Mango season picks up on the tail end of jasmine, as the little flowers brown and curl and crush underfoot. Star jasmine, an eager sibling, is getting ready; flower heads reaching for the sun.
Motherhood has torn down and rebuilt my sense of time. I chart my child’s growth on the changing of the seasons. I saw cherry blossoms, and then he crawled. Summer approaches, and so do the flowers for which he was named; the soft red plumes of Christmas bush, of mukiyala, in the language of my grandmother’s country.
I’ve learned new language since my baby was born. Since before he was born, when I would feel him wriggle and poke my belly back. The call and response of two creatures made of each other. How do you describe the language of mother and child? How do you describe something without words?
It belongs to the body. To two bodies in dialogue. Biological communion.
*
I’m watching my neighbours talk across the laneway that connects our houses. A man and a woman on a balcony talking to a man and a woman on their roof, with their dog. The conversation wraps up — Good to see you! — and they retreat. The woman ushers the dog back through the window.
The days are warmer but the chill creeps back when the sun goes down. It’s our 14th week of lockdown (I think). I’m cold where I sit on the couch feeding the baby but I’d rather let him keep sleeping than close the door. My body keeps him warm.
*
It can be hard to keep hold of yourself as you become so attuned to another. I write myself into existence, even though all I can write about is him.
Maggie Nelson writes of motherhood as love affair; Jemima Kirke captions it as loss. They’re both right.
There’s a curious quality shared by lockdown and parenting an infant, of being out of step with time. Governed by opposing forces; unrelenting stillness. I guess we never feel the Earth turn under us.
*
It’s mango season again. My baby, nine months old — out as long as he was in — likes to suck the seeds. Spring rain knocks the dead blossoms off the jasmine I planted a year ago, and I remember the car trips home in my last weeks of work, swollen belly under sun-warmed seatbelt, stopping at the mango stall on the side of the road. Three years of lifts home with the art teacher and his girls, a pantomime family. On Fridays we ate ice-blocks. The younger daughter rested her feet on my headrest, pushed her toes into my hair. I laughed; felt some warm glow of nostalgia for something that hadn’t happened yet. For the mother I was yet to become.