Bubbles: Reflections on Becoming Mother by Laura Bissell, reviewed by Rohese Devereux Taylor

Luath Press, £9.99

Review by Rohese Devereux Taylor

Motherhood, writes Laura Bissell, is “joy and love and closeness and soft warmth, but it is also terror, fear, the unknown, the unimaginable”. These shifting states, somehow able to exist simultaneously within the heart-walls of new and seasoned parents, are tracked by the Scottish writer and academic throughout her debut memoir, Bubbles.

In the book, Bissell, a Glasgow native, explores shifting identities, womanhood, history and current events as she charts her own journey through pregnancy, new motherhood and re-finding her moorings during the Covid-19 outbreak.

Born in September 2018, Bissell’s daughter was 18 months old when the world was plunged into fear and confusion by the spreading virus. Life in lockdown as a working mother – family support cut off, access to streets and parks rationed – saw Bissell and her husband make do, like so many others across the globe. Despite the distancing and isolation, new and familiar webs of connection unfurled and tightened during the shared, but not equitable, experience.

After four months of isolation in Glasgow, Bissell was reunited with her parents in their beach-bordering garden in Dunoon, and the encounter is touchingly described in her book. On that same summer day in 2020, I was birthing my first child, a daughter, born into this new, ever-shifting world of lockdowns, social distancing and mask-wearing.

Reading Bubbles brought back memories, moments that had already buried themselves under the sleepless nights, tandem tears, grubby hand-grasps and ripples of laughter that punctuate new parenthood. So much has been lost during the last two years, not least loved ones, but also opportunities, experiences and small pieces of ourselves. It perhaps seems little compared with the enormity of what others lost, but there is also space to mourn for the newborn mothers who had no-one to turn to during those first days, when moods didn’t lift and babies never slept. For the infants who didn’t meet their families for fear of infection, for the parents that couldn’t be comforted with a touch, or for those who birthed alone because hospitals were understaffed and overstretched.

I was lucky; the world began to open up just days before my baby was born. I was able to be held by my own mother as I laboured at home after months of being apart, before giving birth in water with my partner by my side at the newly re-opened midwife-led unit in Paisley. I could share my daughter with family and friends, and I was thankful for the slower pace of life in those early days.

It was not an easy time for Bissell, who contracted Covid in December 2020, although she acknowledges she too is one of the “lucky ones”. She reflects on how much harder it might have been, had she given birth during the pandemic, to have experienced “the loss of what this time should have been”. No visits from family, no baby classes, no friendships with others who are in exactly the same brand new boat.

Bissell takes comfort in small pleasures – watering plants, sharing coffee with her husband – but she also feels “a deep and primal dread”. Her daughter’s world has shrunk to just the three of them, the toddler still happy and curious but the mother concerned about keeping her safe despite the threat of the virus, environmental collapse, civil unrest and violence against people of colour and women that lies outside their family bubble.

Throughout the book, the author looks back at how her own mother was mothered, and how she went on to mother Bissell and her sister. How will her daughter feel when she reads these words? She hopes she knows that “becoming a mother is one of the most significant facts of my life”.

Memories of her own close family and her childhood are woven through the text, the lines demarcating past and present overlapping. Bissell and her husband live in the house she grew up in, so they brought their daughter home to the place she felt safe in as a child, echoes of her former selves in every nook and rickety floorboard.

Bissell’s mother takes pains to remake a doll’s house that she gave her daughters when they were children. During the second phase of lockdown, she cleans and redecorates, waiting for the time when she can hire an electrician to wire up the lights that illuminate the little house she will pass on to her beloved, and very much missed, granddaughter.

The streets of Glasgow provide constancy and reassurance as they shape-shift through the seasons, and while she feels she is “living a simulation of a life”, Bissell renders her home city, although at some points paused and waiting, in vibrant colour.

My daughter is now the same age as Bissell’s was in March 2020, when lockdown began. I cannot imagine having to contain the wilds of toddlerhood within four walls. Bissell's daughter has spent more than half of her short life in isolation, when the bubbles she so loved to blow were replaced by one unseen, in which only she and her parents could exist. But now, as the edges of those memories start to fade, Bissell reminds herself of the “gift” of being able to share that time with her daughter.

“We have done our best, but it is hard to feel it is good enough," she writes. Bubbles conveys the weight of parenting during the pandemic, but this is also a book about unswerving love, family, legacy, place and hope. A celebration and excavation of the state of motherhood, it is an unflinching account of one woman passing through some of life’s greatest transitions against the surreal backdrop of a global health crisis.