The last days

Years ago, someone gave me a piece of advice. I was young then, relatively speaking. I was still trying out versions of the self: colour-coding my bookshelves; learning to make risotto. I was no longer a goth but I still held onto my dragon embroidered jacket, in case I needed it again. I had published no novels. I was dating someone who was doing a PhD in particle physics and who believed fiercely in a god.

The advice was this: Write your first book before you have your first child. Otherwise, motherhood will swallow you up.The advice may not have been in those exact words. But that is how I recall it. I was not pregnant. The physicist spent much of the year in Switzerland whereas I was trying my hand at living in the middle of America. My literary ambitions didn’t seem much at risk from having a baby. And yet, the fear settled in me.

My mother gave up work when she had me. She was a civil rights lawyer and all the further good she might have done ended when she held my small body in her hands. She never published but she told me she had once drafted a novel about two sisters and a house on fire. I have met women since who started careers, literary and otherwise, after the storm of children. It is possible. But I didn’t know if I could.

I then had a book not a baby. I heard authors call their books their babies. I heard other authors react, disgusted by this phrase. Some because it seemed too feminine, and others because what is a tame book compared to the mucus and blood and hair and rageful life of a newborn? I think I might have used the phrase once or twice, awkward-mouthed.

I married someone who wasn’t the physicist. I was happy to marry this person, who was kind and good to me. And yet as I tried on dresses and received cake by mail order, I found it hard to remember there would be a day after the wedding, and a day after that. Shakespeare’s comedies end with weddings. His tragedies in death. I told my fiancé that I felt like I was planning my funeral. I had written a novel in which someone tried to kill herself on her wedding night in a dress with many buttons running down the back. I too wore a dress with tiny buttons.

The wedding didn’t kill me. We wrote our own vows. A friend ran the ceremony. People finished the cake so there was none left for us to eat. A few months later, I got pregnant. It was entirely on purpose. I told myself I was ready – I’d had two books published. I had a third on the way. I told myself this was a foothold wide enough to stand on. I told myself that other people had both books and babies.

The birth is due in one month. At the moment, the baby is 5lbs or 2.5kg, outweighing my novels in both hardcover and paperback formats. They don’t seem like all that much now. It turns out that two books feel like light ballast. There is new advice now. Very little of it is about writing.

If I were writing this essay after the birth, things might be different. I might be struggling with whether to confess that the whole thing has been a terrible mistake. I might be rosy with confidence, so sure that no library or award could compete with this hot little creature woven inside my womb. But I’m writing it now. Now, as the snow melts on London’s rooftops. Now, as my back twitches in pain. Now, as my room is so quiet that I can hear the chuckling of birds outside. A version of this life is ending. I’m in the last days. This may be the last essay I write as childless novelist.

It is, in a sense, another small death. This me is almost gone. Almost swallowed up. The books are no insurance. And whether motherhood is the correct choice for me or any writer, this ending is still coming. I am, quite frankly, afraid.

But there will still be the day after and the day after that and the day after that. There will still be words. I must just find a way to put them together. Somehow. I remind myself that I’ve always had to finish one book before I could start another. I do not know the me who is coming – the me I will need to be. I will meet her soon. There is hope in that.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is an author and editor.