Drawing my way through the first year of motherhood

Reflections on sketchbooks as a way to remember the early days of my son's life, and becoming a mother.

I didn’t sleep the first 24 hours after my son was born. I was too busy looking at his face, both entrancingly new and deeply familiar. At the smallness of his fingernails. Checking the steady rise and fall of his tiny chest.

Almost a year on, and while I’ve slept a bit more since then I still catch myself marvelling at this person we made, watching him change every day like patterns in sand - the same but different, shifting and moving, always.

Drawing my son during his first year has helped me make some sense of these changes, and to record them as they happened. Drawing helped me mark the time-bending months of newborn blur with records of how he was, and how I was. Because of course, it isn’t only him who has undergone massive, non-reversible changes this year. While not drawn on the page, my shifting sense of self is there looking back at me from the drawings, too.

The first picture I drew of my son is maybe a five minute sketch in pencil - all I could manage alongside tight, raw stitches, a still-swollen belly and raging hormones. But the length of a drawing is never the point. What matters is the making of it - and by doing so inscribing in your mind a specific moment in time. This has always been, for me, the most magical element of drawing from life.

So I can look at this sketch and remember the bright February light coming in through the curtains, the smell of milk gone slightly sour, and the piles of mess everywhere. I can remember how fragile he felt, how small, but how full of weight in terms of significance. The marvel of his existence alongside the crying in the shower - mine and his.

I don’t really recognise my son’s face in the first drawing that is all pouting lips, scrunched shut eyes and soft hands. But I can see my pencil seeking him out, trying to understand his face in the specifics of his nostril shape in the same way my heart sought to comprehend who this person was who would change my life forever.

Then, a flurry of early drawings during the first month. More time spent on them, and changes already visible in my son’s appearance, posture, and alertness. A drawing of him asleep in the car seat that he’s now almost too big for tugs at me with the constant grief of parenthood for the version of your child who’s already gone. I am thankful for these drawings that captured him as he grew.

I miss my son while holding him. How is that possible? But one of the lessons my son has taught me this year is that two things can be true at the same time. Motherhood is, at least for me, incredibly joyful and easy and excruciatingly difficult. It’s both. It is a multitude of things, many of which I am yet to discover. And it’s everything to the maximum - no half measures.

Drawings emerge of my son asleep on my partner during those first precious weeks of us all being at home together. Looking at the two of them together reminds me of the weight of his little body, the sound of his breathing. How trapped I was on the sofa for hours on end, but how deeply content, too. The impossible length of a night stretching ahead of you. The sense of foreboding about how many wakes it would take to get through til dawn - sometimes grey and miserable and sometimes a riot of birdsong and colour.

At three months, some memory drawings emerge - me testing myself on my knowledge of my ever-changing son. Only one or two look like him, of course. Or they look like that version of him, now gone, like the coming and going of the blossom on the trees outside our window.

Memory drawings of a yoga class together actually show me, too. They remind me my son was once no longer than my thigh.

Familiar toys, now outgrown, feature. And as my son starts to move and be awake for longer the drawings become more challenging to make and therefore more unfinished. But aren’t we all works in progress? There’s a sense in the drawings of those afternoons spent on the rug, the first rolls and the discovery of his feet.

Every now and then a moment of stillness as he sleeps, or is in the buggy.

I start to draw more things out of the four walls of our living room as I heal from the birth and come to feel more confident in walking out not as one person, but two, also laden with a mountain of stuff. My sketchbook, whatever the scene, tends to feature the arch of the pram’s handles or one of its wheels. My son’s constant presence makes itself known even when he is not the subject.

Looking back at these drawings now I also have a sense of where I was at the time they were made, both physically and emotionally. My slowly growing sense of belief in myself and the shrugging off of things I might have worried about before, now non-important. This is true of all of my sketchbooks. Drawings from a decade ago can conjure up specific times - holidays, relationships, old flats and jobs.

Then there are first drawings of my son sitting up, and a series of them to practise these new shapes and poses that became the new way of being and seeing the world. It is here, at six months into being my son’s mother that I can recognise a likeness of him in my drawings. It strikes me as a long time, and also no time at all.

Recent drawings are of my son walking. Something so incomprehensible in those early weeks, but now so ordinary. Our new way of being. He’s even harder to catch in stillness now, so is an increasing challenge to draw. But my sense of him is stronger, after our year together, so that it’s now a mix of observation, memory and intuition that guides my pen across the page as I try to record these precious moments.

This week I left my son at nursery for the first time. Walking out onto the street without him I was at a loss - what to do with myself for a full hour and a half? I lay on the sofa with my cat (who was delighted by the silence and free lap to sit on) and half concentrated on my book while refreshing my phone to check for an emergency call. My son was fine by himself. How wonderful. How utterly heartbreaking.

As I return to work in my non-illustration job, I hope I’ll keep drawing my son. I plan to. All of the cliches about parenthood are true. Time really does fly. I am thankful that drawing can provide a time machine of sorts to transport me back to these early days of my son’s life and my new life as a Mum, and help me hold onto all the memories we have yet to make.