So it seemed my body was actually siding with the baby now, too. It was coming round to the idea of growing a healthy child. Which was hard when all my comforts – reflexology, aromatherapy, sex – were being stripped from me. I got very dramatic when my mum suggested a hot bath might not be a great idea.
‘I read that if it’s too hot it could harm the baby. Plus the pH of your vagina is sensitive so bubble bath might irritate it, which is no good because you shouldn’t really take antibiotics.’
‘GOD, MUM! Is there anything I can do? Can I take a shit in peace or WILL IT HURT THE BLOODY BABY?!’
‘Just don’t push too hard, darling!’ she called after me.
I tried to slam the bathroom door and cursed its slow-close safety fixtures. Great for not smashing a kid’s fingers if you have one, not so much if it’s you who wants to throw a tantrum.
Neither my mum nor Rich would acknowledge the logistical flaws in this new life plan, either. Whenever I mentioned worries about how I’d continue to work and therefore pay the mortgage, my mum would say something like, ‘It’ll be fine,’ or ‘Well, there’s never a good time!’ If there’s never a good time, why the fuck do people ever have babies at all? I wondered. I’m pretty sure if I’d been suggesting buying a second house, they’d have some objections. But that was safely off the table because no mortgage advisor would be able to sanction such a thing. A similarly expensive investment by way of a baby? Shockingly, nobody’s doing risk assessment on that.
So I called my uncle. He is a very wise man who has self-helped himself into a pretty solid mental state, and is always called upon by every generation to give advice on money, work, relationships and dry wall. It’s weird because he’s never had kids, has never married and he works for himself, but I think it’s the fact he always seems happy and his irrepressible can-do attitude that makes him the ultimate agony uncle. You want to travel? Do it. You want to sell up and live on a barge? Why not? And so it was decided he would help this reluctant mother-to-be reconcile her Beyoncé-styled feminist stance on womanhood with impending motherhood.
‘I don’t see how this is going to change everything if you don’t want it to,’ said THE MAN WITH NO KIDS AND NO UTERUS. ‘I mean, you decide how you want to play it, it’s your kid. You and Rich are smart enough to make it work. Look how many women carry on working and socialising?’ He basically told me to Lean In. It was what I needed to hear.
‘I don’t even know if you have to move out of the flat – kids are small for ages, right? For now, just call your boss, sooner rather than later, and see what she says. If she’s adamant you can’t do the job, you’ll know and you can make a different plan. But it’s really her call, so find out and you’ll have all the facts.’
He was right, and in my head this handed at least an aspect of the decision over my future to someone else, which I liked the idea of. Yes, my boss could decide if the idea of parenthood was viable for us.
Rich finally made his way into an empty room and we lay together holding hands. He told me if this wasn’t the right time for us to have a baby we could discuss … the alternatives. Just like that, the unmentionable had almost been mentioned. There was something about laying it out like that, making it real, giving me the very real chance to say, I don’t want this, which set me free. It was all it took to make me breathe again. I thought about it. If I didn’t have a baby it would mean an easier ride at work, that we could plough on unimpeded in many ways. But for some reason, even though this pregnancy had seemed like the worst shock, it was softening around me. It seemed less of a doomed situation. I felt scared, and when had that ever stopped me from doing anything? I mean, apart from waxing my bikini line. I wasn’t ready to throw a baby shower and buy a cot, but I was getting closer to accepting pregnancy, which was easy since I couldn’t see or feel it yet. I asked Rich what he wanted, and realised he just looked truly knackered. He shrugged and said he felt it wasn’t the best time, and he was worried about my career.
‘You’ve worked so hard to get here to this point, and I know it’s hard to risk all that.’
‘So if I wasn’t worried, if I could carry on working, would you want this baby?’
‘I think there are so many questions though – how would we make it work? But ultimately, I guess we just would.’
He’s very good, isn’t he? Didn’t overtly lay the entire decision at my feet but didn’t commit to his own opinions either. He was just supportive and patient.
‘What about partying with your friends and your career, and what about the flat?’
‘Well, those things will be there whenever we decide to have kids, won’t they?’
I decided to try on a different hat for a moment. I’d never delivered this as good news; I’d rung him bawling my head off, after all.
‘Fuck it,’ I said, ‘Let’s have a baby.’
‘OK, bubs.’
He said later it was like a switch had been flicked inside me, some kind of maternal ignition or something. The mood had changed and he went with it.
So I decided to get my ducks in a row, starting with work. I plumped for an email because 1. I am chicken shit 2. I still couldn’t talk coherently, and knew for sure heaving over the phone was not going to help my cause. I’ve always hated that a phone call gives you the opportunity to talk in the wrong place, to stumble over your words. My boss replied – congratulations, I still want you for the job, we’ll see how it goes.
Oh! So it’s fine then. Huh.
It felt as if the final concerns had been washed away by this woman who couldn’t see any harm in me doing both – pregnancy and a job – so now I really had the chance to mould this situation to suit us. It felt like she was all, you can handle both – you can do it. It didn’t have to be the end of life as we knew it.
I carried on feeling sick, hopeful that I’d feel better at 12 weeks because I’d heard this was quite likely. I was counting down the days, either sweating under a blanket on my mum’s sofa or sleeping. Usually sleeping.
When I was 10 weeks pregnant, I had a bleed. Nothing dramatic but a definite red bloom in the gusset, sticky and ominous. I called the antenatal unit at the hospital and was finally put through to a midwife who was eating her lunch at her desk.
‘Nothing you can do, love,’ was her brusque summation. ‘It might be that you’re miscarrying but we don’t do scans this early on, so you’ll know at your 12-week scan. If you lose a lot of blood, call 999.’ And that was it. I might be miscarrying, I might not. It could all be gone in the next 12 hours if the blood continued to come and the little clot of cells fell out of me.
I felt that hot prickling around my hairline, a signal that my body was preparing to fight or flee. Interesting, I thought, I’m definitely not relieved. I am worried. I don’t want to miscarry, actually. The contrary brain had turned. The fragility of this baby came shrieking into my brain, and I felt protective. An hour or so later, I was reading the copy of What To Expect When You’re Expecting, which my mum had popped on my bedside table weeks ago and had sat there gathering dust ever since. I let them talk to me as if I was a happy, expectant mother, as if this was all part of the plan and I was now excitedly entering the second trimester. Suddenly, when it was suggested in real terms of life and death – that this wasn’t a fait accompli I simply had to come round to – I could feel something different. By not worrying about my identity, my career or my relationship, something else broke through … An instinct? I’d be the first to call bullshit on that – I hate the idea that we’re biologically structured to make decisions that will make us good mothers – but just as the antenatal depression and sickness had felt out of my control, so too this new acceptance and sense of calm came without a rational thought.