Lost in Motherhood

That’s a pretty big statement, I thought. I appreciated the sentiment, of course – I was that baby that outdid every other experience she’d had to date – but … really? I mean, it was better than falling in love with my dad? Better than riding a motorbike in full leathers? She’d lived through some pretty incredible moments – first female prime minister, first woman in space, first computer, the advent of the NutriBullet … She’d nailed a dozen different careers, had accomplished so much. She’d seen friends beat cancer, she’d watched the Berlin Wall tumble down, she’d met Katharine Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman. She’d been a punk, a speed freak, an artist, an island-hopper – surely there must have been some serious highs in amongst all that hedonism? Before you had to ditch the Marlboro Reds and black coffee and rely on me – a jelly-mouthed baby with colic – for your kicks? Having a baby was the best? I hadn’t done nearly enough of all the other stuff yet, could it really eclipse all the other stuff I’d planned to do?

I realised I couldn’t have a straight chat with her about this – she was too deeply invested already, and she was One of Them – a mum. She couldn’t give objective or impartial advice on this. It felt like she was just full of massive Hallmark lies. And more lies: I was seriously ill but nobody would openly discuss the prognosis. I felt sure Rich and my mum were shaking their heads in the next room, wondering how they would raise this child together when I had died in labour.

Now, usually when I’d gone through something a bit shocking – an especially bad commute where there had been no free seats and I’d had to witness someone vomit into their briefcase, for example – I’d unwind with a little drink. I liked to sit on the windowsill in our bathroom, with a big glass of wine and very occasionally, a cigarette. I’d flop from there directly down into the bath and give myself a massive head rush from the combination of smoke and hot water (I’m actually a bit of a pussy when it comes to both of those two indulgences – I once passed out after half a Benson & Hedges at school). Clearly, cigarettes are a big no-no during pregnancy, but booze? Rich was adamant it was stupid to abstain altogether.

‘Have a glass,’ he said. ‘It’ll relax you and I’ve been reading up – it won’t hurt the baby.’

But the real kicker was that my body disagreed. The minute a bottle was opened I was overcome with the urge to throw up. The smell was unbearable. As was the smell of tea and coffee. And food.

So it seemed my body was actually siding with the baby now, too. It was coming round to the idea of growing a healthy child. Which was hard when all my comforts – reflexology, aromatherapy, sex – were being stripped from me. I got very dramatic when my mum suggested a hot bath might not be a great idea.

‘I read that if it’s too hot it could harm the baby. Plus the pH of your vagina is sensitive so bubble bath might irritate it, which is no good because you shouldn’t really take antibiotics.’

‘GOD, MUM! Is there anything I can do? Can I take a shit in peace or WILL IT HURT THE BLOODY BABY?!’

‘Just don’t push too hard, darling!’ she called after me.

I tried to slam the bathroom door and cursed its slow-close safety fixtures. Great for not smashing a kid’s fingers if you have one, not so much if it’s you who wants to throw a tantrum.

Neither my mum nor Rich would acknowledge the logistical flaws in this new life plan, either. Whenever I mentioned worries about how I’d continue to work and therefore pay the mortgage, my mum would say something like, ‘It’ll be fine,’ or ‘Well, there’s never a good time!’ If there’s never a good time, why the fuck do people ever have babies at all? I wondered. I’m pretty sure if I’d been suggesting buying a second house, they’d have some objections. But that was safely off the table because no mortgage advisor would be able to sanction such a thing. A similarly expensive investment by way of a baby? Shockingly, nobody’s doing risk assessment on that.

So I called my uncle. He is a very wise man who has self-helped himself into a pretty solid mental state, and is always called upon by every generation to give advice on money, work, relationships and dry wall. It’s weird because he’s never had kids, has never married and he works for himself, but I think it’s the fact he always seems happy and his irrepressible can-do attitude that makes him the ultimate agony uncle. You want to travel? Do it. You want to sell up and live on a barge? Why not? And so it was decided he would help this reluctant mother-to-be reconcile her Beyoncé-styled feminist stance on womanhood with impending motherhood.

‘I don’t see how this is going to change everything if you don’t want it to,’ said THE MAN WITH NO KIDS AND NO UTERUS. ‘I mean, you decide how you want to play it, it’s your kid. You and Rich are smart enough to make it work. Look how many women carry on working and socialising?’ He basically told me to Lean In. It was what I needed to hear.

‘I don’t even know if you have to move out of the flat – kids are small for ages, right? For now, just call your boss, sooner rather than later, and see what she says. If she’s adamant you can’t do the job, you’ll know and you can make a different plan. But it’s really her call, so find out and you’ll have all the facts.’

He was right, and in my head this handed at least an aspect of the decision over my future to someone else, which I liked the idea of. Yes, my boss could decide if the idea of parenthood was viable for us.

Rich finally made his way into an empty room and we lay together holding hands. He told me if this wasn’t the right time for us to have a baby we could discuss … the alternatives. Just like that, the unmentionable had almost been mentioned. There was something about laying it out like that, making it real, giving me the very real chance to say, I don’t want this, which set me free. It was all it took to make me breathe again. I thought about it. If I didn’t have a baby it would mean an easier ride at work, that we could plough on unimpeded in many ways. But for some reason, even though this pregnancy had seemed like the worst shock, it was softening around me. It seemed less of a doomed situation. I felt scared, and when had that ever stopped me from doing anything? I mean, apart from waxing my bikini line. I wasn’t ready to throw a baby shower and buy a cot, but I was getting closer to accepting pregnancy, which was easy since I couldn’t see or feel it yet. I asked Rich what he wanted, and realised he just looked truly knackered. He shrugged and said he felt it wasn’t the best time, and he was worried about my career.

‘You’ve worked so hard to get here to this point, and I know it’s hard to risk all that.’

‘So if I wasn’t worried, if I could carry on working, would you want this baby?’

‘I think there are so many questions though – how would we make it work? But ultimately, I guess we just would.’

He’s very good, isn’t he? Didn’t overtly lay the entire decision at my feet but didn’t commit to his own opinions either. He was just supportive and patient.

‘What about partying with your friends and your career, and what about the flat?’

‘Well, those things will be there whenever we decide to have kids, won’t they?’

I decided to try on a different hat for a moment. I’d never delivered this as good news; I’d rung him bawling my head off, after all.

‘Fuck it,’ I said, ‘Let’s have a baby.’

‘OK, bubs.’

He said later it was like a switch had been flicked inside me, some kind of maternal ignition or something. The mood had changed and he went with it.

So I decided to get my ducks in a row, starting with work. I plumped for an email because 1. I am chicken shit 2. I still couldn’t talk coherently, and knew for sure heaving over the phone was not going to help my cause. I’ve always hated that a phone call gives you the opportunity to talk in the wrong place, to stumble over your words. My boss replied – congratulations, I still want you for the job, we’ll see how it goes.

Oh! So it’s fine then. Huh.

It felt as if the final concerns had been washed away by this woman who couldn’t see any harm in me doing both – pregnancy and a job – so now I really had the chance to mould this situation to suit us. It felt like she was all, you can handle both – you can do it. It didn’t have to be the end of life as we knew it.

I carried on feeling sick, hopeful that I’d feel better at 12 weeks because I’d heard this was quite likely. I was counting down the days, either sweating under a blanket on my mum’s sofa or sleeping. Usually sleeping.

When I was 10 weeks pregnant, I had a bleed. Nothing dramatic but a definite red bloom in the gusset, sticky and ominous. I called the antenatal unit at the hospital and was finally put through to a midwife who was eating her lunch at her desk.

‘Nothing you can do, love,’ was her brusque summation. ‘It might be that you’re miscarrying but we don’t do scans this early on, so you’ll know at your 12-week scan. If you lose a lot of blood, call 999.’ And that was it. I might be miscarrying, I might not. It could all be gone in the next 12 hours if the blood continued to come and the little clot of cells fell out of me.

I felt that hot prickling around my hairline, a signal that my body was preparing to fight or flee. Interesting, I thought, I’m definitely not relieved. I am worried. I don’t want to miscarry, actually. The contrary brain had turned. The fragility of this baby came shrieking into my brain, and I felt protective. An hour or so later, I was reading the copy of What To Expect When You’re Expecting, which my mum had popped on my bedside table weeks ago and had sat there gathering dust ever since. I let them talk to me as if I was a happy, expectant mother, as if this was all part of the plan and I was now excitedly entering the second trimester. Suddenly, when it was suggested in real terms of life and death – that this wasn’t a fait accompli I simply had to come round to – I could feel something different. By not worrying about my identity, my career or my relationship, something else broke through … An instinct? I’d be the first to call bullshit on that – I hate the idea that we’re biologically structured to make decisions that will make us good mothers – but just as the antenatal depression and sickness had felt out of my control, so too this new acceptance and sense of calm came without a rational thought.

I just knew I wouldn’t miscarry. I knew this baby would come and although I wasn’t sure what would follow, I looked forward to that moment. Of course, I could very easily have miscarried and I’m astounded I didn’t. I am not a doctor, I know nothing. But the awful chemical reaction that was making me feel so hopeless and frightened seemed to slow, the hormones settled, and I was sure. I know, it sounds like I was properly crazy, and I was, but that’s hormones for you. Or at least, I hope it was the hormones. Otherwise I was/am properly crazy. I began to look beyond the immediate moment, just a little bit past it to the 12-week scan.

Oh, and by the way: I hate turtles. I hated getting up at 4.30am for our beach treks, I hated the smell when I had to dig down to help the little cretins reach the top, I hated the fact that you’d think they were dead, lodged in the sandy cavern, but then they’d suddenly flip around and spray sand in your face. I went on the trip to drink rum, meet guys and party with my friend, who had coerced me into including this turtle crusade in our itinerary so we had something to put on our CVs. I remember thinking, if these tiny creatures that everyone finds so cute are lost on me, I’m clearly NOT a maternal person in any way. But, remember: HORMONES.

* Am I a millennial? I suspect I’m too old. It’s loosely defined as one who reaches early adulthood in the 21st century, but I would argue I haven’t really reached adulthood yet.

† Just to clear something up (as that nice GP did with my chlamydia, thankfully) – I contracted this symptom-less disease when I was in my late teens. My boyfriend at the time, a lovely Catholic boy from the countryside, who waited patiently for months before having sex, was secretly riddled.

CHAPTER TWO

THE SECOND TRIMESTER/DENIAL

OK, nothing’s going to change. We are in control. We will be FINE. A baby is just us plus one.

A midwife calls me ‘mum’

The 12-week scan arrived and we sat alongside other women at various stages of pregnancy in a corridor outside the ultrasound room. We were back in Chichester because I hadn’t yet mustered the energy to leave my mum’s and go back to Brighton, it’s where Rich worked and my gynaecologist was right there. Without making any hard and fast decisions about how it would work when I was due to give birth, we had opted to register at this hospital, an hour’s drive from our flat.

A colleague of Rich’s waved at us – Rich, my mum and me – from across the room, his wife bulging at the seams, and thus our cover was blown. But it didn’t worry me now that we had a plan of sorts. Plus, we were a party of three – four, if you counted unborn foetus – so we stood out a bit. My dad was due to come but I wasn’t sure if it would be another transvaginal scan or not. Transvaginal is so not my dad’s thing, weirdly.

I still had trouble equating everything I felt with an actual baby – I felt like I had been hijacked, but possibly by some kind of government-funded scheme to secretly investigate chlamydia scar tissue in 28-year-old women. Not a bouncing baby. But the nausea had finally chilled out to a low-level feeling of crap, which I could thankfully eat through, so I was feeling better at any rate.

The midwife bellowed my name into the waiting room – cool, officially and publicly pregnant then, thanks, love. I was convinced that since I felt so inadequately equipped to become a mother everyone waiting probably thought I was too. I had this feeling that they all thought I was a young teen mum despite the fact that I definitely looked like a 28-year-old mum.

We went in and the nurse signalled to the bed while looking over my NHS-issued purple book of notes.

‘Now, if Mum could just jump up on the bed, and pop your jeans down, please.’ She was still looking at her notes, and so I wondered why on earth she would want my mum to pull her jeans down. Mum looked back at me with the same confusion, until Rich edged me towards the table. And just like that, this woman changed my name.

I felt like saying, Oh, actually, we’ve decided nothing’s going to change? Yeh, so just call me Grace. Grace is GOOD, thanks.

I really like my name. Grace is easy and singular. It’s what my parents chose and I love them very much. And so I love Timothy as well – it’s pretty much the only thing I have in common with my six half-siblings. It’s what I took into new schools as a little one, it’s the thing I still have from those days. In fact, other than a brief phase around eight or nine when I’d asked my parents to call me Olivia Graceland, I had always been called Grace. I didn’t qualify for nicknames really, because it’s not something that needed shortening and I probably didn’t have any strong enough traits to mark with a cool moniker. I didn’t even change my surname when I got married. As a journalist you work so hard to get it known, handing out business cards whenever possible, repeating it over and over so all and sundry know who to call back for another internship. I was by no means well known, but if I rocked up with another name all of a sudden, wouldn’t I be someone else? Wouldn’t I lose a key bit of myself, and potentially not be remembered? Rich had made a big deal of the ‘emotional emasculation’ in his wedding speech, but he was actually behind me on this. We hadn’t quite got to the whole what-will-our-kid-be-called? convo, and I had already decided I didn’t mind a bit if she or he was a Holmes. But anyway, I spent a bit of time thinking about it and explaining it, and now this stranger had changed my name in one swift move. I was officially ‘Mum’, despite the fact my child was a mere cluster of cells. I don’t even know why I’m defending this whole debacle actually – it’s my name, I want to keep it! End of!

Being referred to and introduced as ‘Baby’s Mum’ is as reductive as it gets. I mean, I am used to being introduced as something to place me in someone’s mind – so-and-so’s assistant, The Intern, Rich’s wife, Blonde Grace (at uni, I was one of two Graces, Boobs Grace and Blonde Grace) – but being called ‘Mum’ was a bit like being renamed.

I know it sounds like I was worried about losing my cool, but in all honesty, I was never cool. Anyone who mewls, ‘I used to work at Vogue!’ four years after they’ve left and relies on a knock-off designer handbag to help her be taken seriously in her industry isn’t genuinely cool or really that OK with her choices. BUT, I did have a sort of mask of cool perfected. I had some of the right clothes, I had focused on constructing this career that would take me to cool places where I would sweat profusely and wonder if I ever pronounced anything correctly. It was definitely a façade and I’m guessing the imposter syndrome was what was causing my upper lip to be perennially moist. It was a relief to go freelance and only have to maintain over email. But I did believe the last vestiges of anything resembling cool would trickle out of my vagina with the baby. Or, ideally, be delicately lifted from my insides by the surgeon who was performing the C-section I was fantasising about. Because I’d then forever be known as MUM.

And is it any wonder?! When do we fetishise or even celebrate motherhood in our vocabulary? When do we use the words in praise? In fact, my generation have advanced the field by adding the prefix ‘mum’ to things that are really rubbish, to really drive their naffness home. For example, ‘You’re such a mum’ – you nag, you worry, you piss everyone off, you big fat bore. ‘You’re so mumsy’ – you’re dowdy and dumpy and nobody fancies you. ‘Mom jeans’ – the ugliest fucking jeans known to man. They make your vagina look like a big ass and your ass look like a big vagina. FACT. ‘Mommy porn’ – 50 Shades of grammatical errors and submission-based sex. Yuck. I’ll take me some non-parent-related porn, thank you. ‘Mum hair’ – a really crap bob.* ‘Mum face’ – haggard, grey, tired-looking complexion. Probably teary. ‘Yummy Mummy’ – mum who makes a bit of an effort, which for me always had a whiff of the Readers’ Wives about them.

Sometimes ‘mothering’ someone can be kind of nice, but it’s 100 per cent sexless and non-exciting, and tends to be a way of gently pointing out you’re treating someone like a baby. Rather than being fabulous and dazzling, you’re patronising and basically suffocating another person.

So then, mums are tedious, past it and irreparably uncool. You are JUST A MUM. Nothing more than that, even though the ‘just’ suggests you ought to be. I sneered at the idea it would be the hardest job in the world, but fully believed it would be the most boring one. Once we’ve started to make progress on making BITCH and CUNT unacceptable, we’re going to have to explain ‘mum’ isn’t really such a hot diss. It’s just another way of reducing women, of dismissing and degrading them. And it totally worked on me.

Mums are parochial and stuck in the 80s – presumably because that’s where we’ve banished our own mums to. They’re subsumed by domestic drudgery, hoovering in the background of the real narrative, ready to cook or wipe a bum. They are overcome with tiredness and the shame of having no sexual appeal whatsoever. In fact, they have sex only to have more babies, surely?

My mum the wild child

It’s weird that I was so convinced by this depressing idea of motherhood, when my own mum wasn’t really like that. It turns out that although she and my dad had been trying for a baby for a couple of weeks when she got pregnant she still had the same pangs as me, worried about the changes she would be going through. Maybe more so, given that her own parents had split up when she was a child and her mum had never really recovered, dying of a broken heart when she was just 58, all her birds having flown the nest. My mum, in comparison, was a wild child. She didn’t so much dabble in drugs as body-slam herself full force into bags of speed and weed. She had a lot of sex with a lot of people. When she met my dad she was a theatre stage manager, working late into the night, partying hard and sleeping until the matinée started the whole cycle again the next day.

‘What did you do on Sundays?’ I once asked. She couldn’t remember there being any Sundays.

Then she met my Dad. She was in love. So in love that she – the least maternal person ever to walk the earth, she says – married him (even though he had six children) and decided to have a baby.

When she got pregnant her sisters laughed and her dad shook his head gravely. She’d been babysitting my baby cousin for a full 30 minutes when he’d rolled off the bed and cracked his head open on the floor. It was a terrifying prospect. But she quit the fags and coffee, got really fat and eventually bore me into the world.

She wasn’t like the other mums. She didn’t bake or sew or knit. She dyed her hair pink. I never thought of her as ‘mumsy’. She and my dad were considered ‘a bit showbiz’ by my friends’ parents, I think because they had a lot of gay friends and said ‘cunt’ a lot. They threw parties, were out every weekend and she was a force to be reckoned with – a strident feminist and purveyor of crude jokes in a village of doctors and accountants, all of whom voted Tory and sailed every weekend.

She never ‘settled’ in motherhood, she still thought everything could be bigger and better. With her on the PTA the school fete suddenly went from a little jumble sale to a gala for over 3,000 people with celebrity guests, hot-air balloon rides and a remote broadcast from the local radio station.

Mumness

So it was weird that I was really preoccupied with an image of mums cleaning floors and loading the washing machine – great work, advertising industry! Drinking insipid tea in front of daytime television with a worried look on your face. I think I got this from Neighbours or Coronation Street. I was also painfully aware I’d need to learn how to make gravy. That seemed important somehow.† ‘MUM’ was the refrain moaned by pre-teen boys in grass-stained football shorts or precocious girls with gappy teeth and pigtails. It was a word always whined or howled in my head.

Of course, it ended up being the most loved sound in my universe – when my kid first mumbled ‘mama’ it was like I’d discovered who I most wanted to be right there. So in the right hands, when it was her saying it, it was the most beautiful sound, like liquid gold. To be fair, she once called me a slut (having heard it on the radio, mind – nothing to do with me) and even that sounded bloody lovely. If I reduce it right down to its fundamental parts, it’s love: motherhood is love. So the name really has bugger-all importance. But back to pregnant me, who had no idea that would be the case.

I wasn’t even on Instagram back then. I didn’t have that group of women saying, ‘Look, you can wear neons and you can get shit pierced and take your kid to gigs! Look at our snazzy backpacks and our gin!’ Without social media, your tribe is whatever you have in front of you. And I was working in an industry where having a baby could end you unless you pretend like it didn’t happen. A baby in a sling was about as likely to win me work as suddenly admitting I had shagged the boss. Actually, less so, because most magazines wouldn’t want me to write about my experience of childbearing.

But then the cold jelly was dolloped onto my stomach, that weird barcode reader was pushed down hard and we heard the swooshing ‘thud-thud-thud’ of a heartbeat. I looked at Rich – Oh my God, are those tears in his eyes?! Is he … is he crying?! – and missed the baby coming into view. When I looked back at the screen it looked like a little puppet. It had the hiccups, according to the sonographer, and we watched as it bounced off its soft bed, limbs flailing like a little Thunderbird. It didn’t look biological at all, it was mechanical and cloudy, like really bad TV.