the Scottish Borders there are whole routes carved by women taking fish to the markets inland – ‘creel paths’ that take care to avoid difficult ground while maintaining directness and efficiency. Walking has, for as long as humans have stood upright, provided a means of connection by linking communities, providing space for contemplation, enabling access to the natural world and resources, and created paths whose existence depends on groups who share a purpose. And for as long as people have walked, so have mothers.

If you know where to look you can find the stories written by generations of mother-walkers: women who have had the care of children while also roaming the land, sometimes, though not always, simultaneously. Among them are writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Ellen Weeton, Charlotte Smith and Mary Shelley, Dorothy Wordsworth, Kate Chopin and Janet Adam Smith, and in our own time Chitra Ramaswamy, Katherine May, Clover Stroud, Helen Mort and more. There are many, many more – the selection I’ve made here is mostly British because that is the writing I know best. In my choice of writers I have barely begun to account for the variety of stories about mothering and walking to be found.

That these stories have been under- (and often un-)appreciated should not be a surprise to me given that I frequently failed to see what was right in front of me. Twenty years ago I encountered for the first time Mary Wollstonecraft’s account of walking in Scandinavia in the 1790s with her young daughter, Fanny. I’d studied Wollstonecraft’s writing as a student in Leeds, where I’d found myself especially taken by the ferocity with which she argued women’s lives should be improved. But somehow I had failed to take notice that Wollstonecraft was formulating her arguments about the value of women’s lives while enduring the desperate hardships of caring for her daughter as a single parent, and wandering the cliffs of Norway and Sweden in search of some sort of solace, some kind of comfort. That she was there, in a place where few tourists ever ventured in the late eighteenth century, I knew was due to the machinations of her daughter’s father and Wollstonecraft’s former lover Gilbert Imlay. But I had not noticed, until I sat down with Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark a few months after my son’s birth, how in these letters Wollstonecraft described walking as essential to the way she thought through her responsibilities as a mother in a misogynistic world. As I encountered again the familiar cadence of Wollstonecraft’s words I saw in them new possibilities: new paths I had not noticed; new ways of moving; new ways of being.

Mary Wollstonecraft was not unique in writing about the entanglement she felt of mothering and walking, and as time passed and my son grew I looked out more and more of these remarkable women. I found many stories of mothers on foot, taking to the hills and finding themselves, women who carried their children with them into the high places and, in doing so, passing on something wonderful. I had wandered at will over much of Scotland for more than a decade, climbing over a hundred Munros and covering tens of thousands of miles on foot, and these women offered hope to me as I sat, reading about walking instead of doing it, that I’d be able to find my way back to the mountains: that I would find my path again.

This book is about the long history of walking mothers and how this matrilineal history, too long ignored, might help us mother now. It’s also a book about the impact of the society in which we mother, that society’s indifference to mothers, and our collective forgetfulness of the histories of mothering that might offer guidance, or wisdom, or comfort to those who come to care for children. This book is also about my own story as a walker who became a mother, and who needed a great deal of help to find the path between my old life and the new.

The story of this book is told through a series of journeys on foot that I took to explore the complex interconnections between motherhood and walking that have existed for so long. Each chapter focuses on a particular walk that helped me to explore a specific aspect of motherhood – Body, Mind, Anger, Self, Ambition, Hope. The walks start small as I begin to learn to manage a body damaged by bearing and birthing two babies – first a son, and then a daughter. I set off walking locally on familiar ground, on routes I have long known and loved, and that provide a safe space in which I can come to know my body, and myself, again.

With a greater understanding of the body I have been left with, I head into the Pentland Hills south of Edinburgh where I retread my footsteps from walks taken before I had children, collapsing the distance between the self that I was then and the mother I am now. I take those insights with me on a walk in the Lake District with my friend Jo who, like me, has experienced the terror and despair of postnatal depression. As we take a path well known to both of us, we contemplate how we came so close to losing everything to PND.

I then follow the Water of Leith in Edinburgh in summer to walk with ‘Astra’, in order to explore what anger in motherhood feels like, looks like, and sounds like. Having both allowed our anger to become a danger to those we love, Astra and I walk the paths of early motherhood as we attempt to understand what went so badly wrong in those first weeks and months, and what we might do differently.

Growing stronger in body and mind I tackle a slightly longer walk with two of the women who supported me in the despairing days of new motherhood. On this journey we take to the old ways high above Abbotsford near Selkirk in the Scottish Borders, the former home of the novelist Sir Walter Scott, and where I began, with help, to walk back to myself.

Then, burning with ambition to return to the mountains, I put myself into a difficult situation in the hills above Glencoe. But having nearly let my ambition get the better of me, and beginning to feel, at long last, like my old self, I finally attempt my long-held wish to walk the West Highland Way, ninety-six miles long and running from the outskirts of Glasgow at Milngavie (pronounced ‘Mull-guy’), all the way to Fort William at the foot of Britain’s highest mountain. Walking this path represents the culmination of hopes and dreams I have had since I had my first child, and in setting foot on the Way, alone, I have the space at last to think about all that I have learned from the other mother-walkers I have encountered on my own journey into motherhood. Here, on the West Highland Way, I have the chance to consider how these women’s experiences offer hope not only for my own journey, but for all those who mother and walk. On this adventure, released from childcare for a time, I have the chance to think about some of the ways in which walking brings us not only joy and connection but freedom: the freedom to decide when and where to put one foot in front of the other; the freedom to rely solely on ourselves and our bodies; the freedom to be.

Back in the woods with my young son the luminous colours of spring have gradually faded, to be replaced by the richer and deeper greens of midsummer. We come here often, picnicking in the same spot each time we visit, on mossy seats as soft as clouds and occasionally as damp. While F eats his snacks, I enjoy being close to the forest floor. A Sitka spruce towers behind us, and we perch on its cushioned roots. In front of me, though, is a tangle of birch with a hint of hillside beyond. I can hear birds flitting in the undergrowth behind me, and from up in the canopy a call sometimes comes. I start to keep a diary of the sights and sounds of the woods that gets added to each time we sit down for our picnic. This will become our ritual.

Sometimes I wonder if F can sense the deep, murmuring life of the woods when he pauses to touch trees or explore puddles and lichen. He is certainly aware of existences beyond his own, and I adore him for his curiosity and gentleness. These quiet moments come often, but for the most part F pelts down the trails, whooping with joy as he runs. He claps himself as he goes, delighted with his body and this path through the woods.

By now F has completely mastered running. He is so fast now, faster than I can keep pace with unless I run too. Every so often he turns to me, checking where I am, and he holds out his hands so we can run down the track together. He is so confident, though his knock-kneed gait frequently sends his feet clattering together and he is on the verge of going down half a dozen times before we reach the bottom of the first path. There he corners in mud so fast I assume he’ll fall over, but no, he skips lightly over the plank bridge and off towards the benches – each of which must be climbed in turn. Once he has conquered everything to his satisfaction we head towards the birch woods, and as we enter them the light shifts. It’s wonderful both to see the sun and be entirely hidden from it within this young wood. I try to estimate the age of the trees, their slender forms barely five inches thick but rising a good five metres. They must be thirty-five years or so old, though the thick coverage of lichen that each bears gives the impression of far greater age. They are a little younger than me. I gaze up the trunks towards the bright sky and I wonder how far they will have reached in another thirty-five years. I wonder how far my son will have grown by then. I turn to him and watch him race through the woods, giggling. He holds out his hand then, and I reach for him in turn.

1

Body

How do you convey the profundity of the changes wrought by pregnancy and childbirth on a body when, long before anything is visible to others, an entire world has changed inside? You might notice a little tenderness in your breasts; clothes grazing the skin now seem to scrape and scratch; a comfortable bra becomes a torment. Or you might find the smell of coffee, or anything else too pungent too early in the day, suddenly turns your stomach. Or you might not get any of these small hints. Your body might stay quiet, guarding the secrecy of the guest who is already making itself at home deep inside you. Either way, before you are even sure that anything is different you are no longer alone in your body.

Before I was pregnant my mind was the only mind inside my body, my thoughts the only thoughts. Then, by some sort of conjuring trick, there was another. And I couldn’t hear them. There were entire worlds inside me to which I had no access and over which I had no control. It made me feel like an incompetent god, or a universe, vast and life-giving. But it also made me feel like a helpless passenger in a crashing vehicle. These disorienting sensations were heightened by the changes that occurred outside my body. In becoming pregnant my body shifted instantly from being entirely mine to being shared, and therefore available for public scrutiny. Now I had a schedule of appointments at regular intervals at which I was to perform various tasks. I had to pee into pots and present them so that the midwife could ceremonially test my urine for signs of life-threatening pre-eclampsia. I had to appear fasting, starving myself so that my blood sugars could be checked for gestational diabetes. Regular blood samples were drawn. Even the simple act of taking an ibuprofen tablet to ease a headache became fraught with difficulty: there was now an equation to work through – my needs were to be balanced against the potential dangers posed to the foetus by drugs that were, for me had I been alone in my body, entirely innocuous.

In both pregnancies I was considered ‘geriatric’ (I was thirty-six when I became pregnant for the first time, thirty-eight the second). My ‘advanced’ age, a genetic condition that could prove fatal if not well managed, and an abundance of body fat, meant I was deemed to be ‘high risk’ in pregnancy. This resulted in lots of scans to check the growth of the foetus. These were wonderful experiences, the baby’s body appearing on a screen in an explosion of black and white pixels, the press of the sonograph peeling or adding layers of flesh according to the pressure exerted. It was eerie, though, seeing my body disappear, or emerge only in passing. My belly was rendered transparent by the device sliding over it, my organs significant only when the impinged on the show, or when a full bladder early on made the foetus easier to scan. I felt myself become a window, of interest only because of what I might reveal to be happening inside.

And what is happening inside a pregnant woman is, for a long time, revealed only in mediated ways: the blue line of the pregnancy test, a foetus rendered digitally on a computer screen, a heartbeat broadcast through an electronic device. A change occurs, though, around the midpoint of pregnancy. In place of these wonders of modern science and their disembodying, alienating magic, comes, somewhere around the twentieth week, a complete transformation in how pregnancy feels. This is what used to be known as the ‘quickening’, when the movements of the foetus are first detected. Before modern pregnancy tests the quickening was the moment that a woman knew for certain that she was with child: nausea, tiredness, tenderness, frequent urination, which typically occur throughout pregnancy, can all be symptoms of a multitude of conditions. The quickening, though, was unmistakable. I remember the excitement at feeling both my babies move for the first time, a swirling sensation like bubbles bursting quickly. In the earlier weeks after my quickenings the sensations would be brief and light, barely perceptible and gone before I had fully realised what was happening. But as my babies grew their presence became increasingly impossible to ignore, and so did their full strangeness. As my abdomen became more crowded, limbs would find their ways into bizarre places. My son, who preferred to lie horizontally across my belly, had a way of kicking me beneath my ribcage. The pain was excruciating. This otherwise inaccessible place under my ribs had never been touched before, and it resented the intrusion. My daughter, in contrast, rolled over and over, her back and elbows visible as they slid under my skin. I felt as though my body was the surface of the sea, roiling as a giant and mysterious creature came close, disturbing but not breaking the water. It was as though I contained wondrous mysteries, but I also felt like a vessel – of value because of what I carried and no longer for who I was. My belly, it seemed, now bore what was most significant about me, and what it carried was both alien and familiar, me and not me.

I resented the noisiness of the baby’s movements when I was trying to settle down for sleep, and I disliked too my inability to control anything of this other body inside my own. I longed to be myself again, in sole charge. Growing larger, I became more and more frustrated by how lumbering I felt, how slow and heavy. Walking began to feel uncomfortable, then painful, a burning sensation down the front of my pelvis developing a habit of quickly becoming so unpleasant I had to stop and turn for home. As a result my walks became shorter and shorter, my world more and more confined, my existence ever more circumscribed by the extreme physical demands of carrying a near-full-term foetus around with me.

Yet after both births I found the lightness and the internal silence that followed eerie. I felt empty, like a room abandoned by partygoers after particularly raucous revelry, or an abandoned house, a mere shell. Perhaps it was because the revellers had left such a mess – tearing and breaking and snapping things – so that who I was after the baby had passed through me bore, it felt, very little resemblance to who I had been before I became pregnant. Perhaps it was because I had become used to being part of a duo, bound together more intimately than in any relationship I had ever had before. Perhaps it was because I had grown accustomed to always knowing what my baby was doing, and whether it was okay. Perhaps it was because I had forgotten how it felt to live in a body unstretched by the strains of pregnancy, and I did not know how to close myself up again.

It’s the warmest day of the year so far, eighteen degrees and without a breath of wind. Unusually for Scotland it’s not the first or only day of warm, sunny weather, but one in a long sequence that has lasted a week, and which looks to last at least as long again. I couldn’t have chosen a more fortuitous time to arrange to walk with another mother whose body, she told me over Twitter DM, struggled to cope with the miraculous brutality of pregnancy. This window of calm weather feels like a blessed time, a sudden warmth coinciding with the longer days, the spring equinox just passed and the summer ahead. The months of dark afternoons and long nights getting up with my children seem banished by the light, and I thrill at the prospect of evening walks after bedtime or reading in the garden while the children sleep.

I pull up to Jemma’s house in East Lothian delighted at the thought of setting out with her in this glorious weather. The cottage she has directed me to sits on an attractive estate of old farmworkers’ houses, arranged higgledy-piggledy along quaint and curving lanes lined with the first flushes of spring foliage. We have planned to go out with Jemma’s twin babies, seven-month-old R and S. In front of me Jemma’s house is a beautiful whitewashed building set in a particularly intricate complex where the daffodils are just beginning to bloom. I go through the back gate, a little unsure if I have the right place, but Jemma’s warm voice welcomes me from the front door. ‘I just need to get my coat,’ Jemma grins, her deep brown hair swinging over her shoulders as she disappears into a different part of the house. Left to myself I get down on the living room’s soft rug to play a little with the two babies who are lying companionably together. I work hard for smiles and eventually R gives me a wide, toothless grin. S is a little more reserved, but I’m fairly sure there’s a hint of a smile. Acquaintances made, it’s time to put the twins into their warm suits. Dressed and hatted, the children are slid one by one into waiting rucksacks. Jemma takes the yellow one to carry S, and I have the red with R. Straps are adjusted for adults and children, and after a few minutes we are ready to go. As we step out of Jemma’s cottage door we are greeted by the noise of a great tit shouting hornily, ‘Teacher! teacher! teacher!