Mums are parochial and stuck in the 80s – presumably because that’s where we’ve banished our own mums to. They’re subsumed by domestic drudgery, hoovering in the background of the real narrative, ready to cook or wipe a bum. They are overcome with tiredness and the shame of having no sexual appeal whatsoever. In fact, they have sex only to have more babies, surely?
My mum the wild child
It’s weird that I was so convinced by this depressing idea of motherhood, when my own mum wasn’t really like that. It turns out that although she and my dad had been trying for a baby for a couple of weeks when she got pregnant she still had the same pangs as me, worried about the changes she would be going through. Maybe more so, given that her own parents had split up when she was a child and her mum had never really recovered, dying of a broken heart when she was just 58, all her birds having flown the nest. My mum, in comparison, was a wild child. She didn’t so much dabble in drugs as body-slam herself full force into bags of speed and weed. She had a lot of sex with a lot of people. When she met my dad she was a theatre stage manager, working late into the night, partying hard and sleeping until the matinée started the whole cycle again the next day.
‘What did you do on Sundays?’ I once asked. She couldn’t remember there being any Sundays.
Then she met my Dad. She was in love. So in love that she – the least maternal person ever to walk the earth, she says – married him (even though he had six children) and decided to have a baby.
When she got pregnant her sisters laughed and her dad shook his head gravely. She’d been babysitting my baby cousin for a full 30 minutes when he’d rolled off the bed and cracked his head open on the floor. It was a terrifying prospect. But she quit the fags and coffee, got really fat and eventually bore me into the world.
She wasn’t like the other mums. She didn’t bake or sew or knit. She dyed her hair pink. I never thought of her as ‘mumsy’. She and my dad were considered ‘a bit showbiz’ by my friends’ parents, I think because they had a lot of gay friends and said ‘cunt’ a lot. They threw parties, were out every weekend and she was a force to be reckoned with – a strident feminist and purveyor of crude jokes in a village of doctors and accountants, all of whom voted Tory and sailed every weekend.
She never ‘settled’ in motherhood, she still thought everything could be bigger and better. With her on the PTA the school fete suddenly went from a little jumble sale to a gala for over 3,000 people with celebrity guests, hot-air balloon rides and a remote broadcast from the local radio station.
Mumness
So it was weird that I was really preoccupied with an image of mums cleaning floors and loading the washing machine – great work, advertising industry! Drinking insipid tea in front of daytime television with a worried look on your face. I think I got this from Neighbours or Coronation Street. I was also painfully aware I’d need to learn how to make gravy. That seemed important somehow.† ‘MUM’ was the refrain moaned by pre-teen boys in grass-stained football shorts or precocious girls with gappy teeth and pigtails. It was a word always whined or howled in my head.
Of course, it ended up being the most loved sound in my universe – when my kid first mumbled ‘mama’ it was like I’d discovered who I most wanted to be right there. So in the right hands, when it was her saying it, it was the most beautiful sound, like liquid gold. To be fair, she once called me a slut (having heard it on the radio, mind – nothing to do with me) and even that sounded bloody lovely. If I reduce it right down to its fundamental parts, it’s love: motherhood is love. So the name really has bugger-all importance. But back to pregnant me, who had no idea that would be the case.
I wasn’t even on Instagram back then. I didn’t have that group of women saying, ‘Look, you can wear neons and you can get shit pierced and take your kid to gigs! Look at our snazzy backpacks and our gin!’ Without social media, your tribe is whatever you have in front of you. And I was working in an industry where having a baby could end you unless you pretend like it didn’t happen. A baby in a sling was about as likely to win me work as suddenly admitting I had shagged the boss. Actually, less so, because most magazines wouldn’t want me to write about my experience of childbearing.
But then the cold jelly was dolloped onto my stomach, that weird barcode reader was pushed down hard and we heard the swooshing ‘thud-thud-thud’ of a heartbeat. I looked at Rich – Oh my God, are those tears in his eyes?! Is he … is he crying?! – and missed the baby coming into view. When I looked back at the screen it looked like a little puppet. It had the hiccups, according to the sonographer, and we watched as it bounced off its soft bed, limbs flailing like a little Thunderbird. It didn’t look biological at all, it was mechanical and cloudy, like really bad TV.
‘But I can’t feel it,’ I said, completely unable to see this image on the screen as a snapshot of my insides. Not like with a transvaginal scan, where you can feel the probe knocking your ovaries like a piñata. It still wasn’t a baby there on the screen, but it definitely looked like something which might grow into one. Rich was transfixed and I felt bad that I wasn’t bonding with the squiggly little creature that could have been anywhere. It was still sexless in my head, without an identity. But I took the picture they printed and tried to see Rich and I in the image. There was my long chin at any rate, but the long hooked nose looked like a little old man’s. I stared at the picture long and hard to try and see our future – this is our kid, I thought, this is our kid. This is Rich’s kid! I love Rich and this is his child, inside me. This is my very own kid … It didn’t really work, but I’ve never been very good at pep talks.
Then we left and went back to real life, away from this crazy world where we gazed into my belly, and pressed on with the present.
I nearly puke on Anna Wintour
When you’re pregnant you can deal in these diametric opposites quite comfortably as the future is all hypothetical and you can’t imagine not being in control of your own destiny. Moving on from the fear of a baby changing everything, I had resolved that it would change nothing. I don’t want to go to soft play or parks, so I just won’t! I thought, making a mental list of the things I didn’t like about childcare and so would just not indulge. I practised full-scale denial, thanks to the advice of mostly childless people and from reading books by women who had nannies, even though I knew we’d never be able to afford one.
And continuing as if nothing was going to change was actually completely possible during my second trimester, as my energy returned and the sickness calmed down. My belly started growing but the bump was still very much of IBS-bloating proportions and sometimes barely appeared at all. I hadn’t bought a stitch of maternity wear, I was working out the perfect anti-nausea routine in readiness for a return to work, and I was about to prove my theories and capabilities in the most sane way I thought possible: attending Fashion Week. Unfortunately, it would instead be the moment I narrowly missed vomiting on Anna Wintour.
To give you a bit of background information, when I left university I went straight to The Times as a fashion intern. From day 1 at the newspaper, I was hooked. I had a string of badly paid internships and quickly realised that to make the knockbacks and hard graft worthwhile I would need to become fiercely ambitious.
I eventually got a job at Vogue based solely on the fact that my boss at The Times gave me a good reference, and that I spoke Italian (which actually was not true).
Then a job as an actual WRITER came up at Glamour, where I stayed until I’d amassed enough experience to go it alone as a freelance beauty writer. I compiled a list of dream