Lost in Motherhood

Too much? If you’re feeling like you already know more than is necessary about the workings of my genitals, I urge you to continue regardless. (Except you, Dad. If you’re reading this, chlamydia is a rare but very beautiful orchid. Don’t read the footnote, ’kay?) Think of it as an endurance test of sorts. I’m not sure what the reward is for enduring multiple descriptions of my innards, but still.

I blame motherhood for the need to over-share. I never used to discuss my vagina with anyone who wasn’t directly involved with it, and that was generally confined to my gynaecologist and my husband, and before that, a brief but distinguished list of men in their late teens/early 20s. And most of them didn’t discuss it per se, as much as compliment it or suggest it be better groomed.

But the minute my vagina was ripped open by a crowning head in a room of eight strangers, it became public property and my number-one topic of conversation. I took back control by talking about it to everyone, presumably so they’d get a fair idea of what it was like before they inevitably saw it. It’s possible I need therapy. Anyway, buckle up, there’s more to come. You’ll be able to draw a very accurate diagram of my labia by Chapter 7, and I urge you to do so.

Wait, why are there TWO lines?

Let me take you back to the moment the story really began. It’s 9.15am on 24 January 2012, and I’m at home in Hove, sitting on the toilet, staring down at the knickers looped around my knees. Tears are quietly pooling in the gusset. I have just seen two blue lines darken purposefully on a pregnancy test, where I’d have preferred just the one, and maybe a thumbs-up emoji. Because two lines mean, yeh, you are all kinds of pregnant. You’ve basically AirBNB’ed your womb; another human being is setting up camp in your innards. Your vagina is about to be split in two, then chopped up like mincemeat.

It was not the news I had hoped for when I planned to fit a quick pregnancy test in between breakfast and the start of my working day, writing about – ironically – whether it’s ever OK to ask a woman when she’s going to have kids, for the Huffington Post. It was off-topic for me, but since our wedding in 2010 it was all anyone asked me and it had really started pissing me off. I mean, sure, on paper, my husband and I were all set for the childbearing years to begin. But the assumption that as a married woman the next logical step would be motherhood irked me. I am a fully practising feminist so I’m not into the yokes forced upon our sex. But also I was still keen to prioritise spontaneous holidays and sleep. Oh, and my career. And I just didn’t fancy it.

Then I realised I hadn’t had a period since 2011, so when I popped out to get the paper and live yoghurt (in case it was thrush delaying my menstruation) I added a pregnancy test to the basket. There I was, midway through furiously tapping out this angry argument that ‘when are you having kids?’ was an entirely inappropriate question when I saw that the answer from me would be, IN ABOUT NINE MONTHS ACTUALLY.

My first instinct was to go back in time and nuke that errant sperm, ripping its microscopic little head off and dousing the remains with a shot of spermicide. I know, I know – I seem like such a maternal soul, why on earth would I not want to embrace this little miracle?

The truth is I enjoyed being an autonomous, self-obsessed, one-blue-line kind of person. I liked who I was. I liked our tiny flat full of sharp corners and bottles of rum. I liked my husband. I even liked my body. I didn’t want all that to change. Plus, I was about to start a new job which I had spent the past seven years working my butt off to bag (often for free): acting beauty editor at Glamour, a part-time gig so I could also start writing a book. It felt like I’d finally got to where I wanted to be.

Just the week before I’d been sitting in the pub with a group of girlfriends slagging off people with kids for invading our favourite brunch bar – the buggies skinning your ankles and the thoughtless amount of noise and space-invading stuff these women came with. The general gist was: mums are selfish and obsessed with their kids and lose all reason and ambition when they give birth. They moan and stop dyeing their hair. They don’t have sex anymore. They live vicariously through their kids, letting their own lives slip from the radar. They lose the will to engage with the world and crusade for what they believe in, unless it was #FreeTheNipple or banning junkies from parks.

I was fine with concealing my nipples and would a Brighton park even be a proper Brighton park if it didn’t offer a grassy knoll up to a junkie once in a while? I couldn’t join this gang now, swallow my words about not letting prams on commuter trains. Also, imagine not being able to have a sneaky smoke when you felt like it. What would I do with my right hand when there was a bottle in the left?! I did another test. Still pregnant. Fuck.

How can you become a mum and not lose your sense of self? I considered the examples of motherhood I had to go by. Kirstie Alley in Look Who’s Talking. Diane Keaton in Baby Boom. She had given up a kickass career to make apple sauce. APPLE SAUCE? I hate apple sauce. And how about Three Men and a Baby? What drove the mum to leave her baby at that weirdly massive loft apartment and flee when she could have stayed and asked Tom Selleck about his moustache? Plus, it took THREE men to keep said baby alive, by the way. It wasn’t just something I’d gleaned from Touchstone Pictures, though. A school friend of mine had got married and had a baby all before I’d finished university. The friend I’d danced up against on smoky dance floors, sneaking a Volvic bottle of vodka from my mouth to hers had a son, an actual kid that was hers. All I’d gleaned when I popped in before returning to the smoky dance floors was that she was hoovering all the time and seemed … dazed. Happy, but not like before. Different. Like a body-snatched kind of different. Not a happy I could understand because it revolved around nappies and a crying baby. Of course, it was love, but I was too self-involved to recognise that.

Wiping my pee-soaked fingers on a wedge of loo roll, I wistfully looked over at our wonky airer, where I’d layered T-shirts, thongs and a pair of leather trousers to dry. I was nostalgic for the moments before I found out I was pregnant and just chucked clothes about in ignorant bliss. Oh my God, I’ll never be able to have sex again, I realised. Mums don’t really have sex unless they absolutely have to, oh God! I kept checking the skin on my belly – the freckle, the barbell through my belly button. I didn’t want the freckle I’d looked down on forever to stretch, and no doubt the piercing would just come shooting out at some point, like a bullet. I’d have to give up my job, move house, shop in Mothercare. Suddenly all the framework for my independence was wobbling, teetering.

I cried hysterically, and wandered into our tiny living room, readying myself to call the baby daddy – currently at work – and tell him he’d made me pregnant. For a moment, I was the only person in the whole world who knew our lives had changed forever.

When he picked up, I gasped and gulped and snorted.

‘I NEED YOU TO COME HOME!’ I eventually shouted into my BlackBerry, snot and spit peppering the screen. ‘NOW.’

Silence his end.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked at last, his voice naïve, full of hope.

‘NO! I’m not very … well.’ I answer. I can’t tell him I’m pregnant over the phone, knowing he has an hour’s commute to survive, I think to myself, wait ’til he’s home.

‘Fuck, you’re pregnant, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘FUCK.’

The baby daddy

If this was a romcom, Rich would have rushed in and we’d sit together (in a much bigger room in a bijou flat, lit by twinkly fairy lights). He would smile as I cried fresh pretty-faced, snot-free tears, which were all down to shock and could be easily mopped up. I think my hair would be up in an artful topknot, tendrils cascading around my forlorn but very beautiful face. He would rub my back while telling me all the cute things we’d enjoy doing with our baby, his boyish excitement spelt out by a grin and sparkling, earnest eyes. He’d sell me a lifestyle of scooting to the park, baking cookies, swimming in lakes, handing every full nappy to him, until my crying turns to laughter and we smile at each other. This little wobble would be tied up nicely so nobody would worry, everyone would know I do really want my baby – of course I do – and a happy ending is around the corner. Nobody wants to think of an unwanted child! That’s a horrible proposition! It’s possible a Beach Boys’ song would accompany the end of the scene as we are holding each other, as trepidation turns to joy. It’s all going to be fine!

Instead we perch on the edge of our new sofa, he puts his head in his hands and neither of us talks until the sun has set so low someone gets up to switch on a light.

I met Rich several times before I met-met him, because, I argue now, I wasn’t ready for the onslaught of love and feelings. I was helping out with the Mr Nottingham University pageant, which he entered, and had a boyfriend at the time, so I wasn’t primed to see him as a prospective baby daddy. His special talent was to down two bottles of wine in under a minute, and then set his balls on fire. He also sang ‘Wonderful Tonight’ while stark-bollock naked, but I think I was in the loo at the time. I was introduced to him again at a party a month later, where he’d just had his head shaved for charity, but again I don’t remember it – not ready. I needed to fuck around a bit longer and flirt with my friends’ brothers, etc. When I did properly meet him, he annoyed and interested me, which is of course a fatal mix. He was one of four irascibly arrogant, attractive freshers who turned up late to Rag orientation, just as I was halfway through my speech as a committee member. I balled them out for it but took note of his blue eyes, cool glasses and the ridiculous way he was wearing two T-shirts at once. And while I publicly raged against arrogance, it basically turned me on (I was 20 years old, nowadays I just rage). Even though he was pretty direct, I could never tell whether he was joking or not. He was really funny, acerbic, incredibly rude and a showman, and I dug it. But once I’d made the first move (drunkenly standing on his feet, thinking I was playing footsy, and then just shoving my tongue in his mouth), it turned out he was also deliciously kind, sweet, clever and sane. Definitely not my type – I liked them dark, swarthy and mean – but it was a nice change. He was so level-headed and patient, which was comforting to a highly neurotic crackpot like me.

He’s from Barnsley and had only left the UK for UK-extensions, like Faliraki and Kavos. His ambition had been to open a cocktail bar OR fight fire (mainly with the view to nailing chicks), with no ambitions to go to university. His teachers thought otherwise because he was really clever, but it wasn’t until a friend’s father suffered a massive stroke that he decided to study physiotherapy at university, thinking he could be pivotal in the rehab of people like his friend’s dad. I know – whatta guy. Nearly 11 years later that’s what he does – helps people learn to walk again. He’s basically a good man with a questionable sense of humour.

We are the stereotypes of our regions in the flesh – I’m every bit the southerner his parents feared I would be (precious, fussy, always cold), and he’s every bit the northerner my parents hoped he’d be (calm, stoic, economically sensible).

He’s got lips like Tom Hardy and despite the fact he has mousy-brown hair, is convinced he’s blond. He’s got a dead tooth up front where he flipped over the railings inside a double decker bus with a beer bottle between his teeth. He has a broad but soft Yorkshire accent, and swears in a southern accent – a hint that perhaps he didn’t swear at all before he moved down here. He’s always very good at everything, even if it’s his first time. From table tennis and playing the ukulele to useful things like building a shed and card tricks. He’s a bit tight; slightly sloppy when drunk and when he buys something he has to check its price remains the same online in the weeks afterwards. He’s kind, quietly and understatedly. Kids love him. Everyone loves him.

I’d had boyfriends before we met at 20, but I’d never felt this genuinely worshipped, and it made for a heady end to my second year at uni. One time we staggered back from a night out and there was a sign on the old fridge which my landlord had dumped in the front garden, saying to ‘look inside’. He had filled the whole thing with cheese, massive blocks bought from the cash and carry, like gold bullion in a safe. It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for me. When I graduated, I continued to go up to visit, and when he graduated, the following summer, he moved down to Chichester to my parents’ house. When we both got jobs – his as a physio and mine as a writer – we moved to Brighton, where we’ve been ever since. He is still the anchor that keeps me sane but also laughing until I pee, and although he is nearly a whole year younger than me, he is always the more emotionally robust of the two of us. I often look to him for a measure of a situation, when I don’t know what to think. So the fact that he wasn’t jumping at the news was making me even more nervous. It’s his baby too, and he’s more worried than me.

Proper weepy

The next day, after dreaming about growing phantom babies that were actually kittens, I wondered if maybe the problem was that my husband is so laid-back and rarely visibly excited (I blame his northern upbringing) that I just hadn’t been buoyed along yet? Maybe I need to seek out the joy, absorb it like osmosis from someone who will be really excited. So I hopped on the train to see my mum. I placed the two positive pregnancy tests on the table, and predictably enough she squealed with joy. I was banking on her reaction making me feel happy but the bitter tears came again, the inexplicable sadness. I couldn’t say those words – I AM PREGNANT – without sobbing.

‘I’ve saved all your Sylvanians, darling!’ she says, as if this would steady my nerves.

She realised the escalating price of toys wasn’t the problem, and held me for what seemed like hours.

I dodged calls from friends, came off Twitter and I put on my out-of-office. I told Rich I wanted to be sure how I felt about it before I dealt with how other people felt about it. Deep down, I think I wanted the option to back out of the pregnancy, but also because in telling people, they would start seeing me differently too. I didn’t want people to start vying for my job or friends to discard me on the pregnant pile. I shut myself away and didn’t deal with it at all. Until my body forced me to deal with it.

I’m just like Kate Middleton

I was back at my mum’s a few days later when I was suddenly punched in the throat by a wave of nausea, which never let up. I crawled into bed and there I stayed.

‘Oof. Oooooof, oooooof. Oof,’ was all I could say. Almost the French for egg, interestingly, seeing as it was an oeuf implanting itself in my womb and causing me to feel like I could fill a stadium with my hot, sour vomit.

The early symptoms of pregnancy are the first hint that you are slipping from your own narrative. You hand over your body and mind to your baby and to everyone who has an opinion on how you should look and feel. For me, it felt like my body was turning against me, like the priority was already switching from me to my baby, who as yet was just a cluster of cells. My body changed in a flash; I had lost control already. As I was at my mum’s when this tsunami hit, there I stayed. It was insane! My every cell vibrated with the need to vom and that sappy taste sat on my tongue like an oyster. My mum wedged halved Cheerios between my cracked lips so I wasn’t starving her grandchild, but otherwise I didn’t eat and I would spend up to 10 minutes trying to swallow a single mouthful of water.

It wasn’t just the mornings either – it rolled through my body 24 hours a day, waking me from sleep. I couldn’t escape it. Lying down, sitting up – it was all like riding a rollercoaster – and I couldn’t read or focus on the TV to distract me.

My acute sense of smell meant that I knew Rich was entering the house before I heard him. His aftershave, his breath, a cigarette he’d walked past that morning – it was all burning the hairs out of my nose, making me hate him. Hate him! This prick with a penchant for pickled onion Monster Munch was clearly out to piss me off.

‘YOU HAD A KFC, DIDN’T YOU? ADMIT IT! YOU SELFISH ARSEHOLE!’

Weirdly, he stopped asking me how I was feeling about the baby around then. And with my mum hovering like a nervous nurse, wringing her hands and counting Cheerios, it was easy to avoid the conversation altogether. I think he assumed I would be dead soon, anyway.

I felt so weak and so sad now; the need to stay in bed and sleep was overwhelming every other thought. This is what depression feels like, I thought one morning as I considered changing my pyjama bottoms but instead rolled over, a fresh wave of nausea drowning me under its sour wash. I had experienced brief pockets of depression in my teens, so I knew the familiar heaviness, the consistently tear-filled throat. Looking back, I definitely suffered from antenatal depression. It felt bottomless and constant.

It was pulling me under and away from decisive action, stopping me from making a plan to surface again and change. Suggesting anything as definitive as an abortion at this point felt too deliberate and I was wrung out, not capable of lifting my head from the pillow. I definitely thought about it. I was adamant I did not want to be a mother. And the craziest thing? I couldn’t tell anyone how I felt. Because the first thing a mother is expected to be is loving and grateful.

When I read about postnatal depression I felt a bell ringing – I’ve already had that, I thought, that’s how I felt as soon as I found out. Now I go to the PANDAS Foundation UK website and see that as many as one in 10 women will be depressed in pregnancy. As a clinically recognised diagnosis it is only about 20 years old, perhaps because the effects of pregnancy can make the most robust of women feel shit. The painful tits, the dizziness and breathlessness, the nausea, the realisation that your only source of support is a total bellend who can’t ball his own socks let alone care for a baby. But it can also be down to a hormone imbalance: levels of the hormones oestrogen and progesterone increase during pregnancy, which usually results in that ‘bloom’ women are supposed to enjoy as they gestate. But according to PANDAS, sometimes the placenta doesn’t produce enough progesterone, which can lead to chronic anxiety, incessant crying, lack of energy, isolation … yes, yes, yes, and hell, yes. Had I known this, I could have asked for help. But I assumed it was all part and parcel of me being such a bad potential mother.

Every outcome seemed wrought with sadness – having the baby, not having the baby – as I sunk lower and lower.

After years of routine smears finding those pre-cancerous cells you’ve got to have fished out from your cervix, I had a gynaecologist. It sounds grand, doesn’t it? – ‘MY GYNAECOLOGIST’ – but actually, it was the grim reality of having the suspect cells. I no longer needed to be referred by my GP, I was a regular at the salon-de-speculum. Anyway, when my mum eventually decided I wasn’t peeing often enough, she took it upon herself to call this gynaecologist (did I mention she was also my mum’s? YEP, we have the SAME gynaecologist) to ask her advice.

‘Bring her into the hospital this afternoon – I’ve got a clinic just outside the antenatal unit, I’ll squeeze her in.’

Perks of having a terrifying vagina, guys! Straight in! I was pulled from my bed, whimpering, refusing to put on clothes.

‘Could you just breathe through your nose?’ I asked my mum, tsking her appalling breath, as she drove me to the hospital, my neck craning out of the window like a dog.

‘Yes, you’re definitely pregnant, Grace, congrats!’ the gynaecologist crowed, as the transvaginal scan revealed a tiny, peanut-sized lump lying in my womb. ‘And there’s only one baby, great! I was worried about twins or triplets with the way you’re feeling,’ she qualified, cheerily.

‘Yay!’ I whispered. I cried quietly as she ran through all the brilliant things about this baby – the scan was showing it to be the perfect size, the placenta was on track, it would have a September birth, which is excellent … I mean, what fucking brilliant news, September you say? I’m so pleased that this foetus will most likely excel at school because it’ll be old for its year. Marvellous. But now what about if it was born in 2020? Because I think that might work better, actually? When I feebly mumbled I was scared for my vagina, she assured me that the vagina could be stitched up like any other battered body part – ‘it might actually be better afterwards’, she said, winking at my husband.

Then my test results came back and it turned out my ketones – the acid that remains when your body burns through its own fat because it has little else to burn for energy – were really high. Like, anorexic-in-hospital-for-a-feeding-tube high. So they decided to admit me, put me on a drip and try medication for the nausea.

I was officially diagnosed with Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG), which once Kate Middleton was diagnosed in 2012 became all the rage. Back then, I’d never heard of it. It’s a condition affecting 1 per cent of women suffering with sickness in pregnancy, according to Pregnancy Sickness Support. Symptoms include hardcore pregnancy sickness which could actually harm you and the baby, if left untreated. So if you took pregnancy sickness and gave it some crack and some Red Bull and said, go to town on that woman’s gag reflex, bitch, that’s it. The causes are unclear, but I suspected it was thanks at least in part to the fact I wasn’t that up for having a baby right now.

I felt like a massive failure, taking the drugs. Mainly because I hadn’t considered the risk to the baby until my mum had piped up. But also because my body – according to the doctor – needed the drugs. If I didn’t get a handle on the nausea, the pregnancy could end anyway.

It looked and felt as though I was dying. The nausea might last the entire nine months, said the gynaecologist, but they could make my body a bit more hospitable for the baby. Wait, why is nobody seeing what a terrible idea this is and suggesting it would be safer to end the whole debacle? I have very narrow hips. I silently begged them to find a medical reason we had to abort, using just my eyes. Which of course didn’t work. I wanted to talk to Rich, but he was ushered out with my mum so I could rest. It was as if he’d faded away from this picture altogether – it was just me being poked and prodded for signs of life.

When my mum came in to collect me the next day I stared at the TV, answering her questions with a grunt or a sigh. I was so cross with everyone who was meant to be on my side but had already sided with this new baby, who nobody had even met yet. I had been hospitalised! I had a cannula sticking out of my hand because the acid coursing through my veins would otherwise kill me! I am SO ill! Why is everyone congratulating me? I cried some more.

Back at home, my mum helped me shower and propped me up in her bed, facing the TV, just as she had done the last time I had puked Gallo rosé wine all over my own bed 10 years before. The drip had definitely taken the edge off and the medication was dulling the nausea so that rather than feeling violently sick with every breath, I could almost picture myself eating dry toast one day without heaving.

The best thing that’ll ever happen to you?

When you’re pregnant and feel ill-equipped, you say things like ‘What if I drop it or slip over and squash it?’ to your partner or your parents and they’ll hush you with platitudes, as if all those outcomes are impossible. Nobody’s going to suggest an abortion, no matter how scared you are. They might secretly be thinking, wow, she should NOT be having a baby, but they’ll never say it. Even my mum, who had delighted in the goriest details of my birth for the past 28 years, suddenly shut up shop on that particular theme, and just kept telling me that becoming a mother was the best thing she’d ever done.