by Adele Parks
‘There is no end in sight. When it finally does stop peeing and shitting, in that disgustingly dependent way, when it finally sleeps through for an entire night and perhaps even manages to say something cute, I still have to negotiate it through nursery and primary school, with all their associated horrors. Head lice, bullying, OFSTED and end-of-term reports.’ I fling myself back against the settee, nearly upsetting my teacup. Libby cautiously puts down the iron, but she doesn’t interrupt.
‘And which nursery school?’ I demand. ‘Or should I have a nanny or a childminder? And am I damaging this child if I go back to work? If I am, tough, because I simply could not stay in with it all day every day.’ I glare at Libby as though she personally has insisted that I should. ‘Which school?’ I yell, and if she were to suggest one right there and then I would take her up on it because, really, I don’t have a clue. A few ‘helpful friends’ and acquaintances have already telephoned me to say that it’s too late to put my name down at any of the best prep schools, as the places are all taken for the next million years. I’ve only just managed to restrain myself from screaming down the telephone line, ‘But it’s still a foetus!’
I’m exhausted.
Tired of trying to pretend everything is fine. Tired of having to pretend that it’s even better than fine. ‘Fine’ would be failure that I have to eclipse. I pause, reflect and then divulge, ‘I feel as though I’ve been exposed as the fraud I am.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not an eight, let alone a ten. I’m a five and a half.’
Libby doesn’t understand, so I explain that whilst I appear to be the epitome of self-confidence – appear is the operative word – I’m not a natural at anything much.
‘It isn’t enough to have a good job, a lover, a lovely home, great friends and a gym membership; suddenly there’s a new measure. I have to give birth without putting on weight and whilst repeating yoga chants, and then I have to nurture another Einstein without giving up the day job,’ I yell my frustration.
‘I think you are too hard on yourself. Who set these unreasonable standards?’
Who, indeed? Did I? Did Hugh? Did Becca, way back in 1987? Was it Hollywood?
‘Perhaps it would be wisest if you didn’t worry about the school at the moment,’ says Libby, dragging me back to the problem in hand, or at least to the problem I’m prepared to admit to. ‘One step at a time.’
One step at a time, what nonsense! I’ve always prided myself on my ability to multi-task. Although, recently, I’ve done nothing but drop balls. Libby unplugs the iron and starts to wind the cord around the handle. Then she moves a pile of freshly ironed clothes so that she can sit next to me. She squeezes my arm.
‘The thing is, as I’m going to be a mother I want to be a good one,’ I plead.
‘You will be,’ Libby assures.
I wish I could be as certain. I wonder if I can admit to Libby why my relationship with women like Penny is so complex. As much as it pains me to say so, I do admire Penny. In many ways she is exactly the type of mother I want to be. In other ways she horrifies me. Her eternal self-sacrifice is at once resplendent and repugnant. I do want to be the sort of mum that feeds her child homemade, organic, nutritionally balanced food. I want to take my child to ballet, tennis and French lessons (although not necessarily before it is three years old), yet this means that my life won’t be my own. I’ll simply be the chauffeur; constantly scheduling car runs to Tumble Tots and Water Babies. How will I ever have time to fit it all in? Will I ever moisturize my knees and elbows again? Then there are the teenage years when my child will hate me anyway, however much time and effort I have devoted to it. If it’s a boy it will become smelly, moronic and uncommunicative, and if it’s a girl it will undoubtedly be hysterical, anorexic and shrewish. Final insult to injury is that it will make me a grandmother.
As though she’s reading my mind Libby says, ‘motherhood is not all anxiety, uncertainty and defeat, you know. Far from it.’
‘What is it like, then?’
She pauses. Someone less serious would be able to answer this question very easily. They’d say ‘fantastic’ or ‘awful’ or ‘hard’ or ‘relentless’. But whatever answer they’d give would be over-simplified, one word, or perhaps one line. Or they might give me a cliché, because mums often describe motherhood by resorting to clichés. They say, ‘It’s changed my life’, or ‘It’s like falling in love.’ Libby doesn’t do either of these things. She picks up a KitKat, takes a bite and then stares into space; or she could be looking at the huge pile of laundry that still needs to be ploughed through. She takes a deep breath.
‘It is the most overwhelming experience I’ve ever had. It consumes my every waking moment, and, actually, a fair amount of my sleeping moments too. I have so much to say about being a mum that I am always tempted to stay silent. It’s an amalgamation of a zillion squabbling emotions: joy, rapture, satisfaction, fear, guilt, wonder, relief, worry. Especially worry. I sometimes think that I might be made physically ill with worry. Am I too strict? Not strict enough? Am I teaching her wrong from right, and who am I to make the distinction? Will it matter anyway because possibly something unimaginably ugly will happen to her –’
‘Libby!’
‘I know it’s awful just letting the thought flit into your head, never mind articulating it aloud, but it does come into every parent’s head. The fear of cracked skulls, broken bones, broken hearts, and so much worse. And sometimes I want to collapse with the weight of my fears and responsibilities. I want to crawl under the duvet and let someone else take over. Of course there isn’t anyone else, so I can’t, and besides which I only have to look at her and I’m’ – Libby searches for a particular word – ‘renewed. She’s my reason to live, but more than that she’s everybody’s reason to live, even for those people who have no idea of her existence. She is the future.’
I stare at Libby, wondering if she’s joined some mad cult, but she looks just the same. Slightly frazzled and pretty. Does she think Millie is going to be the first female President of the USA? I mean, she’s a bright enough kid and I don’t want to burst the bubble, but there’s the small question of the passport.
I realize that perhaps I’m on the wrong track when she adds, ‘Aren’t they? Children? The babies we bear, not just mine or yours but all of them, they are the sum of everything and everyone that has gone before and here they are, our future. There’s renewed hope and possibility in every one of them. I suppose, thinking about it, I do occasionally miss a spontaneous trip to the pub but I don’t hanker after it. And if I make myself remember, then, yes, the labour was painful, the sleepless nights were irritating, but with all that I still wouldn’t change a thing. Fact is, giving birth may seem crappy and disturbing now, but I can guarantee that you’ll think it is the best news in the world fifteen seconds after the afterbirth slithers out. It’s not orderly. It’s messy and complex but it is beautiful and amazing, too.’ She rolls the KitKat wrapper into a ball and tosses it in the direction of the waste-paper bin; it misses. ‘that said, sometimes I could scream because she’s asked me just once too often why she can’t have another ice cream or Barbie doll and I think I might kill her, and, for a second, I hate, I’m so tired.’
‘You hate her?’
‘Not her, I just hate. But mostly she’s about joy. An indescribable, unrepeatable splash of colourful, wonderful joy.’
As I walk home from Libby’s her words swim around my head. She made it sound so simple. A baby being ‘the best news in the world’. A baby being the ‘reason to live… everybody’s reason to live… the future’.
So simple and convincing.
Even though it’s drizzling I’ve decided to walk a few Tube stops; I could do with the fresh air (or at least London’s apology for fresh air), it might clear my head. I don’t bother with my umbrella but let the rain fall on to me. I’m aware it’s full of pollutants, but it still feels symbolic and cleansing.
I’m all mixed up. Par
tly because I don’t understand what Libby is on about. Partly because I do. A ‘splash of colourful, wonderful joy’. Colour? Which colour? Thinking about it, there’s not much colour in my life. Traditionally, I’ve always worn black; after all, I was a student in the late 1980s and my career is in advertising, so what other colour is there? I did flirt with the whole brown/purple/grey-is-the-new-black thing – that happened towards the end of the last decade – but Hugh brought me back down to earth and reminded me that black is the one true classic. My flat used to be decorated in a dozen subtle tones of mauve but I painted it in a dozen subtle tones of brown when Hugh moved in. I couldn’t expect a man to live with such girliness. To be honest, neither the sludgy mauves nor the sludgy browns could be fairly described as colours.
A huge canary-yellow street cleaner trundles past, spraying and splashing puddles left and right. Pedestrians grumble and swear as their coats are drenched, but I start to laugh. Even though I got sprayed too. I know that in the past I’d have been screaming and cursing. My blood pressure would have been soaring. I’d have already been calculating how and when I could change into another pristine outfit before anyone saw me in such a state. In fact, I keep spare clothes at work just for this type of crisis. But today I simply laugh and brush off the worst of the spray from my coat because it’s not the end of the world, is it? So I’m a bit grubbier and damper than I was a few minutes ago and I don’t look quite so perfect. I’ve lived to tell the tale.
I think I’ll paint the nursery canary yellow.
Then a double-decker bus flies by too, drenching me for a second time.
Yellow and red.
31
Since Libby’s description of children as our future (I’m sure I’m paraphrasing to the detriment of her beautiful speech in favour of a fairly obvious, tacky song – but you know what I’m on about), I’ve started to allow thoughts of what this might be like. Beyond pregnancy, to when I am a mum. A mummy. A mother. Someone’s mother. My baby’s mother.
And I’m so excited I can hardly think.
Yes, I’m fat, but, now that I’m so fat that I’m beyond help, I’ve decided to surrender and that feels good. So good. Now when I wake up on a Saturday morning and it is past midday I do not feel guilty about the depths of sluggardly behaviour I have sunk to. Because sleeping is good for the baby. It makes a nice change to lie in bed and do absolutely nothing. I no longer believe that Saturdays have to be spent reading the papers to keep informed. Or visiting farm-produce market shops to buy cheese, the fishmonger’s to buy bream or cod, the Italian deli to buy sun-dried tomato and rosemary bread because Hugh hates the ‘processed muck that all the supermarkets churn out’.
I no longer feel guilty when I fail to run six miles or swim thirty lengths. Total surrender to my body shape feels like an honourable discharge. I embrace the freedom of eating what I like, because eating is good for the baby. Each mouthful of previously forbidden food feels like I’m sticking my fingers up to the blokes on the building sites who torment you if they do whistle, insult you if they don’t. Have you tasted chips with salt and vinegar, eaten from a bag? I mean, really tasted? Not just gobbled them down, guiltily, hardly allowing their fat, squishy gorgeousness to hit your taste buds. But slowly chewed them, luxuriated in the burning crispiness of the outside and then creamy corpulence of the inside. You should do.
I’ve grown so large that I’m invisible. I’ve vanished off the fashion-despotism radar screen and I feel liberated. It no longer matters if I’m wearing the very latest shade of black, in the very latest length. As a child I always thought being the invisible man would be rather fun, and it is. It allows you to arrive late and leave early from the office, it allows you to sit out of strenuous exercise (including sex) if you so choose, and it allows you to dawdle around supermarkets.
I still have piles, which are excruciating and a humiliation, and I’ve got odd patches of funny-coloured skin on my stomach but, as I’m invisible, only I know this.
Instead of resenting the pregnancy and regarding it as a reversal of everything I’ve spent almost the last fourteen years trying to achieve, I’ve started to consider the possibility that I was trying to achieve the wrong things. I’m beginning to accept and, on occasion, actively enjoy the pregnancy, because after all there’s no other way to a baby, is there? And I so want this baby.
BANG.
I have turned gaga. I have become obsessed. It’s happened to me. I show people the baby scan, I tell them when it kicks me, I talk about my plans to breast feed – it’s official, I am captivated. I go back to my maternity books and read them all over again. How could I ever have thought of my baby as an alien? Admittedly, its head is still a little bit out of proportion, but this is definitely a baby. I hold the book to my stomach and try to imagine that little being inside me. A tiny thing with fingers and toes, and ears, eyes, a mouth and a nose. It is gorgeous. How could I have missed the fact that it sucks its thumb from fifteen weeks onwards? How adorable. Even the fact that the baby weighs approximately 200 g, ‘a figure that will increase more than fifteen times between now and delivery’ – this doesn’t faze me. I’ve been asking what is there to life if there are no bars, no restaurants, no shops, no massages; well, it’s obvious, there’s life itself. The baby has replaced my work, my gym, and my friends’ infatuations. Everything. It is true the absolute sweetest things on this earth are the little socks that baby GAP sells. The most beautiful, wondrous things on this earth are babies’ hands (all babies are now lovely, although mine will obviously be the loveliest).
However, my enthusiasm for the coming baby and the fat me is possibly not shared by Hugh. I tried to ignite him in the same way as Libby had me. I encouraged him to talk about any fears or doubts he might have about the upcoming birth, but he sniggered and asked if I’d recently attended an American workshop about ‘sharing emotions’. So I told him about the splash of colourful, wonderful joy – only I can’t be quite as good an orator as Libby, because Hugh simply stared at me.
‘Don’t you see what she’s getting at?’ I persisted.
‘Babes, I’ve told you I’m delighted about the baby,’ smiled Hugh. I bite my tongue and resist begging him to tell me again. ‘Have you seen my golf socks?’
‘Third drawer down on the left.’
I know he said he was pleased and he did send flowers to the office, and I want to believe him, but I can’t help but notice that since then he’s rarely mentioned the pregnancy. Well, other than to ask me where he will store his LP collection if we are going to convert the spare room into a nursery. I pointed out that we don’t even have a record player any more and suggested he sold them. We could do with the extra cash.
And I can’t help but feel disappointed that Hugh didn’t keep his promise to sit down with Kate and Tom in Wales and tell them our news. I’d imagined us all sitting in front of an open fire. Hugh cuddling a newly scrubbed, straight after bathtime, angelic-looking Kate and Tom (I know it]’s a stretch but it was a fantasy). I’d rehearsed with him how he should explain, very gently and carefully, that a new brother or sister wasn’t anything for them to worry about because each baby comes with its own extra bag of love. That the love he had for them wouldn’t have to be shared or spread more thinly (we’d gloss over the fact that time, however, would be at a premium). As it was, Kate caught me with my head down the loo on Sunday morning.
‘Are you poorly?’ she asked with what could have been mistaken for glee, if a minor hadn’t delivered the question.
‘No, she’s pregnant,’ sighed the world-weary Millie. Kate stared non-comprehendingly, so Millie took her off to give her a lesson in basic biology using Barbie and Ken as props. I would have been concerned, but how much damage can a couple of eunuch dolls do? Anyway, I couldn’t leave my sentry position, and where the hell was Hugh?
Hugh doesn’t find the scans fascinating, nor the books frustrating, nor the biology miraculous. Admittedly, none of it is new to Hugh and it’s all new to me… still. His attitud
e was best summed up in Wales when Henry asked him if he wanted a boy or girl.
‘All the same to me.’
I was thrilled and waited for the statutory line, ‘as long as it’s healthy’.
He surprised me. ‘After all, I’ve already got one of each flavour.’
Oh…
It’s odd, but this is the first genuine difference of opinion I think we’ve ever had. We’re normally so in sync. I can’t think of anything more absorbing than talking about the baby, thinking about the baby, planning for the baby. I’m not saying that Hugh doesn’t want it – I’d say he’s neutral.
Quite a big difference of opinion; perhaps it would have been better if we’d started with a disagreement about which colour to paint the downstairs loo.
God, I really should be thinking about this pitch.
The phone rings, giving me the perfect excuse not to think about it right now.
‘Hello, darling.’
‘Hello, Jessica.’
‘What does the book say?’
Luckily, Jessica has filled Hugh’s shoes in terms of being appropriately enthusiastic and excited about the coming birth, although I remain careful not to make an outright reference to the fact that the birth will make her a grandmother. She rings once a week and I read the appropriate chapter from the maternity book.
Week 21
The skin covering your baby begins growing in two layers. These layers are the epidermis, which is on the surface, and the dermis, which is the deeper layer… The epidermis is arranged in four layers. One of these layers contains epidermal ridges. These are responsible for patterns on surfaces of fingertips, palms and soles of the feet. They are genetically determined.
We both fall silent in amazement.
‘How can something so tiny be so intricate and perfect?’ asks my mother. ‘to think, right from the moment of conception, it’s all mapped out, what sex it will be, what colour eyes it will have, even its tiny fingerprints are already forming.’ I normally interrupt my mother with an effervescent flow; my silence startles her. ‘Are you still there, Georgina? Are you all right?’ ‘Yes. I’m fine.’