by Ellery Lloyd
Dedication
For Zu
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Six Weeks Earlier
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
I think it is possible that I am dying.
For quite some time now, in any case, it has felt like I have been watching as my life scrolls past in front of my eyes.
My earliest memory: It is winter, sometime in the early 1980s. I am wearing mittens, a badly knitted hat, and an enormous red coat. My mother is pulling me across our back lawn on a blue plastic sled. Her smile is fixed. I look completely frozen. I can remember how cold my hands were in those mittens, the way every dip and bump of the ground felt through the sled, the creak of the snow beneath her boots.
My first day at school. I am swinging a brown leather satchel with my name written on a card peeking out from a small plastic window. EMMELINE. One navy knee sock is bunched around my ankle; my hair is in pigtails of slightly unequal length.
Me and Polly at twelve years old. We are having a sleepover at her house, already in our tartan pajamas, wearing mudpacks and waiting for our corn to pop in the microwave. The two of us in her hallway, slightly older, ready to go to the Halloween party where I had my first kiss. Polly was a pumpkin. I was a sexy cat. Us again, on a summer’s day, sitting cross-legged in our jeans and Doc Martens in a field of stubble. In spaghetti-strap dresses and chokers, ready for our end-of-school leavers’ ball. Memory after memory, one after another, until I find myself starting to wonder whether I can call to mind a single emotionally significant scene from my teenage years in which Polly does not feature, with her lopsided smile and her awkward posing.
Only as I am thinking this do I realize what a sad thought it is now.
My early twenties are something of a blur. Work. Parties. Pubs. Picnics. Holidays. To be honest, my late twenties and early thirties are a bit fuzzy around the edges as well.
There are some things I’ll never forget.
Me and Dan in a photo booth, on our third or fourth date. I have my arm around his shoulders. Dan looks incredibly handsome. I look absolutely smitten. We are both grinning like fools.
Our wedding day. The little wink I’m giving to a friend behind the camera as we are saying our vows, Dan’s face solemn as he places the ring on my finger.
Our honeymoon, the pair of us blissed out and sunburned in a bar on a Bali beach at sunset.
Sometimes it is hard to believe we were ever that young, that happy, that innocent.
The moment that Coco was born, furious and screaming, whitish and snotty with vernix. Scored into my memory forever, that first glimpse of her little squished face. That moment they passed her to me. The weight of our feelings.
Coco, covered in confetti from a piñata, laughing, at her fourth birthday party.
My son, Bear, a fortnight old, too small even for the tiny sleep suit he is wearing, cradled in the arms of his beaming sister.
Only now does it dawn on me that what I am seeing are not actual memories but memories of photographs. Whole days boiled down to a single static image. Whole relationships. Whole eras.
And still they keep on coming. These fragments. These snapshots. One after another after another. Tumbling faster and faster through my brain.
Bear screaming in his carrier.
Broken glass on our kitchen floor.
My daughter on a hospital bed, curled up in a ball.
The front page of a newspaper.
I want this to stop now. Something is wrong. I keep trying to wake up, to open my eyes, but I can’t—my eyelids are too heavy.
It is not so much the idea of dying that upsets me as the thought I might never see any of these people again; all the things I might never have the chance to tell them. Dan—I love you. Mum—I forgive you. Polly—I hope you can forgive me. Bear . . . Coco . . .
I have an awful feeling something terrible is about to happen.
I have an awful feeling it is all my fault.
Six Weeks Earlier
Chapter One
Emmy
I never planned to be an Instamum. For a long time, I wasn’t sure I’d be a mum at all. But then who among us can truthfully say that their life has turned out exactly the way they thought it would?
These days I might be all leaky nipples and little nippers, professional bottom wiper for two cheeky ankle biters, but rewind five years and I guess I was what you’d call a fashionista. Ignore my knackered eye twitch and imagine this frizzy, pink-hued mum bun is a sleek blow-dry. Swap today’s hastily daubed MAC Ruby Woo for clever contouring, liquid liner, and statement earrings—the sort that my three-year-old daughter would now use for impromptu pull-ups. Then dress it all in skinny jeans and an Equipment silk blouse.
As a fashion editor, I had the job I’d dreamed of since I was a problem-haired, bucktoothed, puppy-fat-padded teen, and I truly, truly loved it. It was all I’d ever wanted to do, as my best friend, Polly, would tell you—sweet, long-suffering Polly; I’m lucky she still speaks to me after the hours I spent forcing her to play photographer in my pretend shoots, or strut with me down garden path catwalks in my mum’s high heels, all those afternoons making our own magazines with yellowing copies of the Daily Mail and a glue stick (I was always the editor, of course).
So how did I get from there to here? There have been times—when I’m mopping up newborn poo, or making endless pots of puréed goo—when I’ve asked myself the same question. It feels like it all happened in an instant. One minute I was wearing Fendi in the front row at Milan Fashion Week, the next I was in joggers, trying to restrain a toddler from reorganizing the cereal aisle in Sainsbury’s.
The career change from fashion maven to flustered mama was just a happy accident, to be totally honest with you. The world started to lose interest in shiny magazines full of beautiful people, so, thanks to shrinking budgets and declining readership, just as I was scaling the career ladder, it was kicked out from under me—and then on top of everything else, I found out I was pregnant.
Damn you, the internet, I thought. You owe me a new career—and it is going to need to be one I can build around having a baby.
And so I started blogging and vlogging—I called myself Barefoot, because my stilettos came with a side order of soul-baring. And you know what? Although it took me a while to find my stride, I got a real buzz out of connecting with like-minded ladies in real time.
Fast-forward to those first few months after giving birth, and in the 937 hours I spent with my bum welded to the couch, my darling Coco attached to my milky boobs and the iPhone in my hand my only connection to the outside world, the community of women I met on the internet became a literal lifeline. And while blogging and vlogging were my first online loves, it was Instagram that stopped me from slipping too far into the postnatal fog. It felt like a little life-affirming arm squeeze every time I logged on and saw a comment from another mother going through the same things I was. I had found my people.
So, slowly, it was out with the Louboutins and in with the little human. Barefoot morphed into Mamabare, because I’m a mama who is
willing to grin and bare it, warts and all. And take it from me, this journey has got even crazier since my second little bundle of burps, Bear, came along five weeks ago. Whether it’s a breast pad fashioned from rogue Happy Meal wrappers or a sneaky gin in a tin by the swings, you’ll always get the unvarnished truth from me—although it may come lightly dappled with Cheeto dust.
The haters like to say that Instagram is all about the perfect life, polished, filtered, and posted in these little squares—but who has time for all that nonsense when they’ve got a ketchup-covered curtain climber in tow? And when things get hard, both online and off, when wires get crossed, when food gets tossed, when I just feel a little lost, I remember that it’s my family I’m doing all of this for. And, of course, the incredible crew of other social media mamas who’ve always got my back, no matter how many days in a row I’ve been wearing the same nursing bra.
You are the reason I started #greydays, a campaign sharing our real stories and organizing meetups IRL for us to talk about our battles with the blue-hued moments of motherhood. Not to mention that a portion of the profits from all #greydays merchandise we sell goes toward helping open up the conversation around maternal mental health.
If I were to describe what I do now, would you hate me if I said “multi-hyphen mama”? It’s definitely a job title that confuses poor old Joyce from next door. She understands what Papabare does—he writes novels. But me? Influencer is such an awful word, isn’t it? Cheerleader? Encourager? Impacter? Who knows? And really, who cares? I just go about my business, sharing my unfiltered family life and hopefully starting a more authentic discussion about parenting.
I built this brand on honesty, and I’ll always tell it like it is.
Dan
Bullshit.
Bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit.
Because I have heard Emmy give this same little talk so many times now, I usually don’t even notice anymore what a weird farrago of inventions and elisions and fabrications and half-truths it is. What a seamless mixture of things that could have happened (but didn’t) and things that did happen (but not like that) and events that she and I remember very differently (to say the least). For some reason, tonight is different. For some reason, tonight, as she is talking, as she is telling the room her story, a story that is also to a considerable extent our story, I find myself trying to keep count of how many of the things Emmy is saying are exaggerated or distorted or completely blown out of proportion.
I give up about three minutes in.
I should probably make one thing clear. I am not calling my wife a liar.
The American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt famously differentiates between lies and bullshit. Lies, he claims, are untruths deliberately intended to deceive. Bullshit, on the other hand, comes about when someone has no real interest in whether or not something they are saying is true or false at all. Example: My wife has never fashioned a breast pad from a Happy Meal wrapper. I doubt she has ever been anywhere near a Happy Meal. We don’t live next door to a Joyce. Emmy was, if the photographs at her mum’s house are to be believed, a slim, strikingly attractive teenager.
Perhaps there comes a time in every marriage when you start fact-checking each other’s anecdotes in public.
Perhaps I am just in a funny mood tonight.
There is certainly no denying that my wife is good at what she does. Amazing, actually. Even after all the times I have seen her get up and do her thing—at events like this all over the country, in village halls, in bookshops, in coffee shops and coworking spaces from Wakefield to Westfield—even knowing what I know about the relationship of most of what she is saying to anything that ever actually happened, there is no denying her ability to connect with people. To raise a laugh of recognition. When she gets to the part about the gin in the tin, there is a woman in the back row howling. She is a very relatable individual, my wife. People like her.
Her agent will be glad she got the bit about grey days in. Excuse me. Hashtag grey days. I noticed at least three people wearing the sweatshirt as we were coming in earlier, the blue one with #greydays and a Mamabare logo on the back and the slogan GRIN AND BARE IT on the front. The Mamabare logo, by the way, is a drawing of two breasts with a baby’s head in between them. Personally I would have gone for the other logo, the one of the maternal teddy bear and cub. I was overruled. This is one of the reasons why I have always resisted Emmy’s suggestions that I should wear one of those things myself when I come along to this kind of event, why mine always turns out to have been accidentally left back at the house—in another bag, say, or in the dryer, or on the stairs, where I had put it out so I would definitely not forget it this time. You have to draw the line somewhere. Some fan, some follower, would inevitably ask for a photo with both of us and post it immediately on their Instagram feed, and I have no interest in being captured online forever in a sweatshirt with breasts on it.
I like to believe I still have some dignity.
I’m here tonight, as always, in a strictly supporting capacity. I’m the one who helps lug the boxes of mama merch in from the cab and helps unpack them and tries not to visibly cringe when people use expressions like “mama merch.” I’m here to lend a hand pouring glasses of fizz and passing around the cupcakes at the start of the evening, and I’m the person who steps in and rescues Emmy when she gets stuck talking to anyone for too long or who is too obviously a weirdo at the end of it. If the baby starts crying, I am primed to step up onstage and lift him carefully out of Emmy’s arms and take charge—although so far this evening he has been as good as gold, little Bear, our baby boy, five weeks old, suckling away quietly, completely oblivious to his surroundings or the fact that he is up onstage or pretty much anything apart from the breast in front of him. Occasionally, in the general Q&A section at the end of the evening, when someone asks Emmy about how having a second child has affected the family dynamic or how we keep the spark in our marriage, Emmy will laughingly point me out in the audience and invite me to help answer that question. Often when someone asks about online safety, I’m the person to whom Emmy defers to explain the three golden rules we always stick to when posting pictures of our kids online. One: we never show anything that could give away where we live. Two: we never show either of the kids in the bath, or naked, or on the potty, and we never, ever show Coco in a swimsuit or any outfit that could be considered sexy on an adult. Three: we keep a close eye on who is following the account and block anyone we’re not sure about. This was the advice we were given, early on, when we consulted with the experts.
I do still have my reservations about all this.
The version of events that Emmy always recounts, the one about starting to blog about motherhood as a way of reaching out and seeing if there was anyone out there who was going through the same stuff as her? Complete bullshit, I’m afraid. If you really think my wife fell into doing this by accident, it just goes to show that you have never met my wife. I sometimes wonder if Emmy ever does anything by accident. I can vividly remember the day she first brought it up, the blogging thing. I knew she was meeting someone for lunch, but it was not until afterward she told me the person she’d met with was an agent. She was three months pregnant. It was only a couple of weeks since we’d broken the news to my mum. “An agent?” I said. I genuinely don’t think it had occurred to me until then that online people had agents. It probably should have done. On a regular basis, back when she was working in magazines, Emmy would come home and tell me how much they were paying some idiot influencer to crap out a hundred words and pose for a picture, or host some event, or burble on their blog. She used to show me the copy they would send in. The kind of prose that makes you wonder if you’ve had a stroke or the person writing it has. Short sentences. Metaphors that don’t make sense. Random weirdly specific details scattered around to lend everything an air of verisimilitude. Oddly precise numbers (482 cups of cold tea, 2,342 hours of lost sleep, 27 misplaced baby socks) shoehorned in for the same purpose. Words that are
just not the word they were groping for. You should write this stuff, she used to joke; I don’t know why you bother writing novels. We used to laugh about it. When she got back from lunch that day and told me who she had been talking to, I thought she was still joking. It took me a long time to get my head around what she was suggesting. I thought the end goal was some free footwear. Little did I suspect that Emmy had already paid for the domain name and bagged both the Barefoot and Mamabare Instagram handles before she had even written her first sentence about stilettos. Let alone that within three years she would have a million followers.
The very first piece of advice her agent gave her was that the whole thing should feel organic, as if she’d just fallen into it through sheer chance. I don’t think either of us knew quite how good at that Emmy would be.
Inasmuch as it is based on a complete rejection of the significance of the truth and the moral duty we owe to it, Harry G. Frankfurt suggests that bullshit is actually more corrosive, a more destructive social force, than good old-fashioned lying. Harry G. Frankfurt has considerably fewer followers on Instagram than my wife does.
“I built this brand on honesty,” Emmy is saying, just as she always ends by saying, “and I’ll always tell it like it is.”
She pauses for the applause to die down. She locates the glass of water by her chair and takes a sip.
“Any questions?” she asks.
I have a question.
Was that the night I finally decided how I would hurt you?
I think it was.
Obviously I had thought about it many times before then. I think anyone in my position would. But those were just silly little daydreams, really. TV stuff. Completely unrealistic and impractical.
It works in funny ways, the human mind.
I thought somehow if I saw you, it would help. Help me hate you less. Help me let go of the anger.
It did not help at all.
I have never been a violent person. I am not an angry person, naturally. When somebody stands on my foot in a queue, I am always the one who apologizes.