But the minute my vagina was ripped open by a crowning head in a room of eight strangers, it became public property and my number-one topic of conversation. I took back control by talking about it to everyone, presumably so they’d get a fair idea of what it was like before they inevitably saw it. It’s possible I need therapy. Anyway, buckle up, there’s more to come. You’ll be able to draw a very accurate diagram of my labia by Chapter 7, and I urge you to do so.
Wait, why are there TWO lines?
Let me take you back to the moment the story really began. It’s 9.15am on 24 January 2012, and I’m at home in Hove, sitting on the toilet, staring down at the knickers looped around my knees. Tears are quietly pooling in the gusset. I have just seen two blue lines darken purposefully on a pregnancy test, where I’d have preferred just the one, and maybe a thumbs-up emoji. Because two lines mean, yeh, you are all kinds of pregnant. You’ve basically AirBNB’ed your womb; another human being is setting up camp in your innards. Your vagina is about to be split in two, then chopped up like mincemeat.
It was not the news I had hoped for when I planned to fit a quick pregnancy test in between breakfast and the start of my working day, writing about – ironically – whether it’s ever OK to ask a woman when she’s going to have kids, for the Huffington Post. It was off-topic for me, but since our wedding in 2010 it was all anyone asked me and it had really started pissing me off. I mean, sure, on paper, my husband and I were all set for the childbearing years to begin. But the assumption that as a married woman the next logical step would be motherhood irked me. I am a fully practising feminist so I’m not into the yokes forced upon our sex. But also I was still keen to prioritise spontaneous holidays and sleep. Oh, and my career. And I just didn’t fancy it.
Then I realised I hadn’t had a period since 2011, so when I popped out to get the paper and live yoghurt (in case it was thrush delaying my menstruation) I added a pregnancy test to the basket. There I was, midway through furiously tapping out this angry argument that ‘when are you having kids?’ was an entirely inappropriate question when I saw that the answer from me would be, IN ABOUT NINE MONTHS ACTUALLY.
My first instinct was to go back in time and nuke that errant sperm, ripping its microscopic little head off and dousing the remains with a shot of spermicide. I know, I know – I seem like such a maternal soul, why on earth would I not want to embrace this little miracle?
The truth is I enjoyed being an autonomous, self-obsessed, one-blue-line kind of person. I liked who I was. I liked our tiny flat full of sharp corners and bottles of rum. I liked my husband. I even liked my body. I didn’t want all that to change. Plus, I was about to start a new job which I had spent the past seven years working my butt off to bag (often for free): acting beauty editor at Glamour, a part-time gig so I could also start writing a book. It felt like I’d finally got to where I wanted to be.
Just the week before I’d been sitting in the pub with a group of girlfriends slagging off people with kids for invading our favourite brunch bar – the buggies skinning your ankles and the thoughtless amount of noise and space-invading stuff these women came with. The general gist was: mums are selfish and obsessed with their kids and lose all reason and ambition when they give birth. They moan and stop dyeing their hair. They don’t have sex anymore. They live vicariously through their kids, letting their own lives slip from the radar. They lose the will to engage with the world and crusade for what they believe in, unless it was #FreeTheNipple or banning junkies from parks.
I was fine with concealing my nipples and would a Brighton park even be a proper Brighton park if it didn’t offer a grassy knoll up to a junkie once in a while? I couldn’t join this gang now, swallow my words about not letting prams on commuter trains. Also, imagine not being able to have a sneaky smoke when you felt like it. What would I do with my right hand when there was a bottle in the left?! I did another test. Still pregnant. Fuck.
How can you become a mum and not lose your sense of self? I considered the examples of motherhood I had to go by. Kirstie Alley in Look Who’s Talking. Diane Keaton in Baby Boom. She had given up a kickass career to make apple sauce. APPLE SAUCE? I hate apple sauce. And how about Three Men and a Baby? What drove the mum to leave her baby at that weirdly massive loft apartment and flee when she could have stayed and asked Tom Selleck about his moustache? Plus, it took THREE men to keep said baby alive, by the way. It wasn’t just something I’d gleaned from Touchstone Pictures, though. A school friend of mine had got married and had a baby all before I’d finished university. The friend I’d danced up against on smoky dance floors, sneaking a Volvic bottle of vodka from my mouth to hers had a son, an actual kid that was hers. All I’d gleaned when I popped in before returning to the smoky dance floors was that she was hoovering all the time and seemed … dazed. Happy, but not like before. Different. Like a body-snatched kind of different. Not a happy I could understand because it revolved around nappies and a crying baby. Of course, it was love, but I was too self-involved to recognise that.
Wiping my pee-soaked fingers on a wedge of loo roll, I wistfully looked over at our wonky airer, where I’d layered T-shirts, thongs and a pair of leather trousers to dry. I was nostalgic for the moments before I found out I was pregnant and just chucked clothes about in ignorant bliss. Oh my God, I’ll never be able to have sex again, I realised. Mums don’t really have sex unless they absolutely have to, oh God! I kept checking the skin on my belly – the freckle, the barbell through my belly button. I didn’t want the freckle I’d looked down on forever to stretch, and no doubt the piercing would just come shooting out at some point, like a bullet. I’d have to give up my job, move house, shop in Mothercare. Suddenly all the framework for my independence was wobbling, teetering.
I cried hysterically, and wandered into our tiny living room, readying myself to call the baby daddy – currently at work – and tell him he’d made me pregnant. For a moment, I was the only person in the whole world who knew our lives had changed forever.
When he picked up, I gasped and gulped and snorted.
‘I NEED YOU TO COME HOME!’ I eventually shouted into my BlackBerry, snot and spit peppering the screen. ‘NOW.’
Silence his end.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked at last, his voice naïve, full of hope.
‘NO! I’m not very … well.’ I answer. I can’t tell him I’m pregnant over the phone, knowing he has an hour’s commute to survive, I think to myself, wait ’til he’s home.
‘Fuck, you’re pregnant, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘FUCK.’
The baby daddy
If this was a romcom, Rich would have rushed in and we’d sit together (in a much bigger room in a bijou flat, lit by twinkly fairy lights). He would smile as I cried fresh pretty-faced, snot-free tears, which were all down to shock and could be easily mopped up. I think my hair would be up in an artful topknot, tendrils cascading around my forlorn but very beautiful face. He would rub my back while telling me all the cute things we’d enjoy doing with our baby, his boyish excitement spelt out by a grin and sparkling, earnest eyes. He’d sell me a lifestyle of scooting to the park, baking cookies, swimming in lakes, handing every full nappy to him, until my crying turns to laughter and we smile at each other. This little wobble would be tied up nicely so nobody would worry, everyone would know I do really want my baby – of course I do – and a happy ending is around the corner. Nobody wants to think of an unwanted child! That’s a horrible proposition! It’s possible a Beach Boys’ song would accompany the end of the scene as we are holding each other, as trepidation turns to joy. It’s all going to be fine!
Instead we perch on the edge of our new sofa, he puts his head in his hands and neither of us talks until the sun has set so low someone gets up to switch on a light.
I met Rich several times before I met-met him, because, I argue now, I wasn’t ready for the onslaught of love and feelings. I was helping out with the