by Suzy K Quinn
I especially didn’t want spinach for my iron levels.
The only food I could tolerate was yellow in colour and salted in flavour. I could stretch to orange/brown-coloured food like baked beans and tomato soup if it came in cans and promised to contain absolutely no natural vitamin content.
The midwife told me to eat what I fancied. ‘Your body will tell you what it needs,’ she said.
I suspected my body didn’t ‘need’ large Big Mac meals, cheese Doritos or cream-topped Starbucks creations, but I indulged heartily in these ‘cravings’.
The result? I gained shit loads of weight very early on, which made my lumbering cow of a body even more uncomfortable.
Far from my body telling me what it needed, it gave me terrible advice and made me feel awful.
My mother said ominous things when I got pregnant, like: ‘Oh – look out, you’re about to feel really ill!’ and ‘Ho, ho! Watch out for the haemorrhoids, sickness, diarrhoea and thousand other pregnancy symptoms that will turn you into a tired, grumpy invalid and strip away your youth and dignity.’
I didn’t pay much attention. What’s with all the negativity? Pregnancy is a natural process. It can’t be that bad.
Right?
Pre-pregnancy, I pictured my pregnant self the same as my non-pregnant self, except with a large, sticky-out, Mr Greedy stomach tacked on. Maybe having one tiny, girly vomit first thing in the morning.
Nature and I would work in harmony, navigating pregnancy symptoms with good fruit and yoga.
It didn’t work out like that.
Me, heavily pregnant and inappropriately sitting next to a beer can. I didn’t drink from the beer can, although I’m sure I wanted to.
#3 LIE – YOU’LL BOND WITH YOUR PARTNER MORE THAN EVER
When I first got pregnant, I was confident Demi and I could have a baby and carry on living in a big shared house with all our friends.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘We’ll have built-in babysitters. One big, happy, hippy family.’
I wondered why so few other people had kids in shared houses. Surely it was win–win? More love to go around.
Demi thought we should get our own place.
We argued about it.
A lot.
I told Demi he was being small-minded. He told me I was being naive.
After a few months of tired, miserable pregnancy, I had a horrible realisation.
Demi was right.
Our housemates were still living the no-kids, fun, party life. They were staying up late and being really loud. They were having fun without us.
The bastards.
I was going to have to swallow my pride and tell Demi we should move.
Ugh.
Demi was very good about it. He said he thought I might change my mind, so he’d been looking into places and noticed the downstairs apartment was available to rent. Should he schedule in a visit?
It sounded like a great idea.
The downstairs apartment was a little dingy and dark and hadn’t been redecorated since the 1960s.
It was part of the same house and called ‘The Granny Flat’.
I’m not joking.
Royal Mail labelled post ‘72 The Granny Flat’. The current residents told us they had terrible trouble explaining to digital TV providers that they didn’t need remote controls with extra-large buttons.
The Granny Flat, as you may imagine, boasted spiral-ring hobs that had two settings: ‘Off’ and ‘Bright Red I Burn Things’, a shower room with green mould on the ceiling and storage heaters that cost £50 a day to get lukewarm.
There were handles by the front door for wheelchair users and an old fridge that rattled like chattering teeth.
But it was all fine, right? Our own place!
All I saw was a huge bedroom that could fit both a double bed and a cot, plus our very own kitchen, complete with mustard-coloured tiles.
Luxury.
Who needs a functioning cooker and warmth when you have love? We’d make it work somehow!
Even better, we’d be downstairs from all our friends.
Built-in babysitters!
A ‘proper’ family home didn’t occur to us. In the city, entire houses cost a fortune.
It took all afternoon for Demi to move two suitcases of clothes, a few boxes and a bed down from our upstairs room. Yes. All afternoon. He kept stopping for tea breaks and chatting to people.
(Demi: ‘There were THREE flights of stairs! And I washed the bedroom walls with vinegar solution to remove the nicotine stains, on your instruction.’)
I couldn’t move anything myself because I was pregnant.
This was infuriating.
Worse, Demi objected to my complaints about his ‘slow’ pace, because he was doing all the work. He should have counted himself lucky that I didn’t pick up that USB cable he’d dropped and start cracking it like a whip.
After Demi (finally) moved our meagre possessions downstairs, I assessed our new living space.
Aside from the bed, we were short of furniture. Actually, devoid of furniture. All we really owned was a wok and a toaster.
Maybe we weren’t as grown up as we thought.
‘We’re nearly thirty and we don’t own enough possessions to furnish a home,’ I told Demi. ‘This is worrying.’
‘We own a wok and a toaster and a bed,’ said Demi. ‘If anything, we’re over-furnished.’
‘I’m pregnant,’ I insisted. ‘We need adult furniture. A TV stand. Coffee table. Knick-knacks. And a dining table. Everything is changing and I’m scared. I so desperately want some Stilton!’
Eventually, after a lot of arguing, Demi caved.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘We’ll get some more furniture.’
‘But we don’t have any money for furniture!’
‘People are always throwing stuff out around here,’ said Demi. ‘We can furnish our home for free.’
In the absence of a better plan, we decided to hit Freecycle and see what we could find. We also decided to keep an eye out for pavement furniture bargains. People in Brighton were always leaving free bits and pieces outside their homes for others to take.
A few days later, I found a solid-wood chest of drawers outside one of Brighton’s many identical Victorian terraced houses. It was in amazing condition and I couldn’t wait to get home and tell Demi about my free find.
‘It’s really lovely,’ I told Demi. ‘I can’t believe it’s free. And we really need a chest of drawers.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you keep all your T-shirts in cardboard boxes.’
Demi muttered something about ‘nothing wrong with cardboard boxes’, saying he’d had some of those boxes since he was eighteen.
I argued about babies and maturity and proper functional furniture.
Luckily, being pregnant, I always had the winning hand. Men are supposed to give pregnant women what they want; otherwise we go mental.
Our kind friend Alex drove us around the city until I finally found the chest of drawers again. To my delight, it was just as lovely as I remembered: solid-wood, varnished and glowing in the late-afternoon sun.
Perfect.
Thank you, cash-rich people of Brighton.
When we got the chest of drawers home and into the bedroom, I noticed the front of the drawers had a sticky quality to them. As if they’d recently been varnished.
‘Shit,’ I said. ‘You don’t think this was put out on the street to dry, do you? After someone varnished it?’
We looked over the item, which also had new sawdust shavings clinging to some surfaces and inside the drawers, as if someone had lovingly sanded it down quite recently. Perhaps today.
‘That makes sense,’ said Demi.
‘We need to put it back,’ I said. ‘Immediately. This is all your fault.’
‘But where did we get it from?’
We went back out to look for the house. However, in the maze of Brighton’s Victorian terraced streets, one house looks ver
y much like another.
‘We can’t risk leaving it outside the wrong house,’ said Demi. ‘That’s fly-tipping.’
‘So what are we going to do?’ I asked.
‘We’ll have to keep it.’
We still have that chest of drawers and would like to offer sincere apologies to whomever we stole it from. If your newly varnished chest of drawers went missing one sunny Brighton day, please email me and I will pay you for it. And sorry again . . .
With our basic furniture in place, it was time to think about baby equipment. We weren’t going to scour Freecycle or the good streets of Brighton for baby stuff – oh no.
I had that ‘new parent’ urge to make sure everything was totally safe and clean for our precious firstborn child.
A new baby is special and delicate.
(Demi: ‘I’d forgotten we were so obsessed with buying brand-new baby stuff. When it came to our second daughter, we were far less fussy. Everything was second-hand. Sorry, Laya.’)
The internet offered a handy ‘essential baby equipment’ checklist:
Baby bed, cot or crib (check this is European safety standard and measure distance between bars)
Mattress (you MUST buy this brand-new)
Swaddle (a controversial item, but babies like being bound up into little parcels – they sleep better that way)
Eight good-quality bottles
Breast pump (this will cost you a fortune and fill you with horror)
Car seat (check and test this BEFORE the birth)
Large pants (trust me, dear, you’ll need these)
Eight baby sleeping suits
Eight vests
Eight day outfits
We saved up and bought what we needed.
Supposedly, our home was now ready for the new arrival.
The huge white cot was wedged by our double bed, ominous and foreboding.
We argued about exactly where the cot should sit – to the left or right of the bed. Then we argued because Demi wanted to paint the bedroom alcoves Arsenal red. Then we argued about whether it makes any difference to put the milk in your tea before or after the boiling water.
(Demi: ‘It definitely does.’)
I had an uneasy feeling that, far from bonding over parenthood, Demi and I were in for a whole world of arguing and disagreements.
I was right.
Demi and me with wedding guest, brother Richie, at our Brighton Pier wedding. Demi looks thoughtful. Is he full of regret about signing those wedding papers? Too late! You’re now legally obliged to spend your life with me.
#4 LIE – ONCE THE MORNING SICKNESS HAS PASSED, YOU’LL FEEL BETTER
As I entered the third trimester, my body unkindly released a lot of crazy-making hormones. Along with feeling old and tired, I started doing out-of-character things like obsessively cleaning bits of the house that didn’t need cleaning.
‘You’re nesting,’ people said.
Ugh.
Was I becoming one of those girly girls who carried little puppies in their shoulder bags? If so, this was a very bad time. Surely I needed solid masculine logic to see me through the times ahead? But my body thought differently.
Soon, emotions completely took over. Logic left the building.
At seven months pregnant I was given three bags of second-hand baby clothes by my very kind sister-in-law.
According to the internet, ‘baby’ needed eight sleeping suits, vests, day outfits, etc.
Simple, right?
So all I had to do was sort through these clothes, extract the required outfits, then give the rest of the clothes away.
The old me would have got on with the job first thing in the morning and had everything in neat piles by 9.30 a.m., leaving time to get on with emails and writing projects.
But something had happened to my organised, logical brain. Mr Spock was long gone, replaced by a gooey, girly, pregnant woman whose heart swelled over all those cute little baby clothes.
Choose eight outfits? How could I pick only eight? What about those cute little newborn-baby baseball boots? Impractical, yes, since newborns can’t walk. But utterly adorable!
How about that little spotty summer dress – it’s just gorgeous. Yes, I know I’m having a baby in winter, but does it come in my size?
After an hour of sifting through clothes, struggling with the logical, efficient person I used to be and this new, sentimental, girly girl who had leapt out and started singing Judy Garland songs, I had a meltdown.
I phoned poor, long-suffering Demi.
‘I can’t do this!’ I sobbed. ‘There are so many clothes and I need to pick eight sleepy suits, but some have short arms and sleeves, and some have long arms and covered feet. And there’s some sort of bandana in here and a cowboy outfit. We don’t need a cowboy outfit. It’s not on the list. BUT I WANT TO KEEP IT, IT’S SO PRETTY!’
Hormones were attacking me. Stripping away my logic and competence, just when I needed those qualities most.
There was a girly girl inside, full of feelings and emotions. But I wasn’t ready to meet her yet.
Instead, I got Demi to choose the baby clothes (he dispensed with the cowgirl outfit. I shouted at him. He returned it to the pile) and threw myself into the obsessive preparation recommended by many parenting websites.
I cooked one month’s worth of meals in advance, piled up towers of newborn nappies and wet wipes and (bizarrely) scrubbed not only all the internal woodwork, but also the front door.
Having read a website about the danger of germs for newborn babies, I also went steriliser crazy, spraying chemicals all over the place. I googled carpet sterilisers (yes, they exist) before Demi stepped in with some much-needed sanity.
‘They had babies in caves years ago, didn’t they?’ he pointed out. ‘Caves have germs. You can’t sterilise a cave.’
I agreed that yes, I suppose they did have babies in caves once upon a time. But that was thousands of years ago, and I’m sure if rock steriliser existed back then any decent mother would have used it.
‘You don’t even care about germs,’ said Demi. ‘Remember when you ate that two-months-out-of-date Covent Garden Soup because you’d paid £3 for it and didn’t want to see it wasted? You said a few germs were good for you.’
Demi was right – I never usually worried about germs or bothered myself with the names and purposes of cleaning products.
But I wasn’t myself. The hormones were taking over.
I don’t know why they call this obsessive behaviour nesting – I doubt birds go mad for cleaning products or sterilise their claws.
It felt like a storm was coming and I had to stock up with supplies and batten down the hatches or risk being washed away.
Once the baby came, I envisaged Demi and me captive in our own home for those dreaded ‘first three months’. After that, I thought life would snap back to normal.
I really, honestly thought that.
#5 LIE – JUST BREATHE THROUGH IT
We’re a long way from nature these days, aren’t we? Have you noticed? In our lovely, climate-controlled little boxes, cars, homes, offices and trains, we spend a lot of our lives well clear of that cruel and uncomfortable beast they call nature.
You’re probably sitting in one of these boxes right now, I imagine. Unless you’re lucky enough to be on a holiday sun lounger by a swimming pool. In which case, have a beer for me.
Anyway, I have a theory about Mother Nature. I think she’s annoyed that we continually sidestep her wondrous planet of miracles.
‘Look, I made that beautiful forest glade for you,’ she’s saying. ‘And where’s my thanks? You want to sit inside a hunk of cement, consuming poor imitations of my life’s work. Sunny Delight orange-flavour drink? What IS that?’
But she gets her own back with pregnancy and labour.
‘You can’t sidestep this, dearie!’ (I’m imagining Mother Nature a bit like the wicked witch in Snow White here.) ‘You must accept your fate! Nature is pain!’
&nbs
p; Pre-labour, I was certain I would bypass the trauma of childbirth. Everything can be fixed, right? Solved. Controlled. As long as you put in the hard work and preparation.
There was a lot of information on the world wide web that suggested I could have a pain-free birth if I did things the right way.
Women do have easy labours, the internet told me. There were YouTube videos to prove it, and I watched them. Lovely, serene women dressed in flowing white robes, taking deep breaths in birthing pools.
I bought a book on hypnobirthing and reassured myself that human beings are designed to give birth. It’s natural. And nature designs everything very well.
Demi was called forth to help me design a birth plan.
There were so many lovely options. Almost like a wedding. You could have your baby in a big warm pool of water at home, surrounded by candles and your choice of music. It sounded delightful.
I couldn’t wait.
We (I) eventually decided to have the baby at home ‘where nature intended’ and piled up second-hand towels for the litres of bodily fluid that would apparently ruin our carpet.
I did all the hypnobirthing exercises from the book, practising deep breathing and relaxing and releasing. I frequently called to mind the charming hypnobirthing story of the Victorian woman who gave birth in a dank Victorian alleyway with no pain relief.
Plenty of women rocked this labour business and I would too. This was going to be a pain-free, easy-peasy experience – yes indeed.
Right?
(Demi: ‘At this stage, I already suspected labour would be difficult. One of my friends was a new father and had the thousand-yard stare of a haunted man. He described suction cups. Forceps. I’ve been in the Cypriot army. I know trauma when I see it.’)
I even told Demi, it’s OK. All I have to do is breathe properly and it’ll all be fine. No big deal. I’m tough. I got to the third round in that chilli challenge, remember? I only pulled out when those Carolina Reaper-coated tortilla chips gave me full-body convulsions.
I was looking forward to labour, actually. A bit of a challenge and/or completely pain-free.