Discovering that motherhood has a strange way of stretching love​on January 19, 2025 at 6:00 pm

The caesarean incision took about 40 minutes to stitch. Their needles sliding in and out, two doctors talked over me about golf as if there hadn’t been a seismic shift in the universe. I’d just become a mother for the first time, a perfect son with hair like Ray Martin lifted from me on one of the hottest days of the summer of 1993.

At Calder Park that day, Guns N’ Roses played in blast furnace conditions. A power failure plunged the hospital into temporary darkness. My husband and mum toasted the birth of Jack Oscar at the Maccas over the road, and I didn’t see the new dad again for two days while he heaved through food poisoning.

None of it touched me. I was 26, experiencing a personal earthquake, the kind that rearranges your core and the landscape of your life in ways you can never undo. Outside, the city was baking, but my world was narrowed and widened to just my boy.

His face. His feet. I’d barely held a baby before I had my own yet felt a supernatural confidence as Jack fit into my arms as if he’d always been there. My heart cracked wide open and love poured in so fast, along with a bone-deep terror.

Before, I thought I understood fear – changing schools in the snakepit of year 10, interviews, breakups. The time my friend Pies and I got off a bus in the dusty Istanbul depot late at night in 1988. Climbed into a taxi. Were on high alert after a man slipped in beside the driver.

“Get out,” I told Pies. “Can’t,” she said. “No door handles.”

But this was different. Nothing was about me any more. I’d made a person! What if something happened to him? What if I wasn’t enough? The fear I knew would last forever sat alongside the love, amplifying the exhilaration and confusion of those first few weeks.

Breastfeeding for about 23 hours a day, I watched a lot of Beverly Hills, 90210, heard Whitney’s I Will Always Love You endlessly. Neither defused how much the natural process of feeding my baby – a cold face washer between our bare skin – was its own trial.

I’d thought it would be like clicking a piece of Lego onto another bit. Instead, it was about a tiny mouth grasping hopelessly at slippery cartoonish nipples, me sobbing in frustration, already discovering motherhood is about doing the hard stuff again and again.