‘I think you really need to invest in some space for yourself,’ she goes on, ‘Have you tried meditating? Book 15 minutes out to meditate, another 15 for a walk outside, just you. And I think you’d really benefit from some body work too – regular sessions with me and maybe some cranial osteopathy. You need to make time for yourself, Grace.’
I consider this. ‘Do you have kids, Pat?’
‘No.’
‘Ah.’
CHAPTER ONE
You just know when you first find out you’re pregnant that having a baby is going to change everything. The obvious things like your day-to-day life, your financial status and your independence are hanging in the balance. Your home will quickly fill with plastic toys, the corners softened, the plugholes stuffed. Your body will be repurposed like a dodgy doer-upper on Homes Under The Hammer, which you might start watching because you’ll suddenly be switching from working woman to stay-at-home mum, at least until the stitches heal, but probably for a year.
I was most worried about how becoming a mum would affect my identity, with which I’d only just felt comfortable at the age of 28. If work, marriage, friendships, your body and even your name are directly affected by this twist in the road, where will YOU end up? ‘Just A Mum’ and nothing else? Finding out I was pregnant felt like taking a pair of scissors to the threads which my future hung from, snip-snip-snip – I knew I would have to change and I didn’t want to.
I know – this is not how books about child-bearing usually begin. They’re all BLESSED to be with child, the fulfilment of a lifelong dream to be pregnant. Well, I could write that book, for the record. My love for my child is endless, boundless and unconditional. I love being her mother. But this book is not about my baby or my relationship with her. It’s about saying, without caveat or excuse: being a mum is better than I’d ever imagined, harder than I thought possible and I am a completely different person now. I have gone through a transition at a rate that would make your eyes bleed.
If that’s not enough and you’re about to cast this book down in disgust and write me off as undeserving of the gift of childbirth, let me pre-empt some of the hard stuff with a little story. You’re still getting to know me, after all, and this story is quite a good yardstick for measuring my kind side.
When I was 19, I saved up for months and months to go on a turtle-saving expedition. If you’ve seen that Attenborough documentary or Moana you’ll know that turtles lay their eggs in the sand at the top of the beach and a baby turtle’s instinct when it hatches is to scratch its way up through the sand then head for the sea, scuttling towards the light of the moon bouncing off the water, where it will swim away and presumably find its mum and live a long and fulfilling life. But, sadly, now there are hotels and traffic to confuse them, many will wander the wrong way and try crossing a road and die under the wheels of a car. Also, they are poached and made into soup.
So I selflessly left a summer of partying behind me at my peak party age, and started trawling the beaches of Grand Cayman at 5am every morning to check nests and help any little guys that had got stuck to crawl up through the sand and make it to their destiny, to fulfil their little turtle dreams. So when you’re thinking, JESUS, THIS GIRL IS BLOODY AWFUL TO HER HUSBAND/MUM/GYNAECOLOGIST, just remember the tiny turtles I saved and how nurturing and motherly I must be beneath all that bravado. Ahh, little tiny turtles, guys! What’s cuter than that? God, I’m such a good person.
Before I became a vessel for my mother-in-law’s third grandchild (if that wouldn’t make a great slogan tee I don’t know what would) I felt fairly sure of who I was. Actually, I never paused to think about it. I felt young first and foremost – endless possibilities stretched out ahead of me once I’d earned a bit more money and turned 30. A map of places I would one day visit, a menu of experimental haircuts, clothes that really lasted and a collection of house plants lay in wait. I was building up to all that and in the meantime I was a swearer, a drinker, very occasional smoker and when I went back to my parents’ place, still an idle teenager, glued to their sofa because they had Sky and I wasn’t yet adult enough to sort that out for myself.
By 28 you kind of know the sort of friend you are, the sort of girlfriend, the sort of daughter. You know what makes you tick, what you can and can’t stomach, which drinks will make you blow chunks all over a car park and which will help you live your best life. You know how you handle work, stress, heartache and you know what kind of social being you are. But you probably have no idea what kind of mother you’ll be.
There was a lot of trial and error to make the 28-year-old me. A lot of hard work to take me from diligent intern to magazine staffer, then finally to this freelance career as a beauty writer, which was just taking off. I had fallen in love with my husband Rich at university and so we had grown up together and whittled ‘young professional’ identities side by side. Like most millennials,* we had lived with my parents for six months, and that’s as hard as it got for us.
We saved up and bought a tiny flat in Brighton once we were both working, and continued to save for sofas and TVs and maybe a holiday one day. Thanks to Rich’s unshakeably stoic and calm personality, I never had to work very much at being a girlfriend or wife, because it was the easiest gig in the world, but I was very aware of – and grateful for – our dynamic as partners. I remember reading an article in a bridal magazine when we were first engaged which asked, ‘What kind of bride will you be?’ and I remember thinking, just like, me … but in a wedding dress? It hadn’t affected either of us at all, getting married. I hadn’t even changed my name. During the week I was still a hard-working, single-minded writer for women’s magazines, and at the weekend I was a semi-retired party girl. I had just discovered karaoke and how adept I was at Cher’s greatest hits. I hadn’t encountered loss or redundancy or impotence – nothing that could throw me off-course for even a second. I was surrounded by brilliant, funny women all the time, who were just as selfish as me. There wasn’t a baby amongst us, just a working week punctuated by red wine, books, boxsets, shopping for olives and sex with my husband. There was no ill that couldn’t be remedied with a cocktail, a cheese sandwich and at worse, a cigarette. I was solid and robust.
Then one New Year’s Day, my husband thumbed in a softie just before the curry arrived, and somehow that was all it took to derail this well thought-out life. We hadn’t even had sex in a purposeful, deliberate way, really. Having been together for six years already we didn’t do it as often as we used to, and on New Year’s Day I was always overcome by a combination of hangover guilt and the need for fresh starts to announce that we would be doing it more often that year. We would make it a priority; it would be our New Year’s resolution to shag plentifully. And so every year, despite not wanting to, we would have sex, because to not have sex would set the tone for the year. But this perfunctory two-minute act was all it took to get those robust Yorkshire sperm into my reticent, slightly uptight eggs and lo, I was up the stick. Getting pregnant was the biggest curveball I’d ever been thrown. It was the ultimate kick-you-in-the-gut moment for a control freak like me, especially as I assumed I was infertile on account of the chlamydia.†
Too much? If you’re feeling like you already know more than is necessary about the workings of my genitals, I urge you to continue regardless. (Except you, Dad. If you’re reading this, chlamydia is a rare but very beautiful orchid. Don’t read the footnote, ’kay?) Think of it as an endurance test of sorts. I’m not sure what the reward is for enduring multiple descriptions of my innards, but still.
I blame motherhood for the need to over-share. I never used to discuss my vagina with anyone who wasn’t directly involved with it, and