I miss my sofa.
I still have my sofa, to be clear. It’s the same one everyone bought circa 2018, the velvet one with the cylindrical cushions? You know the one, you’ve sat on it at half a dozen parties. You’ve spilled Perello juice on it and mopped it up with a chore jacket.
Good times have been had on that sofa, though very few in the manner you’re thinking. I have laughed and cried and eaten noodles on that sofa. I have napped on that sofa’s strokeable nap. I spent most of the pandemic on that sofa, letting the cushions slip incrementally further and further forward until it eventually spat me onto the floor and I would be forced to go to the effort of hoisting them back into place. Sometimes that was my daily exercise.
In the early months of last year the sofa and I were virtually inseparable. It was where I fed the baby and my husband fed me, in beautiful symbiosis, shovelling Cook meals into my mouth twice a day in front of Richard Osman’s House of Games. It was where I received guests, the sofa subbing in for a kind of goddessy lotus flower, and it was where I slumped at 3am, and 4am, and 5am, trying desperately not to nod off and dash her perfect little acorn head against the coffee table.
Anyway, the sofa is still in situ but it and I are no longer an item. We’ve been consciously uncoupled – aside from a few ill-advised reunions, always disastrous – for more than a year now.
I know the anniversary because it happened the day before the King’s coronation, ironically a big moment for sturdy chairs with adequate back support. May 5th. That was the date I reached for a muslin, screamed in agony as something in my lumbar snapped like a stale rubber band, and spent the rest of the day lying prone on the floor, noticing just how much dust and crap was under the sofa (a lot).
I’d thought birth might be the biggest physical indignity of our relationship, but no – it was peeing in a series of Carte D’or ice cream tubs because I couldn’t stand up to walk to the toilet.
Some context: my lower back had been a little fucked for nearly a decade, ever since I got suddenly into running in my mid-twenties but not at all into stretching or correctly-fitting trainers. I had been here before, but only ever for a week or two, after which the pain would get better and I would resume my life of joyful slouching.
Not this time. This time, I had pushed my luck too far and the only thing ‘springing back’ would be the sofa cushions from my daily indentation.
A year later, I am still here. I live here now. Not on the floor, thankfully, but in a world where the sofa is verboten and every activity is a calculated risk.
People will tell you things, like ‘you have to look after yourself to look after a child!’ and ‘use a rucksack’ and ‘lift with your knees!’ and ‘get a proper desk chair for god’s sake, you’re 36’ – but you don’t actually do those things, because nobody does, because we are all still disobedient toddlers when it comes to our own wellbeing. And because there are also things people don’t tell you, like: did you know it can take up to two years for all your muscles to squelch back into their normal place after having a baby? Or that for as long as you’re breastfeeding, you’ll still be making relaxin, the fun-sounding, Steve-Wright-in-the-Afternoon-vibin’ but actually quite un-chill hormone that turns your ligaments into a kind of overcooked spaghetti? Or that reformer pilates classes cost TWENTY POUNDS EACH?
Some further context: I pushed my luck but not my baby, because I gave birth by elective caesarean. This was for a plethora of reasons including, but not limited to, a low placenta, a failed induction, a hypochondriac need for control and just kinda wanting one. Afterwards I felt equal parts smug and ashamed at having used a cheat code and skipped out on the pain of ‘natural’ childbirth. But nope, here it was now. Pain, and plenty of it. In my darker moments I wonder if it’s some kind of punishment.
I felt equal parts smug and ashamed at having used a cheat code and skipped out on the pain of ‘natural’ childbirth. But nope, here it was now. Pain, and plenty of it.
During those first weeks of motherhood I had stopped wearing perfume, afraid that it would mask my ‘natural’ fragrance and upset or repel my baby. Now, menthyl salicylate has become my signature scent. I slather myself in Deep Heat Max Strength every day like it’s luxury body butter, willing the chemical burn to shake my muscles loose. If my daughter objects then she’s polite enough not to show it. I wonder if strangers on the bus do too.
And I wonder if nobody talks about these kinds of injuries as part of the maternity process because they’re not unique or special; they don’t feature exclusively ‘womanly’ anatomy, and they’re not shrouded in feminine mystique. A bad back is about a humdrum as it comes. Everyone has one. Your dad probably has one. My dad has one. I don’t remember it being a huge feature of my childhood – just something that rumbled away in the background and made itself known from time to time, like my mum’s bad neck, mostly as an obstacle to fun. A reason not to play football or make a ship out of sofa cushions today. A bore.
Will I ever make a ship out of sofa cushions with my daughter? God, I hope so. The idea seems more likely than sitting on one just now.
Sometimes I daydream about the good parenting stuff to come, like showing her my favourite childhood films for the first time, snuggling up with her on rainy days and sick days in front of a classic musical that I will attempt to guilt her into enjoying. Then I catch myself and have to make a mental readjustment. Could I snuggle up with her on an ergonomic desk chair? An acupressure mat? Could her dad do the snuggling while I lie on the floor and he tells me how nice it feels?
The sofa strike isn’t ideal for our marriage, either. “Make time for each other!” says all the advice about keeping your relationship alive while you’re preoccupied with keeping a baby alive. But these days our go-to way of spending quality time together would be with our favourite third – you guessed it, Captain Velvet. Watching TV lying flat on our backs with the iPad balanced on my sternum doesn’t have the same air of cosy coupledom, somehow. It’s hard to connect, romantically, when one of you must remain bolt upright like a Victorian aunt.
Could I snuggle up with her on an ergonomic desk chair? An acupressure mat?
Don’t get me wrong, I have a beautiful abundance of happy memories from the past year. But it makes make me sad that those memories will forever be threaded through with others. Of howling in pain trying to breastfeed while lying on the landing; of psyching myself up to lift her from the cot; of turning down invites and planning the most convoluted routes around London to avoid any risk of having to heave the pram up a couple of steps.
And it makes me sadder thinking how many other people are parenting through pain, pain far worse than mine, with scant medical support and without hope of any cure any more sophisticated than ‘...I guess eventually they’ll grow up?’
All it takes is one little whinge on social media and I have scores of other mums commiserating and offering their own advice (have I tried reformer pilates?), so I know I'm not the only one doing the hokey-cokey through gritted teeth at rhyme time.
I know healing is possible, but it’s logistically impractical. It has become a full-time job, trying to fix my back, when I need to be doing my actual job in order to pay for all this healing. Those tiny windows of free time after she’s in bed have become work time too, but it’s hard to prioritise stretches when every fibre of your being says “sleep!”
And it’s hard to prioritise resting when the poster for good parenting says we must be ‘hands-on’ – which also, usually, means arms-on, back on, glutes on, core engaged. We’re taught that a ‘good’ parent, or at least a fun one, is physical; flinging them in the air, racing them through the park, swinging them around a series of overheated libraries and draughty church halls. Every time they tell us to stand up for the Grand Old Duke of York or the Hokey Cokey, I want to scream. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LET THE MUMS SIT DOWN.
I don’t scream it, of course. I get up and hoist my daughter overhead as best I can, because the fear of regret, of these moments slipping by too fast, is greater than the fear of slipping a disc again. A few weekends ago I watched a friend dancing with her toddler in a local beer hall, and it was so joyous that I joined in and danced with mine too, her legs around my waist in a kind of juvenile jive, and she giggled with abandon and it was wonderful. Then the next day I couldn’t walk properly, and it was terrible.
Still. Can’t complain! The mantra of mothers/martyrs everywhere. Can’t complain! Shan’t whinge! Mustn’t grumble.
And I can’t, and shan’t, and mustn’t, not when a ropey back is such small fry on the scale of human suffering; not when there are parents living with permanent disabilities, parents navigating pain and chronic conditions far more debilitating than mine. Parents who deserve medals, trophy cabinets, special recognition awards with million pound cash prizes, for getting through another round of Wind the Bobbin Up without kicking a bean bag at the injustice of it all.
So although it might seem like I’ve been complaining now for… wow, 1,600 words – I’m actually not. I’m not complaining about the pain, or the uncertainty, or how sweaty it is to wear an adhesive heat patch to a party in August. I’m definitely not complaining about how heartbreaking it is to see your toddler with arms raised, pleading “up up up” and have to tell them that no, mummy can’t lift them up just now, would they accept a formal handshake?
But mostly I’m not complaining about the sofa. My beautiful emotional support settee. My halfway house between alert and asleep.
Where else can a person possibly relax? How do you demarcate the end of the working day, if not with the sofa? Unless you spend two solid hours every evening in the bath, which I’ll admit is appealing but less so now the weather’s finally turned.
I still vividly remember my first trip home for the weekend after starting uni. Marvelling at the new strangeness of everything that had, until recently, been so familiar as to pass without notice. Because my halls of residence modelled itself on a 1970s prison, we didn’t have a sofa – only hard plastic chairs in the communal kitchen, and a series of weird nursing home armchairs in the TV room. More hard chairs in lecture theatres, stools in pubs, that little plastic half-bench at the bus stop; nowhere you could properly recline and let your real personality hang out. So sitting on a domestic sofa for the first time in months felt orgasmic. I couldn’t get over it. “Sofas! Oh, sofas,” I yelped, as though greeting my sweetheart coming home from war. I vowed never to take them for granted again.
So I ask you too, as you sink into your cushions tonight, maybe tucking your legs up impishly beneath you or sprawling its full length like a cat in the sun; appreciate that comfort for me. Enjoy it, on behalf of all the Victorian aunts who just want to snuggle.
Mothering may be inextricable from martyrdom, but I can do a nice line in affectionate nagging too – so count your blessings. Lift from your knees. And get a proper desk chair for god’s sake, you’re 36.
sitting here hunched at my little desk from my silly little vintage desk chair, thinking about all of the matrescent injuries I have woken up with and all the money I've spent trying to ameliorate them
This really made me laugh! But Hope you feel better! Xx