Nicola Dellard-Lyle’s poetry: ‘From Above the Surface’

Nicola Dellard-Lyle’s debut book of poetry From Above the Surface follows her journey of healing and release as a mother. She speaks to us about the troubling transitory period of matrescence, and how poetry has the power to weave unravelling mothers back together.

When a child enters the world, a new mother is birthed, too. This act of creation kickstarts the process of matrescence – an umbrella term for the physical, emotional and hormonal changes mothers experience – however that looks and feels for them personally. So much emphasis is put on childbirth and the immediate period following it, yet mothers enter perpetual evolution; their lives will never be the same and it can be tough for them to catch their breath and come up for air.

It’s this journey into motherhood, along the identity-rupturing path that causes people to continuously unravel and heal while trying to raise a child, that is captured within Bristol-based Nicola Dellard-Lyle’s debut poem collection From Above the Surface.
“I’ve written a mixture of the beautiful, the joyous and the downright difficult moments,” she says. Her words sprout from roots, tumble between waves and get caught in tight embraces within poems that tell her journey from a murky realm of darkness and overwhelm back to feeling like herself again.

Dealing with ‘mother load’
Though no stranger to creative writing, Dellard-Lyle’s “personal outpourings” became a more prevalent fixture in her life when she got pregnant. Then when Caleb, who she’s pictured with on these pages, was born in 2016, it was like someone had flicked a switch.
“So much needed to come out,” she explains. “It felt right to put that into poetic form. At first in motherhood, there is so much love and change. This book is about the transformative time of matrescence. Everything has changed in your whole life and you’ve got this whole other person to look after who’s also constantly changing. You’re finding it amazing and joyful but it’s also overwhelming and that feeling started to really creep in. I call it ‘the mother load’.”

Waking to feed Caleb throughout the night, Dellard-Lyle found the process of putting pen to paper therapeutic, feeling creative despite the exhaustion. She had started sharing some of her poetry on Instagram (@threadpressed) during Covid-19 lockdowns, in the hope it might resonate with other mothers experiencing the same wave of emotions.

“I realised so many people were connecting to it,” she remembers. “They said I put it down so clearly in a beautiful way and felt it was really touching. That felt important to share with others who may be were writing as well.”

It turned out other mothers were indeed writing. In fact, there was a group called The Mum Poem Press helping people share their work, printing some of it into anthologies. When lockdown was over,

Dellard-Lyle joined open mic nights held at Redcatch Community Garden in Knowle that saw 20 mothers getting together – babies and children in tow – and sharing their work, often for the first time.

“Standing up there seeing everyone else taking my words in was amazing, and made me realise it’s not as scary as I thought it was going to be,” she says. “It was really empowering, and my son was there waving, having happily requested a poem.”

However, it was around the same time that the weight of the ‘mother load’ began bearing down more heavily on Dellard-Lyle.

“I wasn’t feeling fully capable or resourced to deal with everything going on with me internally, as well as my son’s changes, and it was quite a triggering time for me. It brought things up from the way I was parented. That was when I was feeling very alone, struggling with the day-to-day of mothering. I did not realise I needed to take the extra steps and actually ask for help.”

“Yet I was still writing. I finally managed to get out of that difficult space. I wrote myself out of there. Then when I came back to some of those poems from that time they showed my journey of stepping out of the darkness.”

Creating the collection
Dellard-Lyle initially wanted to create a full motherhood anthology of poems, but this particular smaller collection followed such a specific journey that felt so powerful she needed to share it.

“I’d spoken to my friends about this and they said ‘Do it now. This can be your first collection. It’s going to be potent. You can do something else later.’.”

The poems offer solace to mothers who might be following this well-trodden yet isolating path. Immortalised within them is a moment when Dellard-Lyle’s recounts a turning point in her healing.

“There’s a poem in there called The Return. When I wrote that, I realised how far removed I was, and how mentally unwell I’d been.
I scribbled it on a piece of paper and stuffed it in my notebook in the middle of playing trains. It felt like a tonne of bricks landed on me and I thought, ‘I’m here again, I haven’t felt like this in a while, this is shocking’. It really marks an important moment. I am finding myself and feeling grounded again.

“There are illustrations by Bristol-based artist Charlotte Ortegon Rees throughout the book that depict this rootedness and growth, starting with small shoots and flourishing into a beautiful woman; everything is becoming more level and leads to me having my head above the surface again and being able to see. I’m writing this from above the surface.”

Though she’s been able to come up for air and is in a position to offer support through her creative writing, Dellard-Lyle’s son is 7-and-a-half and the changes both of them face daily are nowhere near over.

“He’s going through a massive shift now at this age. Lots of children do, it’s a spiritual, physical, emotional, everything change. I can feel that, and it’s sometimes difficult to notice how much your child is changing and gather energy to constantly surround it. Parents have to learn to become really thoughtful with how we manage the balance of needs for us and our children.”

To show up consciously as a caregiver doesn’t happen without some unravelling, but through Dellard-Lyle’s words mothers are not alone, with each poem helping to mend and reinforce the rich tapestry depicting the reality of matrescence.