The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion understood that our very capacity to think in infancy grows out of our need to make sense of the loss of our mother’s breast or our bottle at the end of every feed, and to bear that sense of separateness and aloneness.
I think that’s what happened to me when my daughter was born: out of the traumatic birth and the traumatic sleep deprivation and the traumatic everything else grew new capacities for survival and growth and love that I did not previously possess.
We might hear it in a few words of a radio programme in the lonely darkness of a sleepless night, or in a simple melody with the surprising power to console a crying baby, like light refracting through raindrops.
The programme Something to Declare came on, about the Finnish concept of sisu, which the behavioural scientist Emilia Elisabet Lahti expresses as “life force in times of adversity”.
She was crying, being comforted by my husband, who was playing one of his (many, many) Manics albums, when the track changed; on came Raindrops.
