Chocolate Cake in the Desert

Our prehistoric ancestors used infanticide as a necessary survival mechanism. The history of why we’re here today, alive in the first place, is checkered with things we’d rather not say, even though it all remains written indelibly somewhere in a back annex of our genetic coding – like a Google search history you can’t erase.

Other instincts have remained in the modern brain too, like the urge to scoff the entirety of that chocolate cake in the fridge because you don’t know when you’re next going to come across a source of glucose in the middle of the Saharan desert. If you don’t consume it all now, some wild animal definitely will.

Was I a wild, brutal animal for those few seconds when the idea shot through my sleep-deprived brain in the dark hours of the morning, that all I’d have to do is hold a pillow over my newborn daughter’s face and the incessant crying would stop? It terrified me how easy it would be.

But no, I’ll stop here. You can’t say things like that.

Think of the conclusions that people would draw – and rightly so. You can’t say things like that. You can’t think things like that.

Wrongthink.

Maybe they should employ Thought Police for real.

But if the Thought Police dissected my brain they’d find more, much more, of the very opposite. They would find the innate, ingrained knowledge (no need for logic or empirical evidence) that I could stick my arm beneath the falling blade of an industrial slicer without hesitation and feel no pain if it were to save my daughter.

When she was only two weeks old, she was still small enough to fit inside the microwave. I couldn’t look at the microwave after that thought invaded my head. Bizarre, invasive thoughts: the image of her somehow having gotten inside, the door being closed and trapping her amongst the spinning nuclear radiation.

It made me feel sick. I very nearly was sick each time I accidentally looked at that horrible microwave I just wanted to pick up and throw out of my house.

That guy, the Skype therapist from when I still couldn’t freely leave the house, gave me a look when I mentioned that, then a comment about helicopter parenting, and finally asked if I wanted to be medicated.

The messed-up pathology of a mother.

Even through a laptop screen, unable to make out the whites of his eyes, I still saw the distaste.

But so much of motherhood is distasteful. It’s one of the most base, primeval, confronting, unrefined, messed-up parts of us, from the moment a child violently tears itself out from deep in the very centre of your body, with an explosion of blood and mucus and other unmentionable bodily secretions.

It never is what it’s supposed to be like, to look like. Not really.

But I’ll end it here, because you’re really not supposed to say that.