Mum confession: I’ve been using my baby’s pushchair as a proxy for dealing with my mental health
--
I’ve owned a pushchair for over 10 months now, and in that time, I’ve forgotten how to have free hands.
If you’ve never owned one, then the only way to describe using a pushchair every day is to imagine for a moment that you’re a beast of burden, like a horse, and that instead of working at an office, your job is to cart around livestock.
People call me a mum now, but a more accurate title would be something like ‘intelligent transportation system’ or ‘urban transport unit’ because that’s what I do.
I push.
No Gretchen, not like that.
Exactly, Ms. Norbury.
Sometimes when I’m pushchair-free, I lift my hands up in front of me and try to remember all the things I used to do with my hands before I had a baby.
Turning pages in books, typing out a quick blog post, eating…
But most of the time, when my hands aren’t tightly wrapped around a handlebar, they’re tightly pressed against my cheeks, like Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
I used to find this painting morbid, but now I recognise the emotion on his face for what it really is.
Edvard Munch was probably a mum.
I’m sure there’s another more complete version of this painting lurking in an attic somewhere, with a Babyzen YOYO pushchair languishing on the promenade in front of him because he’s had it up to his f*cking eyeballs with pushing. He probably just wants to reply to a Whatsapp message that he’s been meaning to respond to for a week now, but he’s utterly paralysed by the very notion of independently bending…
