Lost in Motherhood

‘But I can’t feel it,’ I said, completely unable to see this image on the screen as a snapshot of my insides. Not like with a transvaginal scan, where you can feel the probe knocking your ovaries like a piñata. It still wasn’t a baby there on the screen, but it definitely looked like something which might grow into one. Rich was transfixed and I felt bad that I wasn’t bonding with the squiggly little creature that could have been anywhere. It was still sexless in my head, without an identity. But I took the picture they printed and tried to see Rich and I in the image. There was my long chin at any rate, but the long hooked nose looked like a little old man’s. I stared at the picture long and hard to try and see our future – this is our kid, I thought, this is our kid. This is Rich’s kid! I love Rich and this is his child, inside me. This is my very own kid … It didn’t really work, but I’ve never been very good at pep talks.

Then we left and went back to real life, away from this crazy world where we gazed into my belly, and pressed on with the present.

I nearly puke on Anna Wintour

When you’re pregnant you can deal in these diametric opposites quite comfortably as the future is all hypothetical and you can’t imagine not being in control of your own destiny. Moving on from the fear of a baby changing everything, I had resolved that it would change nothing. I don’t want to go to soft play or parks, so I just won’t! I thought, making a mental list of the things I didn’t like about childcare and so would just not indulge. I practised full-scale denial, thanks to the advice of mostly childless people and from reading books by women who had nannies, even though I knew we’d never be able to afford one.

And continuing as if nothing was going to change was actually completely possible during my second trimester, as my energy returned and the sickness calmed down. My belly started growing but the bump was still very much of IBS-bloating proportions and sometimes barely appeared at all. I hadn’t bought a stitch of maternity wear, I was working out the perfect anti-nausea routine in readiness for a return to work, and I was about to prove my theories and capabilities in the most sane way I thought possible: attending Fashion Week. Unfortunately, it would instead be the moment I narrowly missed vomiting on Anna Wintour.

To give you a bit of background information, when I left university I went straight to The Times as a fashion intern. From day 1 at the newspaper, I was hooked. I had a string of badly paid internships and quickly realised that to make the knockbacks and hard graft worthwhile I would need to become fiercely ambitious.

I eventually got a job at Vogue based solely on the fact that my boss at The Times gave me a good reference, and that I spoke Italian (which actually was not true).

Then a job as an actual WRITER came up at Glamour, where I stayed until I’d amassed enough experience to go it alone as a freelance beauty writer. I compiled a list of dream titles I’d try to write for, and at the very top was American Vogue.

So when Style.com – the sister site from the same publisher – asked me to report backstage at London Fashion Week the week I was diagnosed with Hyperemesis Gravidarum, I was like, obviously, yes. At the time they were THE authority on the shows, I’d be mad to turn it down. And if I stepped aside for even one season I’d be quickly replaced by someone who wasn’t inconveniently breeding.

It was just a shame I felt so sick.

I decided to keep my ‘condition’ top secret from those around me.

The first show was at the top of a very high, very glass building, and as I’d over-planned I arrived about an hour early. I stepped out of the elevator, into a vast warehouse-style room, with all the action focused in one corner of rails and pop-up hairdressing stations. I took in the view and as I swayed aboard my ridiculous 4-inch heels, my mouth began to froth. NOT NOW, NOT NOW! I reached for a cracker and scoffed it down like the Cookie Monster, spraying flecks all around me. Then the lift pinged again and out stepped La Wintour. Maker and breaker of careers. Editor-in-chief of the magazine at the top of my wishlist, the doyenne of cut-throat fashion-ism. On any other day, had I not left the top button of my jeans undone and just sprayed water biscuit down my front, I would have approached her. I knew it could be a terrible idea, for sure – she had a brutal way of dismissing people, I’d heard – but her daughter had interned with me at Vogue and I’d met her again on a trip not long after and she was lovely, warm and generous. I had an opener. I wanted it so badly. I wasn’t scared, I was ballsy.

I’ll just go up to her and be all, HEY, ANNA! I know your daughter! Super-casual, just one professional to another. So I straightened my shirt, smoothed my hair down. I got ready to make the ultimate career move.

But instead? I burped. Like, really loudly. Loud enough that the people to the rear of her entourage cloud turned around. I turned around too, as if to ask, WHO WAS THAT?! Then I lurched forward, stumbled backwards, and then hid behind a rail of clothes for the next 40 minutes, dry heaving.

Well, this is new, I thought. Not the dry heaving at work – we’ve all done the morning-after-the-Christmas-party-retch – but the complete lack of control and professionalism in the face of a potentially big career moment. Being pregnant was definitely jamming my work mode and it scared me – what if, no matter how much I try to stay the same, it would actually be impossible? It was so frustrating and terrifying to feel the bit of me that got my mortgage paid and fulfilled my ambitions was under fire.

I managed to write the reports and by staying away from the other beauty editors who would have known what was up when they smelt my acrid breath and the fact that I wasn’t stealing the models’ croissants, nobody was any the wiser. And I decided that once the morning sickness had completely stopped, I’d be able to continue unchanged. The fact is, I’d been in the room with Anna and co., I was still allowed in. I just needed to rein in the impulse to vomit.

We need a new nest

OK, so I was still adamant that nothing had to change. But one thing really did – where we lived. Yes, quite a big thing, actually. The flat that we’d scrimped and saved for, and made our mark on by way of two floating shelves and a new catch on the shower door, had to go. It had been perfect, pre-fertilised-egg – a living room with giant sofas that doubled as a large dormitory for friends to crash out in, and a windowsill over the tub, for stacking candles, books and the occasional bathtime sandwich.

The summer before I’d got up the stick, we decided to put the flat on the market because we thought it might be time to splash out on a garden of our own. Somewhere to drink coffee on a Sunday morning, maybe a box room I could make my office now that I worked from home. It sold at the first viewing (and that shower catch made us £15,000 – snap!) but we couldn’t find anything nice we could actually afford. We dawdled and ummed and ahhed, because we were under zero pressure – so what if the buyer pulls out, we don’t HAVE to move, and we’ll just get another buyer.

But at the end of February, as I entered my eighth week of pregnancy from my mum’s sofa in Chichester, our buyer finally threatened to pull out if we didn’t vacate within four weeks. Rich started to rush over to Brighton after work to check out other flats and back to me in Chichester each evening to endure my rants about his breath. One evening he arrived back from our flat, another bag of my clothes slung over his back, and slumped down next to me on the sofa. I didn’t mention his personal stank because he looked so broken. I’d basically been ignoring him for a month and hadn’t noticed how the commuting and lack of support was getting to him.

‘Look, we need a plan. Nothing new is coming up, we can’t afford anything suitable in Brighton. We have to be realistic.’

Nonononononononono!

‘I think we ought to start looking outside of Brighton. We’ll get more for our money. And I won’t have to commute as far, which means I’ll be back before the baby goes to bed. Brighton is not going to work for us, not right now.’

He’d said it. It was out there. Our life was going to change. But there was a caveat – NOT RIGHT NOW. Once we’d saved a bit of money, maybe we would be able to go back to Brighton, to a proper house. This wasn’t forever, this was for now.

‘And I think the most sensible choice is right here, because I won’t be far from work, you won’t be far from the hospital and your parents will be nearby to help out.’

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck! I’d no longer be the city girl, living a stone’s throw from her favourite bar, the beach and an ATM machine. I’d be back to where I started, back to bad phone signals, no nightclubs and a lot of fields. Back to socialising with my mum and wider family without having a cool flat and glamorous job to jet back to afterwards. Back to feeling gawky and isolated and frustrated.

‘OK,’ I say, in the tiniest voice, hoping he might not hear and we can just pretend this hasn’t happened. I have no fight in me, and I’m pleased that he seems buoyed by this decision at least. I can deal with the finer details later. At least I wouldn’t have to meet another set of midwives either, or try to navigate a new set of roundabouts, my bête noir as a driver.

My mum was delighted, Rich was grim, and I was escaping it all on Rightmove. It had replaced ASOS as my favourite virtual shopping basket. I was already changing, OH GOD, NO! Ooh, but wait, look, a double garage!

I was supposed to start my job in six weeks’ time, and we would have to have moved before that. And actually, there was a whole bunch of small houses – HOUSES – for the amount of money we’d saved for a one-bed garden flat in Hove. They were mostly new builds – small Tardis houses with boxy rooms and a manicured lawn of fake grass. Then behind door number four was a 122-year-old tiny cottage, with pink roses and a rambling garden full of wild flowers. We both had to duck as we entered and quickly calculated we’d have to ditch both of our sofas. The owners had a baby, so a metre from the main bedroom on a floor that inexplicably sloped and creaked was a tiny box room, barely big enough for a single bed, but already decked out with a cot and shelves of stuffed toys. My mum warned us off it – ‘It’s old! It probably has damp! And what about the sloping floors?!’ – and Rich scraped the skin off his scalp by head-butting the doorframe, but I was in love.

Rich was less keen.

‘There’s no room for our sofas. And what about the floating shelves, where will they go?’

‘It’s bigger than a flat though, isn’t it? And there’s a garden.’

‘Well, we wouldn’t be able to have the Wii out. It would have to go in a box or something.’

‘Um, OK. Or we could plug it in upstairs in the loft? Hey, you could have your own game room, bubs!’

‘Hmm … But what about my bar? Where would I put my bar?’

DEEP BREATH.

‘Rich, I’m not sure we can discount a house on the sole fact that your bar – which maaaaybe isn’t the priority when we have a baby on the way – doesn’t fit in. AMIRIGHT?’

‘Fuck.’

‘I know, dude. But … well, why don’t you build a shed in the garden and put your bar in there? It could be proper bar, then, couldn’t it?!’

‘Hmm …’

For Rich it was the realisation that we were settling down, becoming a family, but true to form, it took him 24 hours before he was immersed in the positives, excited about building a shed with a bar in the garden, and as we stood outside Boots with a bag of breath mints (attempting to continue to abate nausea), the estate agent called to say we’d had our offer accepted and would hopefully exchange in June. The next day I drove back to Hove with my mum, stopping en route to dry heave onto the hard shoulder, and put down a deposit on the first flat I viewed for rent, based purely on the fact that it was near the station. Currently occupied by a woman with cats, it smelled like cats.

It would be the stopgap between our old life and new, a quick commute to London until I could commute no more and would be hoisted into our new cottage, ready to hang up lines of tiny baby-sized washing and start puréeing apple sauce. I could take the stack of magazines we used as a coffee table and our collection of novelty shot glasses, it could still feel like home. Sure, we’d have to pay rent and a mortgage for two months, but we would otherwise be homeless. It was all coming together and I had two major projects to occupy the part of my brain that would have otherwise freaked out about the baby. It was still half a year away – no biggie. I helped pack up our flat (well, I lay on the bathroom floor, shouting instructions to Rich), and although I felt those glum feelings returning – we were essentially packing up our youth and independence into those boxes – I focused on the immediate future: an exciting new job and a slightly briefer walk to the station in the morning.

The fabulous thing about moving while pregnant – which we would do twice – was that nobody wanted me to do anything. I went a bit peaky, fetching sandwiches for lunch, and all the removal men stopped what they were doing to pep talk me into sitting down. Rich rolled his eyes as one of them picked me up and put me on the one remaining chair they’d left in the middle of the now-empty living room. Sweet.

Rich and I went to a swanky fish restaurant that night.

‘This is the new us, bubs – OK, so maybe no to nightclubs, but this is really nice, isn’t it? We’ll go to nice restaurants and widen our culinary horizons! We’ll be fine, actually, won’t we?’

He nodded, as he poked the skeleton of his sea bass, wondering which bits he could actually eat.

Bloated yet professional

Finally, we were installed in our new flat and the day arrived – I was to begin my new job at Glamour on a shoot day, interviewing the model Lily Cole while my beauty boss styled her and directed the shots. And it was like I’d never left. There was no mention of babies or morning sickness or the future. I was singing showtunes with the manicurist, wheedling Lily’s favourite lipstick out of her when all she wanted to discuss was her work for Greenpeace, and fingering a rail of glitzy threads I could never afford. I WAS BACK. It was familiar, it was comforting, and it was work.

Nobody knew I was pregnant, of course, and I wondered if the information about my expectancy would be announced officially or would drip-feed down from the higher echelons. It’s the latter, and one by one, startled staffers came by my desk when my boss was out to hiss, Is it true?! One wasn’t convinced, even when I showed her the shape of my belly under the massive shirt I was wearing.

‘Yeh, but your boobs haven’t got any bigger, though, have they? They’re still really tiny.’

Always a pleasure chatting with that one.

I called on an old colleague from Vogue one lunchtime and she helped me navigate Topshop’s maternity section. I was finally kitted out and my belly was no longer covered in livid red indents from my savage jeans.

Work was a true sanctuary, and even as my bump swelled and became more noticeable, the team mostly ignored it as per my request and I was not once sidelined. In fact, when I was five months pregnant, my boss assigned me two trips: one to Paris to interview Natalie Portman and just before that, one to LA to launch a new shampoo. I know that sounds ridiculous, but yes, we were flying to LA in order to sit around a table in a conference room and discuss a new shampoo. I said yes to both without hesitation, calling Virgin on my boss’s request to check I would be OK to fly. All was approved and I was off to LA!

On the morning I was due to fly to LA, I woke up at 5am, worrying I’d miss the alarm, so when it went off I sprung out of bed and started busying around the bags. Rich lifted his head sleepily, reached for his glasses and stared at me.

‘Oh God, what?’ My hands immediately jump to my belly, thinking it’s probably ballooned overnight.

‘Have you … spilt something? On your … tits?’

I looked down at my white T-shirt. Two little yellow splodges sat right where my nipples nudge the cloth.

‘What the fuck?!’

It was like a watermark on silk, a ring of yellow syrup. Actually it was more like pus.

I ran into the bathroom, squeezed my nipples and all of this thick yellow mucus dribbled out. Of course, now I know this is a natural process – it’s the colostrum gathering ready for your baby, and actually it would have been worthwhile trying to ‘harvest’ some of this nectar. But I was horrified. Pus tits?!

Other than the fact I had to stuff my bra with the hotel’s complimentary cotton pads every morning, LA was GREAT. Without Rich or my mum there, I could completely deny the pregnancy was taking hold of me. I was in a fabulous hotel with fabulous people, none of whom were parents, and I didn’t really even look that pregnant. I didn’t get jet lag, which was awesome, and by not drinking I felt pretty fresh, actually. My belly had grown while I had been in LA – possibly because of the travel-related water retention, but either way, it got bigger.

I still didn’t feel pregnant, just bloated, but I got slightly panicky about the changes. No going back now, it was happening.

Weeks later, I was in Paris.

Natalie Portman: [passes a beautiful hand over my belly, which is bigger because I just ate a burger while waiting for her] ‘Oh, my! How far along are you?’

Me: ‘I think, like, about five months? But I’m not really sure actually, because I think I got pregnant on New Year’s Day, but there’s of course every chance it was before that and my dates are all messed up because I can’t really remember when my last period was, you know? I mean, it’s possible I just got that wrong, but that’s all the doctors seem to be bothered about and I don’t know when it was, I really don’t. Plus, my husband and I weren’t together for Christmas so we obviously hadn’t really had sex between, like, 15 December and 1 January, that’s two whole weeks! So yes, I’m not really sure.’

Natalie Portman: ‘… OK!’

And that was the last time Glamour sent me to interview a celebrity.

The gender reveal

You get two scans as standard during the second trimester, and at the 20-week scan I actually began to accept this was happening. We had decided to find out the sex of the baby at this scan. I’d been trying to look for signs that it would be a girl – three magpies, SCORE – and was actually pretty desperate not to find out she was a boy. Why? Because the only way I could get my head around having a kid was to imagine it would be like reliving my childhood, which I really enjoyed first time around. And if I had a boy, that would have been my last comforting lie to myself shot to shit.

‘We don’t look for the absence of a penis, now, we can usually see labial folds when it’s a girl,’ the midwife explains, as she presses the ultrasound into my guts.

But as we pretended only to care that the baby was healthy and well-formed, I yelped when the midwife announced:

‘There’s a vagina. I think. Labial folds. I think that is a vagina.’ The baby kept crossing her legs – modest.

‘Don’t go buying everything in pink, now – this isn’t a definitive answer,’ cautioned the midwife, but still: A GIRL. And then she said, ‘And here is your daughter’s face.’

I felt a connection, at least with the concept of what was inside me being a baby. My daughter. Not some weird stomach bug or an alien creature I had no affinity with whatsoever. It was my daughter. She had lost the hooked nose and chin, and looked quite like a baby now, although I still couldn’t feel the movements we saw inside me before. But there it was – I was going to have a daughter. She would be a girl and then a woman.

Rich and I agreed to keep the sex to ourselves. I was gagging to tell everyone, but he wanted to keep something back to surprise our families with so I agreed. I mean, I told my mum, my best friend, all my colleagues and a woman at the bank, but otherwise, it was absolutely a secret.

The nest is a nest for VERMIN

Things with our stop-gap flat started to go quite wrong as spring turned to summer. The line of woodlice marching across our kitchen doubled then trebled and eventually became an infestation. The landlord was all, ‘Oh yeh, they’re so annoying, aren’t they? Hey ho!’ I couldn’t stand on them because they looked like they might be a bit crunchy so I spent hours every day scooping them up using Rich’s driving licence, which I kept by the back door for this purpose.

The flush stopped working in the toilet, and the boiler cut out every other day. It was always cold and our clothes never dried.

Then one day I started to feel really ill while I was waiting for my train home. Sick, shivery, aching all over, like I was either going to puke, shit or die. I called Rich, who drove to meet my train at the station and took me home, where he put me to bed.

‘It feels so cold,’ I moaned as I fell into a fitful sleep. The next morning my throat was sore, my nose ached and I was breathless. Mum suggested I spend a few days with her so she could keep an eye on me while Rich was working. Rich and I went to throw a few things in a bag and discovered every single pair of shoes in the bottom of our wardrobe was covered in a thick coating of green mould. Rich pulled the wardrobe out of its recess and it turned out the whole of the wardrobe’s back was green, too, with a swirling nucleus of thick white fur. That’s when I realised our bed was damp, not cold, and the floor felt wet and greasy underfoot. He began stuffing salvageable stuff into bin liners, organising the stuff we’d need to decamp to my mum’s again, and I watched him becoming a dad before my very eyes.

I was furious. Now, I probably always would have done so but what was interesting is how I kept referring to the unborn baby rather than myself as implicated in this gross situation. I got all my ducks in order first, calling the Environment Agency for advice on how to report this and how to handle our landlord. Then I itemised the cost of everything that had been ruined – furniture, clothes, the bed, mattress, shoes, bags – so I could provide a clear invoice to offset against our security deposit and the next two months rent, since I was NOT going to be spending a moment longer in that hell hole. Finally, I got him on the phone.

‘This is frankly untenable, and for the sake of my unborn child, I will not live here a day longer,’ I concluded. ‘I AM WITH CHILD!’

Well, this is interesting, I thought to myself, it seems my maternal instinct is kicking in. Either that or I’m just trying to guilt him into giving us more money. But it was the first time I had balled someone out for threatening the wellbeing of my kid.

So while we waited to move into our new home and our rental flat was being deep-cleaned, I was back at my mum’s and she was nursing me through a fresh bout of morning sickness, but I was still adamant: I will not lose myself, I will be different. I will remain ambitious, capable and when it comes, this baby will fit in around us, it’ll do what we want to do. I just need to get my body back, and then? Back to normal for us. Even my mum backed me up.

‘We just went out for dinner with you, you know, once I was upright again.’ She winced at the memory but quickly continued, ‘I mean, you just slept in your pram while we had dinner with friends, went to parties – you simply came with us. I went to Annie Nightingale’s flat once and shaved half my head.’

This buoyed me. Rich and I agreed to dine out as soon as the baby arrived. None of this ‘baby bubble’, lying around in pyjamas for weeks on end, watching Lorraine. We’d get out there, get amongst it. We wouldn’t have a single takeaway or frozen ready meal, and we would not get a microwave. Our new house would be a party house, always full of guests. We’d simply be US with a plus one.