A Line Above the Sky by Helen Mort

Author:Helen Mort [Mort, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473582972
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2022-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

I pored over articles: ‘The Hardest Eight Weeks of My Life’ and ‘What Nobody Told Me About Oxytocin’. I scrolled through National Childbirth Trust guidance on stopping breastfeeding, found only support to continue. Do you really need to stop? The World Health Organization recommends breastfeeding until the age of two. But mostly, I read maps the way I used to as a child, running my finger from left to right and from top to bottom, following the course of the A57 out through Broomhill and Crosspool, skirting Rivelin and curving towards open land. I could remember driving out to Ladybower to climb in the quarries, misjudging the bends, looking out for the wire hair of the moors.

I always imagine that Alison experienced the twinges of separation from Tom – physical and mental – as keenly as I did, even as she longed for mountains. This is pure speculation, but it comforts me. Perhaps she felt she was forgetting places too and she needed to go mountaineering to recover them. Her love was intense but her need for solitude was intense too. Motherhood is a state of perpetual instinct, not logical decision-making. It immerses you in the way climbing does, but the calculations feel more uncertain, more perilous and fraught.

When Tom was still a toddler, Alison knew she wanted another child. Her biographers write of alleged tensions between her and Jim, arguments that had begun when she was just 20, the differences between them becoming more and more apparent. With him running the business, she was expected to tend the home, and having a child had only exacerbated that structural division. A second would add to the strain. And yet she pined for new motherhood once more. I understand this – when I was at my most exhausted and Alfie was waking multiple times in the night, I’d complain bitterly of tiredness, only to pine for him the moment I set him down and dream about having a newborn again. Adverts on TV with cooing, gurgling babies made me tearful, sentimental. I entertained ideas of trying for a second child, only to reject them the next minute. Alison’s need was more persistent, more constant. Her biographers say that she tried to talk Jim round and, when that proved futile, she made her case in a letter to him: ‘Dear Jim, I should love to have another baby … there are many reasons, some of which I have written down, as you are not prepared to listen to me …’

There is something in her cheerful pragmatism that I find endearing, both childish and knowing. And she got her wish. She was pregnant again by July 1990 and gave birth to her daughter Kate in 1991. By then, Alison’s biographers note that Jim’s business was in severe trouble, close to bankruptcy. Even their home at Meerbrook Lea was under threat. And there were two children to nurture. The reality of punishing routines and low energy. The months that followed were fractured, sleepless, punctured by self-doubt.

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