by Lauren Sams
I was still constantly surprised by the engulfing, overwhelming love I felt for Pippa. I’d been worried that I wouldn’t connect with her, that having been so adamant in not wanting children and then so hastily changing my mind, I’d be deficient in love for her, that I wouldn’t have enough.
But six months into this new gig, I knew I did have enough. It manifested in ways I hadn’t expected. I felt it when I fed her, when I heard her crying, when I set her down for a nap. Burst! Bam! There it was, the love. It was different to romantic love, but it was all-consuming in the same way. I’d always fallen in love quickly, and then just as soon felt it fade away. But with Pippa, the love kept growing. I saw it like a sapling in my mind, getting stronger and bigger every day.
The thing was, though, I loved Pippa but I wasn’t very good at being her mum. I had assumed that in the first few weeks after birth when you’re essentially quarantined at home, every new mother was hapless and helpless. But then I started to meet women with babies the same age as Pip, and they knew exactly what they were doing. Their babies were on schedules and listened to classical music – some even slept through the night. Their babies did not need to be encouraged to latch. These women were relaxed and at ease with their babies in a way I was desperately jealous of. If life After Baby was full of questions, the most pressing was this: what am I doing wrong?
I used to be someone. I mean, I wasn’t Beyoncé, but you know, I did OK. I had a job. A good job. For which I was paid quite a decent salary. I edited a popular women’s magazine called Jolie. It was smart and funny and cool and showed you exactly what to spend your salary on (mainly makeup brushes and scarves). I had some semblance – maybe not much, but some – of power. I had a team, I made decisions, I worked hard. I was respected.
And then I got fired. And replaced by a 22-year-old.
Well, I quit, but I was about to be fired. So it was a bit like telling people you were becoming a ‘minimalist’ when really you were just broke.
Now I spent my days doing nothing more than trying to get a baby to nap and feed. Most days, I was not successful at either.
Nina sat down next to me, cradling Pip. She gave her a tight squeeze.
‘Not too tight, OK?’
Pip hadn’t reacted at all. She was almost asleep. But still, Nina knew she didn’t like to be held too tightly. At least, she should know.
Nina raised her eyebrows. ‘I know,’ she said, an edge to her voice. ‘I know she doesn’t like it too tight. Geez.’
I shook my head. ‘Neen, that’s not what I meant. It’s just . . . I’m tired. Start over?’
She nodded, giving Pippa another unnecessarily tight squeeze. I closed my eyes and let it go. I was so grateful to Neen for being here. Really, I was. When Pip was born, I’d suggested that she move in with us. Well, I’d asked her. Less a suggestion, more a very enthusiastic challenge. I had expected Nina to say no. I’d just had a baby; she had just lost her final chance of having one. I thought it would be too painful for her to be around us. And then there was that whole thing where I’d agreed to be her surrogate and ended up getting accidentally knocked up by my ex instead. Standard stuff, really. But to my surprise and delight, she had said yes. And so far, we were doing great.
But every so often, there would be a small but noticeable reminder that Nina was not Pip’s mother; I was. I had told myself many, many times not to one-up Nina or tell her she was doing the wrong thing, but sometimes I forgot. The other day I had pulled her up for bouncing Pip ‘too vigorously’. Today she had squeezed her too tight. I made another internal memo to cool it with Nina. She was helping me raise the child that should have been hers.
‘So, you’re home late. How was last night?’ I asked, changing the subject. Nina had been out with some work friends, I vaguely remembered. She must have slept at one of their places. Maybe it had been late when they’d finished up and she hadn’t wanted to wake us up.
Nina’s eyes lit up. ‘It was great. Like, really great. I probably drank a bit too much, but it was such a good night. You should come next time.’
Here’s a little tip. When talking to a new parent, don’t tell them about hot new restaurants they ‘have to try’. Don’t tell them about the movie you saw that ‘will definitely win an Oscar’. Don’t tell them about the bar you went to that served a cocktail made with some cool new hipster spirit you pretend to be able to pronounce. Don’t tell them about the music festival you went to or the comedy show that changed your life or the new shop that is literally redefining retail. Don’t tell them about the new yoga class you’re loving or the new coffee shop that only sells double-shot espressos because that’s a thing now. Just shut up about all of it. We do not want to hear it.
We’re not going to restaurants anytime soon. Ditto cinemas, comedy clubs, music festivals, yoga classes or cool new cafes. So just be quiet. Pretend, please, that your lives are as monotonous and repetitive as ours, and then we can still be friends.
‘Right. So you had fun?’
Nina nodded. ‘Yeah. I actually went home with someone.’
Whoa. OK.
‘Wow. Really?’
More nodding, accompanied by a wide, cheeky grin. ‘Yep. I did it. It,’ she added, for emphasis that was not strictly necessary.
‘It? It-it?’
Nina nodded proudly.
I had assumed that Nina, who had recently separated from her high-school sweetheart Matt, would be lonely and sad after her break-up. I was wrong. I had thought that, after years of trying to have a baby and not succeeding, she’d be depressed. Again, wrong. Nina had taken to her new life eagerly. She was on Tinder. She was meeting people. She was drinking things other than pinot grigio, the white wine of choice for all women over thirty-one. I was taken aback by all of this until I realised that the last time Nina had dated, R. Kelly was not a convicted criminal. Times had changed. Now all you needed was a jpeg and a location, and bam, you were dating! She had gone on a swipe-right spree recently, but this was the first time she’d actually gone home with anyone.
‘You . . . wow. That was fast.’
Nina scoffed. ‘I don’t think so. You know Matt’s probably dating someone already, he’s such a serial monogamist.’
‘He was only a serial monogamist because he was with you for seventeen years,’ I countered.
Nina shrugged, stroking Pippa’s tiny nose and cooing into her face. ‘That’s beside the point. Anyway, don’t you want to hear about it? All the gory details?’
Did I? Maybe I did. The last time I’d had sex was . . . actually, the last time I’d had sex, I got knocked up.
‘Sure, whatever. Just don’t corrupt Pippa, OK? I don’t have enough money for therapy.’
Nina laughed. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not that scandalous.’
‘So who was it? Another teacher?’
Nina made a face. ‘Oh god no, I would never date a teacher.’
‘Really? Why?’
She shook her head. ‘They’re the worst. Self-righteous. Preachy. Know-it-all. You know the type.’
I did.
‘No, this guy’s a bartender,’ Nina continued, eyes ablaze with excitement. ‘Jed. He’s so hot. Let me show you a photo.’
I tried to remember the last time I’d slept with a bartender. I’d been, what, twenty-two? Twenty-three? In other words, a perfectly acceptable age to sleep with a bartender, because he’d had as few prospects and responsibilities as I did – not to mention access to free booze. I made a mental note to google ‘early mid-life crisis’ to see if Nina was having one.
‘Right . . . so . . . where did you meet him?’
‘Tinder,’ she replied. ‘He was working at the bar, but I didn’t actually see him because I was with the girls from school and we were in the restaurant part. But anyway, they all needed to leave because they have, you know, husbands and kids –’ here, she made a face, as if she had forgotten that, up until very recently, she too had had a husband and was desperate to have a child, ‘but it was only
11, so I stayed, obviously.’ Obviously. Like it was the most obvious thing in the world that 11 pm was an extremely lame time to go home on a Tuesday night. What was I doing at 11 pm last night? Cleaning up spilled breast milk from the kitchen floor and trying desperately not to cry, if I recall correctly.
‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘I got another drink and went on Tinder, and bam! There he was. And he was just finishing his shift, so it was perfect. We hung out and he was so funny – like, really funny, George, you’d love him’ – this, I doubted – ‘and then he said, “Do you want to come back to mine?” and obviously I did and then . . . we did it.’
Nina finished with an actual flourish of her hand.
In less than a calendar year, Nina had gone from a married school teacher who wanted to have a baby more than anything, to a Tinder-swiping, hard liquor-drinking gal about town. I couldn’t blame her, of course, but it was still strange. After a month or so of coming home morose and mournful from the support group meetings her therapist had recommended, she had just stopped going. ‘I don’t know how sitting in a room listening to a bunch of women wail about how they can’t get pregnant is going to help me get over this,’ she’d said. ‘I need to move on. How can I move on from wanting a baby when all I do is talk about how much I wanted a baby? It’s pointless.’
So now, instead of leaning on other women to help her move on, she was leaning into a bartender called Jed.
‘And . . . how was it?’
‘Well,’ she started, with a sigh that I think was happy, ‘it was good. It was . . . different? Like, are guys different now?’ She directed the question at me, as if I had any idea.
‘Um . . . I don’t know. Are they?’
‘Well, yeah. I mean, he was young . . . -er. Younger. Than me. Than us. So maybe that’s why he seemed so, um, up for everything?’
My eyes widened, I couldn’t help it. ‘Like what?’
Nina lowered her head and covered Pippa’s ears. ‘Everything,’ she whispered dramatically.
‘Not . . . that? Not that?’
‘That.’ She raised her eyebrows, punctuating the statement.
I laughed out loud. I could just imagine Nina’s reaction. Nina, who had slept with three guys her whole life (marrying your post-high-school sweetheart will do that to a person). Nina, who once asked me, after reading a Jolie article, if fisting was ‘what it sounded like’.
‘Well, that would have gone down well.’
‘It was OK, actually.’
‘What do you mean?’
Nina grinned sheepishly.
‘You did it?’ I couldn’t believe it.
She shrugged, nodding. ‘It hurt, but . . . I didn’t mind it. Maybe something to add to the menu.’
I felt my jaw unhinge. ‘It’s not roast chicken, Neen. It’s anal sex.’
She shrugged again. ‘Don’t knock it –’
‘Oh, I will. I will knock it because I’m not trying it.’
I couldn’t believe it. Nina was a 35-year-old woman who’d just come out of a 17-year relationship. The last time she’d had casual sex was in a German nightclub in 1996. This Jed guy was probably watching Bonita sing with Big Ted in 1996.
Right on cue, Pip started crying.
‘Is she OK?’ Nina asked, giving Pip’s leg a little rub.
I nodded. ‘She probably just needs a feed. She didn’t have a lot this morning when she first woke up.’
‘Yeah, what happened in here? It smells like old milk.’
‘I leaked. I leak now. My body is broken. Or maybe her mouth is too big? Are my nipples too small?’
‘Your nipples are fine. I think you’re just blessed with an almighty flow.’
‘I don’t know that “blessed” is the word I’d use . . .’
Nina smiled. ‘No, it’s good. Better than not enough right? Remember how freaked out Ellie was when she had trouble feeding Lucas?’
‘Remember it? She hasn’t shut up about it in four years.’
Nina flashed a placating teacher smile and I immediately regretted being nasty about our friend. Ellie had taken to motherhood the way Nina had taken to anal sex – with surprising eagerness. A reformed party girl who once spent her nights being thrown out of clubs, Ellie now spent her evenings reading French Children Don’t Throw Food and nursing a solitary glass of red wine. But she had also taken me in after Jase and I broke up last year, when Nina couldn’t bring herself to talk to me because I was suddenly pregnant with the baby she was meant to have. So I had made a vow to go easier on Ellie. She was a good mum. Not just to her four-year-old, Lucas, but to me, too.
‘Anyway, what have you two got on today?’ Nina asked.
I sighed and gritted my teeth. ‘Mother’s group. Last one before I go back to work.’
Pippa sucked away contentedly this time, blissed out in her own small world, where the only things that mattered were milk and sleep. It sounded lovely. I wanted to go to there. Badly.
While I was still at Jolie, I’d been approached to work for a newspaper supplement called The Weekend. It was a new launch; very exciting, lots of money behind it. Lee, the editor, had three Walkleys and a no-BS attitude. She wooed me, told me I could write what I wanted to write, there’d be no advertiser promises, none of the usual malarkey that comes with editing a glossy. So when I left Jolie, I immediately called Lee. I wanted in. Some people dream of marrying their true love, all that Disney BS, but what I always wanted was a brilliant career.
Then two months ago, Lee told me she was leaving. Did I want to be editor again? The prospect was thrilling. I’d have creative control, she said. Over everything. Editors were trusted at Live Now Media, Lee said. Respected. They held the brand’s reins and went forth, doing what they thought was best. Publishers and ad teams acquiesced to the editor’s power. I was awed. And what’s more, Lee said, it was a family-friendly company. All the top brass were women. They knew the score, they knew they had to keep mothers in the workforce – they knew that if they didn’t, all their editors would be spoiled 25-year-olds from Rose Bay who couldn’t figure out what DPS stood for. So I didn’t need to worry about how it would affect Pip, Lee said. The work stuff would fit in around the two of us.
And the truth was, I needed to go back to work. I’d been unemployed for over seven months. My severance pay had been decent, but it wouldn’t last forever, and it was hard to cover the cost of nappies and Farex and bottles and three coffees a day on the government’s paid parental leave, aka minimum wage. A regular salary would be a good thing. A very good thing.
‘How are you feeling about it? Are you ready?’
I shrugged. Another question to add to my list: was I ready to go back to work? What kind of mum did it make me? ‘Yes. No. Part of me is excited. The other part is . . . freaked out. It’s hard enough getting everything done when I’m at home all day with Pip. How will I feed her and bathe her and play with her when I go back to work?’
Nina smiled and squeezed my hand again. ‘You’ll be fine. I’m going to do pick-ups, OK? It’s easier for me.’
I shook my head. ‘No, you don’t have to do that. It’s not fair on you. It’s too much.’
Nina rolled her eyes. ‘I would never offer if I didn’t really want to do it, OK? Please just let me.’
I smiled back, non-committal. I should be able to do this by myself. It’s not like I’m the first single mother in history. My own mother was a single mother, and she managed just fine.
Then again, she hadn’t gone back to work when her daughter was six months old. Or ever.
*
I had wanted to go to mother’s group about as much as I wanted to eat my own placenta.
Mother’s groups were not for me.
They were for mothers who dressed their babies in colour-coordinated outfits, with proper shoes (mini Nike Air Maxes, preferably) and handmade cardigans and bonnets. Pippa owned zero cardigans, and certainly zero bonnets, hand-knitted or otherwise.
Mother’s groups were for women who knew how
to fold down Bugaboos properly and waited patiently as their babies drifted off to sleep (instead of mentally clocking the minutes till they could get back to their Netflix-ed Swedish thriller and a cold glass of pinot G). Mother’s groups were for women who took photos of their babies constantly and knew exactly the right hashtags to use (#baby #sosweet #newborn #mylife #blessed). They weren’t for women who swore like sailors as they wrestled with baby equipment and really, really wanted to swear like sailors as their babies fought sleep. They weren’t for women who used Instagram exclusively to see if Liam and Miley were back on. Women at mother’s groups were already reading to their babies in a second language, sleep deprivation be damned. Mother’s groups were for lactating warriors, for women who wore their mum badges with so much pride you could see it coming off them in comic-book-style waves.
Mother’s groups, in short, were for the Ellies of the world.
And, of course, that’s who had sent me here in the first place.
‘You know, I think you’re really going to love it,’ Ellie had said, picking up Lucas’s errant Lego pieces and throwing them haphazardly into a giant plastic tub. Lucas himself had long since vacated the area, and Ellie was making the slow pilgrimage that is Cleaning Up After a Four-Year-Old. Who knew what fresh trouble Lucas could be making as Ellie attempted to deal with the debris of his last adventure?
‘Why, exactly, do you think that?’ I’d asked, a single eyebrow raised in exasperation. Ellie was one of my oldest friends, and to be fair, she really was a great friend, but she was still the kind of mother who assumed that what was right for her was right for everyone. I already had a friend like that – her – so why did I need to go to mother’s group?