The Doorway and other prose
02.02.2024 through 21.04.2024 Elila-Rose Mkakanzi
It is normal, and everyday, and unique, and amazing, and life-shattering. It is not for everybody, yet every body emerges in the same way. The intensity is immense, the love and loss even greater.
I have travelled, been amongst different cultures, languages, peoples, and nature's wonders. I have read mind bending books, met remarkable souls, loved and been loved. Nothing comes close to the indescribable doorway that, nonetheless, I feebly attempt to describe. Unfathomable, mundane and magical.
This birth and death cycle. Jah bless this creation.
The Fluids of This Earth
I smell my milk, sour yet somehow tantalising, as sweet to my nose as the smell of my baby’s head. I bleed from my womb still, weeks after, finding patches of red on good underwear, streaked with unfamiliar mucus. My breasts ache at times with the heaviness of milk, one uncomfortably larger than the other. I can feel it every time it comes in, a tingly painful zipping of milk shooting through veins before the telltale spread of dampness crosses my singlet. I go without bras most days, although I am considering buying padded ones to save on the amount of shirts I wash daily.
My baby’s poop smells sweet, unlike my toddlers’ who now eats all the things and the scent usually sends me reeling. My littlest’s is milk-sweet and yellow, thankfully inoffensive at three in the morning when all I want to do is sleep. I find upchuck on the bedspread, random blankets, and clothes I’ve worn. We sweat together, her wrapped up tight against my bosom, and my evening shower is an honest delight, absolutely glorious in the fading evening.
I’m in the trenches, and it’s beautiful down here, muddy and sweaty and bloody and sweet. So sweet with life. How lucky I am, to be covered in the fluids of this earth.
This Feeling of Burn Out Written on an afternoon wherein the inside of my chest felt itchy and achy. I strapped my babies to my body; the two year old on my back, two-and-a-half-month-old on my chest, crocs on my feet and marched us down the hill to the river. I hoped the rushing waters would lull babies to sleep and revitalise a mother. Onwards.
This feeling of being burnt out. Akin to scratching at bare cave walls with fingernails bleeding, cuts and scabs days old, trying to leave a mark on an unmarkable place. A trapped snarling tigress; exhausted skin and bones, angry eyes glinting beneath thunderous brows, milk leaking from teats, belly still tender. Unable to fight but the spirit is willing– although to what cause as the spirit of fight is one borne from guilt of not being the mama I thought I would be.
Meanwhile it is as though my cubs are playing next to a fire that feeds on my remains, using the burnt embers of dreams to trace fragments of imagination; glimpses of a world outside these walls.
Burnt out like a wild forest set aflame from not being tended. The clearing had to occur but the regrowth is yet to be seen. Blackened and bare, parched, waiting for tender hands to see the fruitful forest it once was. Here I am, a mother that is both the wild forest and the tender hands. Yet how can it be that I am both, and still grow sweet seedlings, into young saplings, into trees with roots firm, branches wide, leaves open to the warmth of the sun?
When the mother tree lies dormant, unable to awaken from her self-imposed slumber it begs the question: what will remain for the seedlings to witness? For the cubs to learn from? A martyred mother, or one that gave herself the grace to bloom? My prayer is the latter.
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