Remake / Remodel: Identity, Motherhood and Music

Becoming a mother remakes you in ways you cannot begin to conceive of in advance. It literally recasts your body into a new shape. Some of the ways my body was permanently altered include: the permanent widening of my pelvic bone; a lip of fat on my stomach that remains stubbornly in place no matter how many hyperextensions I do at the gym; thicker hair; larger feet. I receive a twice daily prompt on my phone to do my Kegels exercises, and I will tell you now that I do them. This is not to mention the more philosophical, emotional and neurological changes (there are studies evidencing what is termed “brain shrinkage” on becoming a parent?!). And so I suppose it is little surprise the album I found myself listening to, over and over, during the first hallucinogenic days of motherhood was Roxy Music’s self-titled debut album, home to possibly their most famous song Re-Make/Re-Model. 

I was pregnant during the pandemic: a time of great remaking. During this time I would compulsively Google the same two phrases every day, often many times a day: “Covid vaccination” and “McDonalds vegan burger”. The future had never been more opaque, less accessible. I couldn’t imaginatively project myself into it, both the wider world and myself, as a mother, moving within it. Every day brought the need for fresh recalibrations, both at a near-sighted and bodily level, and then within a broader context. Today I feel so sick I need to lie on the ground. Today I can manage a single ginger biscuit. Today I can go for a walk in the park with my friend. Today the same thing is literally illegal. I couldn’t get comfortable in any one mode; the shape of an identity was constantly changing, forever in flux. 

I read many pregnancy and early motherhood memoirs, desperate for a voice I could relate to. The only two I found recognisable in terms of what I was thinking and feeling, were Nine Moons by Gabriela Weiner and Inferno by Catherine Cho; the former of which I once read reviewed as reviewed as “ hazardous”, and the latter is an account of postpartum psychosis, which gives some indication of the state of mind I was in. I clung to these books. I feel very grateful for these books. I am compelled to say these books saved me, in their own small way. Both wrote candidly about the thing I was struggling with above all: ambivalence. I think ambivalence is often mischaracterised as indifference, or nonchalance, but for me the ambivalence I felt on becoming pregnant felt violent, seismic, apocalyptic. I wanted two directly contradictory things with an all-encompassing ferocity that made me feel I was being physically torn apart. 

I had always wanted to have a child; always knew I wanted to be a mother; and I got knocked up almost immediately after a lifetime spent fretting over my fertility due to endometriosis. The changes were so sudden, so absolute. Overnight, I could no longer drink. I felt so sick I couldn’t eat for months. I felt morbidly depressed. I napped four to five times a day. I felt like I was inhabiting a different body, that I had been given a different brain, within about two weeks of making the decision to start trying. I’d expected a little more time to find my feet, to make my reconciliations. One of the biggest reasons I found my future self so inconceivable was because of the total loss of sense of identity I was wrangling with. 

“You’re really hung up on this identity thing,” my therapist told me. I felt strangely ashamed, exposed by his observation. I am quite attached to a sense of identity, it feels something tangible to cling to, to be anchored by. My broader sense of self is so abstract and nebulous, I for the most part have no idea who I am, or what I think or feel, at any given moment. But I have a set of identity markers, I suppose, that make me feel I must be doing okay: author, lecturer, nice outfits, good taste in music. Music, in particular, has always felt a comforting cornerstone of my identity. I have a pretty decent working knowledge of Bob Dylan’s eighties and nineties studio albums. I used to run a band night named after a Casiotone For The Painfully Alone song. I played drums in a legitimate hype band! A hype band!

During pregnancy, I almost entirely stopped listening to music. The only music I could really metabolise was instrumental, and only in the bath, where I would ill-advisedly stew, listening to Grouper, Vivaldi and Philip Glass, on rotation. My former relationship with music felt so unattainable. When, once becoming a mother, would I get the chance to intensely listen to something on my headphones. How could I ever possibly play in a band? When would I go to a concert or gig? How would I even find out about them?! 

In the early days of motherhood I spent a lot of time walking in the park, often walking for three, four hours at a time. I’d listen to podcasts while my baby slept, and every now and then I’d attempt listening to an old playlist. One morning I put on the Spotify Discover playlist, for lack of anything else coming to mind. The song 2HB by Roxy Music came on. I found myself listening to it on repeat, for days on end. There was something alien about it; something antithetical to my present that I found appealing (apparently it is a tribute to Humphrey Bogart). I began listening to Roxy Music, and in particular their debut album, for the first time in my life. I liked being able to coexist in two realities. Exhausted new mother, pushing baby endlessly through the park. Another, living through this quite libidinous, urbane album, dripping in glamour and sex. Sometimes I think the only way I am able to find the reality of my present tolerable is by projecting myself into something else. Maybe this has always been the function of music for me? 

When my baby was about three months old, and when some of the lockdown limitations eased, I signed myself up for what was ostensibly a mother/baby exercise/dance class. You strap your baby to your body in a sling, and then an instructor teaches you a series of extremely low effort “dance moves”. I don’t know what compelled me to sign up for this class! I suppose I enjoy, and missed, dancing very much.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, maybe just something to pass the time? I took my place at the back, nearest the door, in case I decided to leave. I felt wildly self-conscious, both of my abilities as a mother, and in my desires to do something so, well, lame. The first song was by Sigrid. I had seen her two years earlier, at Primavera, leaving the group I was with to watch her on my own. The smell of sunscreen and beer, dancing in a crowd of strangers. Now I was in a roomful of mums with their babies, as we slowly moved our postpartum bodies around. I was surprised to find myself crying, while I danced. Not out of self-pity, as I might have expected, but more from a weird kind of acceptance. Mum things tend towards the same purview: almost wilfully uncool, and also a bit shit; and there was something very moving to me, in that moment, about that. You can do many of the same things you used to, just more slowly, laboriously, now physically weighed down. That you might be lucky enough to get a new kind of freedom, just one in which this little creature is now more or less permanently attached. But while body could still remember how to move, but I still couldn’t quite get it to move in the way that I wanted to. 

I thought about a play I’d seen a few years earlier, I’m a Phoenix, Bitch, by Bryony Kimmings, about breaking up with her boyfriend and nearly losing her baby. I thought it was terrible at the time. I remember telling a friend I found it so bad it made me feel mentally unwell. But there was one scene I found very affecting: she, the performer and mother Bryony, tries to dance with a projected image of herself, from before she became a parent. But the two selves can’t quite line up, can’t quite reach a rhythm. I remember my friends who were mums being a lot more impressed by the play than I was, and I’d like to revisit it at some point in the future. I’ve come to accept I am a different person now, with different sensibilities and different tastes. I have a bit more time for things wilfully uncool, and a bit shit. I, too, cannot (still cannot!) get my identity/ies to line up, to find a rhythm. I can’t imagine dancing with my old self ever again.

I now mainly listen to music with my son, who is three years old, most mornings, while we do puzzles or knead our fingers through playdough or kinetic sand. I always play him full albums. I have a 6Music dad fancy that I am giving him an education. I enjoy my delusions: that he has preferences and leanings of his own. He likes Nick Drake; The Beach Boys; Peter, Paul and Mary; Alex G. He does NOT like Television! He clapped his hands to his ears when I recently attempt to play him Shellac, shouting “too loud!".

A few months ago, I found myself putting on the first Roxy Music album, and when 2HB came on, I said to him “I used to dance with you to this song, when you were a tiny baby”. He put out his arms to me, like he wanted to be held. I lifted him off the ground, and he rested his head on my shoulder, and we danced to 2HB, in the living room, again.