Leilani

‘You’ll be in my heart’ *(Collins, 1989) sung by Leilani

Layers

My memory of holding my son for the first time is not an image, it's a feeling. I can, still now, feel what that felt like, but I cannot remember what it looked like. He was just a little white cap with a big tube coming out of his head. So, I can't remember the look, but I can remember the warmth.

Skin-to-skin

During my next pregnancy, when I knew I would have another preterm baby, I told every doctor – “if I can hold this baby, that’s all I want. Or touch her, can you bring her to touch my face? I just want touch that baby when it’s born.”

Everyone thinks scent hearts are a super nice thing and they are lovely, but I wanted to show that it can have a painful side as well. I just don't think there's anything that can describe that feeling of having to walk away from a building at night where your child is. It's the most unnatural thing I've ever felt in my life; to just walk out and then get in a car, and then come home, and just sit there.

Scent Hearts

“This is how I was feeling, every time I left: boom, crush, crush, crush.”

Expressing milk is the only thing you can do for your baby. I used to take tons and tons of it in to NICU. People say when you breastfeed you bond with your baby, it's the most special thing. And my first memories were sitting in a cold room at three o’clock in the morning trying to get hold of the unit to see how my baby was doing and if they were okay, just knowing that, actually, they were lying there by themselves.

Night time expressing

“It’s probably the loneliest I’ve ever felt in my life, just sitting there alone in the middle of the night in the cold expressing breast milk.”

There are so many rules about what you can do, there's rules about how long you can have the incubator door open, you can’t be touching them for too long, you can't stimulate them for too long, you can't just get your own baby out, when they're so poorly. So in the neonatal unit you're told what’s wrong with your baby, and you're told what to do. And there's no room for maternal instinct in there, there's no room for it.

Unmaking Mothering

“The rules, I think they’re good initially, but then they hold you back from kind of getting back into society, and being a mum in society.”

I am here

'I am here' - written by Leilani and read by Rachel Bower. The poem speaks to the pain to having to leave but needing to tell your baby that you are still there.

Shock

'Shock' - written by Leilani and read by Rachel Bower. This poem is about the overwhelming journey of preterm mothering which Leilani says is branded like a hot flaming iron on her fractured heart.

Acknowledgements:

‘Unmaking Mothering’ – image taken from a publication by ‘Association SPARADRAP’, written by Dr Nathalie Ratynski and illustrated by ‘Noëlle Herrenschmidt.

‘You’ll be in my heart’ – song written by Phil Collins (1989), from the Walt Disney Film ‘Tarzan’ (1999), produced by Disney, Rob Cavallo & Phil Collins.