COPYRIGHT

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First published as Mum Face by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

This edition published 2019

© Grace Timothy 2018

Cover layout design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

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Grace Timothy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008278700

Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008271015

Version: 2019-02-06

Praise for Lost in Motherhood

‘At turns hilarious, horrifying and always painfully honest, [this] is a memoir about how one woman ‘gained a baby and lost her shit.’ This is the side of motherhood and what it can do to your mental health and your labia that isn’t covered in NCT classes.’

SARRA MANNING, Red Magazine

‘A spit-out-your-tea funny chronicle of becoming a mum for the first time, from the awkwardness of making friends on maternity leave to the politics of post-baby sex. A great read.’

Marie Claire

‘An honest take on the way we approach and define motherhood. It made me laugh and Grace is a refreshing voice on the subject.’

LORRAINE CANDY, Sunday Times Style

‘Hilarious in parts, poignant in others, reading Grace’s musings on motherhood felt like stumbling across the diary of a witty classmate. I wanted to hug her, thank her for reassuring me that I’m not alone in questioning my self-identity as a mother and then I wanted to invite her to the pub so we could chat about pregnancy wind and post-birth coital relations. Five stars plus a little bit of laughter-wee.’

SARAH TURNER, author of The Unmumsy Mum

‘I howled with laughter’

LUCY PAVIA, Marie Claire

‘Honestly brilliant’

EMINE RUSTON, Psychologies magazine

‘This is the best book my daughter ever wrote about her vagina.’

CHRISTOPHER TIMOTHY

‘Grace takes a deeper, more raw look at what being a mother means for a modern woman. Like Bryony Gordon did for the twenty-somethings in the Wrong Knickers, Grace has now shone a similarly funny and candid light on motherhood. She has managed to express exactly how I felt as a new mum, but in the way you’d like your funniest motherhood anecdote to be told.’

HELEN WHITAKER, author of The School Run

‘A friend of mine just had her first baby. I didn’t send her champagne or flowers or breast pads. I sent her Grace’s book. I’m now that baby’s godmother. It’s that good.’

GEORGIA TENNANT

‘Low on data but high on empathy, this is the memoir on the overwhelming identity crisis that becoming a mother can be.’

The Pool

‘This book absolutely blew me away.’

RUTH CRILLY

‘Grace writes with wicked wit and real emotional resonance too – even though I’m not a mother I related deeply to her exploration of what it’s like to navigate the world as a woman, and the expectations that are placed upon us all.’

DAISY BUCHANAN, author of How To Be A Grown Up

‘Brilliant!’

CLEMMIE TELFORD

‘Such a good read, even for us dads. There’s talk of vaginas, babies, IKEA chairs and, er, more vaginas.’

JAMIE DAY

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my girl, of course. Kid, you made me as much as I made you, and the world is so much better with you in it. I love you. Thanks for your patience, your joyousness and your helpful notes. You’re already wise and funny beyond your years. I’m excited about you, bubs – go get it.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Lost in Motherhood

Dedication

PROLOGUE

PART I: THE THREAT

1. THE FIRST TRIMESTER/SHOCK

2. THE SECOND TRIMESTER/DENIAL

3. THE THIRD TRIMESTER/ACCEPTANCE

PART II: THE STRUGGLE

4. BIRTH

5. 0–3 MONTHS

6. 3–6 MONTHS

7. 6–12 MONTHS

PART III: THE CRISIS

8. CRISIS TALKS

9. RECOVERY

10. THE WORST NEWS

11. RELAPSE

12. A NICE FOOT RUB

13. I EVENTUALLY SELF-SOOTHE, I THINK

THE AFTERBIRTH

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

I attempt to sit still, to look as relaxed and open as possible, but I’m on one of those chairs that leans back on a bendy frame. You know the ones? That kind of plastic-looking blonde wood with a creamy-coloured leather cushion. I looked it up online after our session – it’s from IKEA (obviously) and it’s called ‘Poang’, which is Swedish for ‘point’. As in, what’s the point? I think people buy them as nursing chairs, too.

Well, I would have lost a nipple if I’d tried to breastfeed in this chair, let me tell you. My stomach muscles were shot to hell once I’d given birth and I’d have been about as steady on a rocking chair as a drunken eel. Plus, my vagina was so mashed up, the idea of grinding it back and forth on a beech veneer would have broken me for good. I definitely rocked in those early days, but it was more of the rocking-in-a-dark-corner type of move, deprived of sleep and a functioning pelvic floor. The sort you can do on completely immobile furniture or even the floor.

You have to be so cocky to make one of these chairs rock gently and comfortingly, and not throw you off like a spooked horse. I am not cocky or relaxed in this scenario, and have to slam my feet down suddenly to steady myself. I’m aware it’s made me look uneasy. One false move and you look like you can’t handle it. This chair is basically a metaphor for motherhood and the predicament I find myself in now.

I am sitting here in a stranger’s living room with no shoes or socks on. Bit weird. It’s OK, I’m actually here for a nice bit of reflexology, with a birthday voucher from my mum and I’m finally getting round to using it six months later, on the day it expires. ‘You deserve a bit of a treat, darling,’ she’d told me at the time, ‘You look a bit knackered.’ Weird way to kick me when I’m down, I think, smiling through clenched teeth at the thought of trying to fit in this so-called treat, and of the new electric toothbrush I’d hinted at for three weeks. But my mum volunteered to babysit and now here I am on Pat’s Poang, answering her questions about my medical history.

I’m an easy customer in this respect – no operations, no medications, no family history of diabetes. Uneventful pregnancy and straight-forward vaginal delivery. Couple of stitches, nothing to write home – or down on a form – about. I don’t have so much as a high blood pressure or a tennis elbow, so we whizz through the checklist. A nice little foot rub, I think to myself, Might be awkward when she finds the verruca I picked up at BabySwim, but otherwise, I’ll just sit here, relax, be serene … Then she says it:

‘And how about your emotional wellbeing, how are you feeling right now?’

I smile, a smile I plaster on my face, which should say I’m fine! But usually makes people take a step back and ask, ‘Are you sure?’ from a safe distance. It’s become my ‘mum face’ – the mask that covers up the underlying cocktail of anxiety and bewilderment which has been simmering since I gave birth nearly three years ago. But this time, it slips:

‘I would say … well, I am maybe a bit anxious. Well, a lot. And most of the time, too.’

‘Oh?’ She doesn’t seem surprised, ‘And why’s that?’

‘Mainly because I love my daughter so much I’m terrified I’ll lose her or fuck it all up for her. I don’t think I was ready to have kids and I have literally no idea what I’ll do when she starts nursery because I don’t know who I am anymore without her.’ This sounds much worse out loud than in my head and I think perhaps I’ve overdone it a bit. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love being a mum!’ Reel it back in. Don’t call the Social, don’t take her away! ‘But I find myself just bowling through the routine every day and then feel a bit joyless when she’s gone to bed. Like, what’s it all for? I mean, I really enjoy my job, but doing it makes me feel guilty, plus, I’m not sure I’m very good at it any more. Is she even having a nice time? I don’t have much of a social life anymore; I don’t really have many friends nearby. I don’t really know what to say half the time. I’ve also lost my sex drive,’ – I soundlessly mouth ‘sex drive’ rather than say it out loud – ‘my body, my name even …’ I pause – the massive digital clock on the wall flickers to 10.25 and breaks my flow. It’s a beautiful autumnal day and I catch a glimpse of golden leaves and rolling hills outside as the Roman blind is blown away from the window for a second. It feels good sharing like this out of my family’s earshot.

‘So you feel it’s changed you, Grace? Becoming a mother?’

One minute I was just me, doing my thing. I defined myself by my likes and dislikes, my desires, career and relationships. I did whatever I wanted to do. After years of body-image battles, I finally felt like the agent of my own body and I’d grown to understand how it worked. No matter how far I travelled or how my life changed slightly, the constant was the familiarity of my own self. But a cursory New Year’s shag before the takeaway curry arrived was enough to change my life forever. In that instant, I lost control of my body and mind as they were repurposed to grow a baby. My identity started to slide off me as hormones and then love infiltrated every thought and feeling. The colleagues, friends and even strangers who played a part in shaping and supporting my sense of self slipped away, work dwindled as every hour became a moment in my child’s life. I felt like I had to fight twice as hard to have a voice. My confidence was knocked by the constant feedback from everyone and their suffocating deluge of opinions and anecdotes. I tried to fit in everywhere – old life, new life – and didn’t fit in anywhere.

It doesn’t matter how you come to motherhood – biologically, by adoption or surrogacy – it changes everything. You are now a MUM. What I experienced is an identity crisis which no social group, age, creed or race is immune to. It’s something I’ve heard of in different forms from every mother I’ve ever met, an uncomfortable truth that belies the belief that being a mother is the most natural thing a woman could do. From the physical and emotional changes you encounter to the way your agenda and daily life is altered, your identity is constantly up for redefinition. ‘I thought I was patient,’ I would think to myself, ‘I thought I was bright …’ And you’re expected to shelve these concerns because you don’t matter anymore. Not compared to the baby, how you’re working to help shape her identity.

My coat is folded over my lap and my fingers are burrowing through the pocket where a thread has come loose. I tug at it, pushing my fingertips through the ragged seam into the lining. This coat is enough of an answer to this question. I find a small, plastic toy fish floating around. Found Nemo, didn’t I? That would obviously never have happened to me before I had a child. Nor would the crispy Wet Wipe I’m nudging aside. Nor the coat itself – a navy blue, knee-length puffa coat, waterproof, functional and covered in stains. You don’t have a coat like this unless you’re a mum or a shepherd.

In truth, I’m unrecognisable from the person I was just three or four years ago, before I got pregnant. If you’d told me back then that I’d be sitting here now deep in the Sussex countryside, wearing leggings that bag around the knees and pouring my heart out to a total stranger in a beige tunic, I would have called bullshit. Back then I was invincible and so sure of myself.

But here I am in this ugly chair, one finger now tangled in the lining of my mum-coat, mid identity crisis. I’ve lost sass and flirting, and about 65 per cent of my labia. I’ve lost perspective and 5,689 hours of sleep. I don’t stride or strut now; I hurry and chivvy, usually weighed down by my child, umpteen bags or a scooter. The responsibility is weighing heavy too, for this person I love so intensely – I am her advocate, I am her carer, and I have to get it right. But can I ever be good enough, be the parent she so deserves and I am in no way qualified to be? And where am I, where is the confident person I was before? I am now the wife who blackmails her husband for lie-ins, who criticises the way he looks at his phone when his child is asking him a question. I’m the woman who drives around for hours on end if it’ll help my kid nap, rather than face the screaming and ultimate failure of putting her in her cot and hoping for the best. I forget to turn up to things, I flake out on the nights out I used to live for, knowing the next day will be unbearable. I stand back from conversations with new people, no longer sure of how to introduce myself.

The simple bits of being a mum are obviously awesome – everyone knows how good it feels to hold your child, to laugh with them, to share their joy and see things afresh through their eyes. Even the more mundane bits can be an unexpected treat – it always surprises me how much I enjoy washing and drying her clothes, for example. I pick up the scrap of cardboard that holds the yoghurts together and tell my husband, ‘Ah, we’ll make something out of that’. I absolutely love being my child’s mother; nothing has made me happier, or could ever make me happier than being her mother. Nobody could love her more.

And this kid – she is the most amazing child. If I can’t excel at parenting this one, I’m seriously inadequate. She is incredible, the best thing ever. But the stuff is harder than anything I’ve ever endured. It’s hard sharing the experience and responsibility with someone else who may not always agree with you, the loss of sex and intimacy with that person, the onslaught of self-doubt. It’s hard to get through each day on so little sleep and then each night – hallucinating, nursing, arguing, worrying and begging for rest. I feel guilty when I’m not with her, guilty when I’m with her that I’m thinking about not being with her, or because we’re watching too much TV. I’m always tired, always.

I’ve been policing myself, too – cautioning myself not to become that kind of mum or that kind of woman. No sugar, no soft play, no iPad, no tacky plastic shit, no chemicals … but also, like, super-relaxed and laid-back. My ambitions have been compromised, of course they have, but what’s worse is that it bothers me. I’m also bad at work now, and when work’s going well, I’m bad at being a mum. And I’m scared every single day, scared she’ll die, that I’m doing it wrong, that I’m letting her down. I realise neither Pat nor I have said a word for a long time now.

‘Soooo, will we do the foot rubbing bit now?’ I ask eventually.

‘If you want to, but we can just talk if you’d like?’

Uh oh, sounds like Pat might be moonlighting as a therapist here, I think. Oh, I shouldn’t have said anything. When I’m not forthcoming, Pat places her pad down on the floor and reaches out to hold my hands in hers.

‘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.’

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

THE FIRST TRIMESTER/SHOCK

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 that was generally confined to my gynaecologist and my husband, and before that, a brief but distinguished list of men in their late teens/early 20s. And most of them didn’t discuss it per se, as much as compliment it or suggest it be better groomed.

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 Mr Nottingham University pageant, which he entered, and had a boyfriend at the time, so I wasn’t primed to see him as a prospective baby daddy. His special talent was to down two bottles of wine in under a minute, and then set his balls on fire. He also sang ‘Wonderful Tonight’ while stark-bollock naked, but I think I was in the loo at the time. I was introduced to him again at a party a month later, where he’d just had his head shaved for charity, but again I don’t remember it – not ready. I needed to fuck around a bit longer and flirt with my friends’ brothers, etc. When I did properly meet him, he annoyed and interested me, which is of course a fatal mix. He was one of four irascibly arrogant, attractive freshers who turned up late to Rag orientation, just as I was halfway through my speech as a committee member. I balled them out for it but took note of his blue eyes, cool glasses and the ridiculous way he was wearing two T-shirts at once. And while I publicly raged against arrogance, it basically turned me on (I was 20 years old, nowadays I just rage). Even though he was pretty direct, I could never tell whether he was joking or not. He was really funny, acerbic, incredibly rude and a showman, and I dug it. But once I’d made the first move (drunkenly standing on his feet, thinking I was playing footsy, and then just shoving my tongue in his mouth), it turned out he was also deliciously kind, sweet, clever and sane. Definitely not my type – I liked them dark, swarthy and mean – but it was a nice change. He was so level-headed and patient, which was comforting to a highly neurotic crackpot like me.

He’s from Barnsley and had only left the UK for UK-extensions, like Faliraki and Kavos. His ambition had been to open a cocktail bar OR fight fire (mainly with the view to nailing chicks), with no ambitions to go to university. His teachers thought otherwise because he was really clever, but it wasn’t until a friend’s father suffered a massive stroke that he decided to study physiotherapy at university, thinking he could be pivotal in the rehab of people like his friend’s dad. I know – whatta guy. Nearly 11 years later that’s what he does – helps people learn to walk again. He’s basically a good man with a questionable sense of humour.

We are the stereotypes of our regions in the flesh – I’m every bit the southerner his parents feared I would be (precious, fussy, always cold), and he’s every bit the northerner my parents hoped he’d be (calm, stoic, economically sensible).

He’s got lips like Tom Hardy and despite the fact he has mousy-brown hair, is convinced he’s blond. He’s got a dead tooth up front where he flipped over the railings inside a double decker bus with a beer bottle between his teeth. He has a broad but soft Yorkshire accent, and swears in a southern accent – a hint that perhaps he didn’t swear at all before he moved down here. He’s always very good at everything, even if it’s his first time. From table tennis and playing the ukulele to useful things like building a shed and card tricks. He’s a bit tight; slightly sloppy when drunk and when he buys something he has to check its price remains the same online in the weeks afterwards. He’s kind, quietly and understatedly. Kids love him. Everyone loves him.

I’d had boyfriends before we met at 20, but I’d never felt this genuinely worshipped, and it made for a heady end to my second year at uni. One time we staggered back from a night out and there was a sign on the old fridge which my landlord had dumped in the front garden, saying to ‘look inside’. He had filled the whole thing with cheese, massive blocks bought from the cash and carry, like gold bullion in a safe. It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for me. When I graduated, I continued to go up to visit, and when he graduated, the following summer, he moved down to Chichester to my parents’ house. When we both got jobs – his as a physio and mine as a writer – we moved to Brighton, where we’ve been ever since. He is still the anchor that keeps me sane but also laughing until I pee, and although he is nearly a whole year younger than me, he is always the more emotionally robust of the two of us. I often look to him for a measure of a situation, when I don’t know what to think. So the fact that he wasn’t jumping at the news was making me even more nervous. It’s his baby too, and he’s more worried than me.

Proper weepy

The next day, after dreaming about growing phantom babies that were actually kittens, I wondered if maybe the problem was that my husband is so laid-back and rarely visibly excited (I blame his northern upbringing) that I just hadn’t been buoyed along yet? Maybe I need to seek out the joy, absorb it like osmosis from someone who will be really excited. So I hopped on the train to see my mum. I placed the two positive pregnancy tests on the table, and predictably enough she squealed with joy. I was banking on her reaction making me feel happy but the bitter tears came again, the inexplicable sadness. I couldn’t say those words – I AM PREGNANT – without sobbing.

‘I’ve saved all your Sylvanians, darling!’ she says, as if this would steady my nerves.

She realised the escalating price of toys wasn’t the problem, and held me for what seemed like hours.

I dodged calls from friends, came off Twitter and I put on my out-of-office. I told Rich I wanted to be sure how I felt about it before I dealt with how other people felt about it. Deep down, I think I wanted the option to back out of the pregnancy, but also because in telling people, they would start seeing me differently too. I didn’t want people to start vying for my job or friends to discard me on the pregnant pile. I shut myself away and didn’t deal with it at all. Until my body forced me to deal with it.

I’m just like Kate Middleton

I was back at my mum’s a few days later when I was suddenly punched in the throat by a wave of nausea, which never let up. I crawled into bed and there I stayed.

‘Oof. Oooooof, oooooof. Oof,’ was all I could say. Almost the French for egg, interestingly, seeing as it was an oeuf implanting itself in my womb and causing me to feel like I could fill a stadium with my hot, sour vomit.

The early symptoms of pregnancy are the first hint that you are slipping from your own narrative. You hand over your body and mind to your baby and to everyone who has an opinion on how you should look and feel. For me, it felt like my body was turning against me, like the priority was already switching from me to my baby, who as yet was just a cluster of cells. My body changed in a flash; I had lost control already. As I was at my mum’s when this tsunami hit, there I stayed. It was insane! My every cell vibrated with the need to vom and that sappy taste sat on my tongue like an oyster. My mum wedged halved Cheerios between my cracked lips so I wasn’t starving her grandchild, but otherwise I didn’t eat and I would spend up to 10 minutes trying to swallow a single mouthful of water.

It wasn’t just the mornings either – it rolled through my body 24 hours a day, waking me from sleep. I couldn’t escape it. Lying down, sitting up – it was all like riding a rollercoaster – and I couldn’t read or focus on the TV to distract me.

My acute sense of smell meant that I knew Rich was entering the house before I heard him. His aftershave, his breath, a cigarette he’d walked past that morning – it was all burning the hairs out of my nose, making me hate him. Hate him! This prick with a penchant for pickled onion Monster Munch was clearly out to piss me off.

‘YOU HAD A KFC, DIDN’T YOU? ADMIT IT! YOU SELFISH ARSEHOLE!’

Weirdly, he stopped asking me how I was feeling about the baby around then. And with my mum hovering like a nervous nurse, wringing her hands and counting Cheerios, it was easy to avoid the conversation altogether. I think he assumed I would be dead soon, anyway.

I felt so weak and so sad now; the need to stay in bed and sleep was overwhelming every other thought. This is what depression feels like, I thought one morning as I considered changing my pyjama bottoms but instead rolled over, a fresh wave of nausea drowning me under its sour wash. I had experienced brief pockets of depression in my teens, so I knew the familiar heaviness, the consistently tear-filled throat. Looking back, I definitely suffered from antenatal depression. It felt bottomless and constant.

It was pulling me under and away from decisive action, stopping me from making a plan to surface again and change. Suggesting anything as definitive as an abortion at this point felt too deliberate and I was wrung out, not capable of lifting my head from the pillow. I definitely thought about it. I was adamant I did not want to be a mother. And the craziest thing? I couldn’t tell anyone how I felt. Because the first thing a mother is expected to be is loving and grateful.

When I read about postnatal depression I felt a bell ringing – I’ve already had that, I thought, that’s how I felt as soon as I found out. Now I go to the PANDAS Foundation UK website and see that as many as one in 10 women will be depressed in pregnancy. As a clinically recognised diagnosis it is only about 20 years old, perhaps because the effects of pregnancy can make the most robust of women feel shit. The painful tits, the dizziness and breathlessness, the nausea, the realisation that your only source of support is a total bellend who can’t ball his own socks let alone care for a baby. But it can also be down to a hormone imbalance: levels of the hormones oestrogen and progesterone increase during pregnancy, which usually results in that ‘bloom’ women are supposed to enjoy as they gestate. But according to PANDAS, sometimes the placenta doesn’t produce enough progesterone, which can lead to chronic anxiety, incessant crying, lack of energy, isolation … yes, yes, yes, and hell, yes. Had I known this, I could have asked for help. But I assumed it was all part and parcel of me being such a bad potential mother.

Every outcome seemed wrought with sadness – having the baby, not having the baby – as I sunk lower and lower.

After years of routine smears finding those pre-cancerous cells you’ve got to have fished out from your cervix, I had a gynaecologist. It sounds grand, doesn’t it? – ‘MY GYNAECOLOGIST’ – but actually, it was the grim reality of having the suspect cells. I no longer needed to be referred by my GP, I was a regular at the salon-de-speculum. Anyway, when my mum eventually decided I wasn’t peeing often enough, she took it upon herself to call this gynaecologist (did I mention she was also my mum’s? YEP, we have the SAME gynaecologist) to ask her advice.

‘Bring her into the hospital this afternoon – I’ve got a clinic just outside the antenatal unit, I’ll squeeze her in.’

Perks of having a terrifying vagina, guys! Straight in! I was pulled from my bed, whimpering, refusing to put on clothes.

‘Could you just breathe through your nose?’ I asked my mum, tsking her appalling breath, as she drove me to the hospital, my neck craning out of the window like a dog.

‘Yes, you’re definitely pregnant, Grace, congrats!’ the gynaecologist crowed, as the transvaginal scan revealed a tiny, peanut-sized lump lying in my womb. ‘And there’s only one baby, great! I was worried about twins or triplets with the way you’re feeling,’ she qualified, cheerily.

‘Yay!’ I whispered. I cried quietly as she ran through all the brilliant things about this baby – the scan was showing it to be the perfect size, the placenta was on track, it would have a September birth, which is excellent … I mean, what fucking brilliant news, September you say? I’m so pleased that this foetus will most likely excel at school because it’ll be old for its year. Marvellous. But now what about if it was born in 2020? Because I think that might work better, actually? When I feebly mumbled I was scared for my vagina, she assured me that the vagina could be stitched up like any other battered body part – ‘it might actually be better afterwards’, she said, winking at my husband.

Then my test results came back and it turned out my ketones – the acid that remains when your body burns through its own fat because it has little else to burn for energy – were really high. Like, anorexic-in-hospital-for-a-feeding-tube high. So they decided to admit me, put me on a drip and try medication for the nausea.

I was officially diagnosed with Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG), which once Kate Middleton was diagnosed in 2012 became all the rage. Back then, I’d never heard of it. It’s a condition affecting 1 per cent of women suffering with sickness in pregnancy, according to Pregnancy Sickness Support. Symptoms include hardcore pregnancy sickness which could actually harm you and the baby, if left untreated. So if you took pregnancy sickness and gave it some crack and some Red Bull and said, go to town on that woman’s gag reflex, bitch, that’s it. The causes are unclear, but I suspected it was thanks at least in part to the fact I wasn’t that up for having a baby right now.

I felt like a massive failure, taking the drugs. Mainly because I hadn’t considered the risk to the baby until my mum had piped up. But also because my body – according to the doctor – needed the drugs. If I didn’t get a handle on the nausea, the pregnancy could end anyway.

It looked and felt as though I was dying. The nausea might last the entire nine months, said the gynaecologist, but they could make my body a bit more hospitable for the baby. Wait, why is nobody seeing what a terrible idea this is and suggesting it would be safer to end the whole debacle? I have very narrow hips. I silently begged them to find a medical reason we had to abort, using just my eyes. Which of course didn’t work. I wanted to talk to Rich, but he was ushered out with my mum so I could rest. It was as if he’d faded away from this picture altogether – it was just me being poked and prodded for signs of life.

When my mum came in to collect me the next day I stared at the TV, answering her questions with a grunt or a sigh. I was so cross with everyone who was meant to be on my side but had already sided with this new baby, who nobody had even met yet. I had been hospitalised! I had a cannula sticking out of my hand because the acid coursing through my veins would otherwise kill me! I am SO ill! Why is everyone congratulating me? I cried some more.

Back at home, my mum helped me shower and propped me up in her bed, facing the TV, just as she had done the last time I had puked Gallo rosé wine all over my own bed 10 years before. The drip had definitely taken the edge off and the medication was dulling the nausea so that rather than feeling violently sick with every breath, I could almost picture myself eating dry toast one day without heaving.

The best thing that’ll ever happen to you?

When you’re pregnant and feel ill-equipped, you say things like ‘What if I drop it or slip over and squash it?’ to your partner or your parents and they’ll hush you with platitudes, as if all those outcomes are impossible. Nobody’s going to suggest an abortion, no matter how scared you are. They might secretly be thinking, wow, she should NOT be having a baby, but they’ll never say it. Even my mum, who had delighted in the goriest details of my birth for the past 28 years, suddenly shut up shop on that particular theme, and just kept telling me that becoming a mother was the best thing she’d ever done.

That’s a pretty big statement, I thought. I appreciated the sentiment, of course – I was that baby that outdid every other experience she’d had to date – but … really? I mean, it was better than falling in love with my dad? Better than riding a motorbike in full leathers? She’d lived through some pretty incredible moments – first female prime minister, first woman in space, first computer, the advent of the NutriBullet … She’d nailed a dozen different careers, had accomplished so much. She’d seen friends beat cancer, she’d watched the Berlin Wall tumble down, she’d met Katharine Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman. She’d been a punk, a speed freak, an artist, an island-hopper – surely there must have been some serious highs in amongst all that hedonism? Before you had to ditch the Marlboro Reds and black coffee and rely on me – a jelly-mouthed baby with colic – for your kicks? Having a baby was the best? I hadn’t done nearly enough of all the other stuff yet, could it really eclipse all the other stuff I’d planned to do?

I realised I couldn’t have a straight chat with her about this – she was too deeply invested already, and she was One of Them – a mum. She couldn’t give objective or impartial advice on this. It felt like she was just full of massive Hallmark lies. And more lies: I was seriously ill but nobody would openly discuss the prognosis. I felt sure Rich and my mum were shaking their heads in the next room, wondering how they would raise this child together when I had died in labour.

Now, usually when I’d gone through something a bit shocking – an especially bad commute where there had been no free seats and I’d had to witness someone vomit into their briefcase, for example – I’d unwind with a little drink. I liked to sit on the windowsill in our bathroom, with a big glass of wine and very occasionally, a cigarette. I’d flop from there directly down into the bath and give myself a massive head rush from the combination of smoke and hot water (I’m actually a bit of a pussy when it comes to both of those two indulgences – I once passed out after half a Benson & Hedges at school). Clearly, cigarettes are a big no-no during pregnancy, but booze? Rich was adamant it was stupid to abstain altogether.

‘Have a glass,’ he said. ‘It’ll relax you and I’ve been reading up – it won’t hurt the baby.’

But the real kicker was that my body disagreed. The minute a bottle was opened I was overcome with the urge to throw up. The smell was unbearable. As was the smell of tea and coffee. And food.

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.

I just knew I wouldn’t miscarry. I knew this baby would come and although I wasn’t sure what would follow, I looked forward to that moment. Of course, I could very easily have miscarried and I’m astounded I didn’t. I am not a doctor, I know nothing. But the awful chemical reaction that was making me feel so hopeless and frightened seemed to slow, the hormones settled, and I was sure. I know, it sounds like I was properly crazy, and I was, but that’s hormones for you. Or at least, I hope it was the hormones. Otherwise I was/am properly crazy. I began to look beyond the immediate moment, just a little bit past it to the 12-week scan.

Oh, and by the way: I hate turtles. I hated getting up at 4.30am for our beach treks, I hated the smell when I had to dig down to help the little cretins reach the top, I hated the fact that you’d think they were dead, lodged in the sandy cavern, but then they’d suddenly flip around and spray sand in your face. I went on the trip to drink rum, meet guys and party with my friend, who had coerced me into including this turtle crusade in our itinerary so we had something to put on our CVs. I remember thinking, if these tiny creatures that everyone finds so cute are lost on me, I’m clearly NOT a maternal person in any way. But, remember: HORMONES.

* Am I a millennial? I suspect I’m too old. It’s loosely defined as one who reaches early adulthood in the 21st century, but I would argue I haven’t really reached adulthood yet.

† Just to clear something up (as that nice GP did with my chlamydia, thankfully) – I contracted this symptom-less disease when I was in my late teens. My boyfriend at the time, a lovely Catholic boy from the countryside, who waited patiently for months before having sex, was secretly riddled.

CHAPTER TWO

THE SECOND TRIMESTER/DENIAL

OK, nothing’s going to change. We are in control. We will be FINE. A baby is just us plus one.

A midwife calls me ‘mum’

The 12-week scan arrived and we sat alongside other women at various stages of pregnancy in a corridor outside the ultrasound room. We were back in Chichester because I hadn’t yet mustered the energy to leave my mum’s and go back to Brighton, it’s where Rich worked and my gynaecologist was right there. Without making any hard and fast decisions about how it would work when I was due to give birth, we had opted to register at this hospital, an hour’s drive from our flat.

A colleague of Rich’s waved at us – Rich, my mum and me – from across the room, his wife bulging at the seams, and thus our cover was blown. But it didn’t worry me now that we had a plan of sorts. Plus, we were a party of three – four, if you counted unborn foetus – so we stood out a bit. My dad was due to come but I wasn’t sure if it would be another transvaginal scan or not. Transvaginal is so not my dad’s thing, weirdly.

I still had trouble equating everything I felt with an actual baby – I felt like I had been hijacked, but possibly by some kind of government-funded scheme to secretly investigate chlamydia scar tissue in 28-year-old women. Not a bouncing baby. But the nausea had finally chilled out to a low-level feeling of crap, which I could thankfully eat through, so I was feeling better at any rate.

The midwife bellowed my name into the waiting room – cool, officially and publicly pregnant then, thanks, love. I was convinced that since I felt so inadequately equipped to become a mother everyone waiting probably thought I was too. I had this feeling that they all thought I was a young teen mum despite the fact that I definitely looked like a 28-year-old mum.

We went in and the nurse signalled to the bed while looking over my NHS-issued purple book of notes.

‘Now, if Mum could just jump up on the bed, and pop your jeans down, please.’ She was still looking at her notes, and so I wondered why on earth she would want my mum to pull her jeans down. Mum looked back at me with the same confusion, until Rich edged me towards the table. And just like that, this woman changed my name.

I felt like saying, Oh, actually, we’ve decided nothing’s going to change? Yeh, so just call me Grace. Grace is GOOD, thanks.

I really like my name. Grace is easy and singular. It’s what my parents chose and I love them very much. And so I love Timothy as well – it’s pretty much the only thing I have in common with my six half-siblings. It’s what I took into new schools as a little one, it’s the thing I still have from those days. In fact, other than a brief phase around eight or nine when I’d asked my parents to call me Olivia Graceland, I had always been called Grace. I didn’t qualify for nicknames really, because it’s not something that needed shortening and I probably didn’t have any strong enough traits to mark with a cool moniker. I didn’t even change my surname when I got married. As a journalist you work so hard to get it known, handing out business cards whenever possible, repeating it over and over so all and sundry know who to call back for another internship. I was by no means well known, but if I rocked up with another name all of a sudden, wouldn’t I be someone else? Wouldn’t I lose a key bit of myself, and potentially not be remembered? Rich had made a big deal of the ‘emotional emasculation’ in his wedding speech, but he was actually behind me on this. We hadn’t quite got to the whole what-will-our-kid-be-called? convo, and I had already decided I didn’t mind a bit if she or he was a Holmes. But anyway, I spent a bit of time thinking about it and explaining it, and now this stranger had changed my name in one swift move. I was officially ‘Mum’, despite the fact my child was a mere cluster of cells. I don’t even know why I’m defending this whole debacle actually – it’s my name, I want to keep it! End of!

Being referred to and introduced as ‘Baby’s Mum’ is as reductive as it gets. I mean, I am used to being introduced as something to place me in someone’s mind – so-and-so’s assistant, The Intern, Rich’s wife, Blonde Grace (at uni, I was one of two Graces, Boobs Grace and Blonde Grace) – but being called ‘Mum’ was a bit like being renamed.

I know it sounds like I was worried about losing my cool, but in all honesty, I was never cool. Anyone who mewls, ‘I used to work at Vogue!’ four years after they’ve left and relies on a knock-off designer handbag to help her be taken seriously in her industry isn’t genuinely cool or really that OK with her choices. BUT, I did have a sort of mask of cool perfected. I had some of the right clothes, I had focused on constructing this career that would take me to cool places where I would sweat profusely and wonder if I ever pronounced anything correctly. It was definitely a façade and I’m guessing the imposter syndrome was what was causing my upper lip to be perennially moist. It was a relief to go freelance and only have to maintain over email. But I did believe the last vestiges of anything resembling cool would trickle out of my vagina with the baby. Or, ideally, be delicately lifted from my insides by the surgeon who was performing the C-section I was fantasising about. Because I’d then forever be known as MUM.

And is it any wonder?! When do we fetishise or even celebrate motherhood in our vocabulary? When do we use the words in praise? In fact, my generation have advanced the field by adding the prefix ‘mum’ to things that are really rubbish, to really drive their naffness home. For example, ‘You’re such a mum’ – you nag, you worry, you piss everyone off, you big fat bore. ‘You’re so mumsy’ – you’re dowdy and dumpy and nobody fancies you. ‘Mom jeans’ – the ugliest fucking jeans known to man. They make your vagina look like a big ass and your ass look like a big vagina. FACT. ‘Mommy porn’ – 50 Shades of grammatical errors and submission-based sex. Yuck. I’ll take me some non-parent-related porn, thank you. ‘Mum hair’ – a really crap bob.* ‘Mum face’ – haggard, grey, tired-looking complexion. Probably teary. ‘Yummy Mummy’ – mum who makes a bit of an effort, which for me always had a whiff of the Readers’ Wives about them.

Sometimes ‘mothering’ someone can be kind of nice, but it’s 100 per cent sexless and non-exciting, and tends to be a way of gently pointing out you’re treating someone like a baby. Rather than being fabulous and dazzling, you’re patronising and basically suffocating another person.

So then, mums are tedious, past it and irreparably uncool. You are JUST A MUM. Nothing more than that, even though the ‘just’ suggests you ought to be. I sneered at the idea it would be the hardest job in the world, but fully believed it would be the most boring one. Once we’ve started to make progress on making BITCH and CUNT unacceptable, we’re going to have to explain ‘mum’ isn’t really such a hot diss. It’s just another way of reducing women, of dismissing and degrading them. And it totally worked on me.

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 titles I’d try to write for, and at the very top was American Vogue.

So when Style.com – the sister site from the same publisher – asked me to report backstage at London Fashion Week the week I was diagnosed with Hyperemesis Gravidarum, I was like, obviously, yes. At the time they were THE authority on the shows, I’d be mad to turn it down. And if I stepped aside for even one season I’d be quickly replaced by someone who wasn’t inconveniently breeding.

It was just a shame I felt so sick.

I decided to keep my ‘condition’ top secret from those around me.

The first show was at the top of a very high, very glass building, and as I’d over-planned I arrived about an hour early. I stepped out of the elevator, into a vast warehouse-style room, with all the action focused in one corner of rails and pop-up hairdressing stations. I took in the view and as I swayed aboard my ridiculous 4-inch heels, my mouth began to froth. NOT NOW, NOT NOW! I reached for a cracker and scoffed it down like the Cookie Monster, spraying flecks all around me. Then the lift pinged again and out stepped La Wintour. Maker and breaker of careers. Editor-in-chief of the magazine at the top of my wishlist, the doyenne of cut-throat fashion-ism. On any other day, had I not left the top button of my jeans undone and just sprayed water biscuit down my front, I would have approached her. I knew it could be a terrible idea, for sure – she had a brutal way of dismissing people, I’d heard – but her daughter had interned with me at Vogue and I’d met her again on a trip not long after and she was lovely, warm and generous. I had an opener. I wanted it so badly. I wasn’t scared, I was ballsy.

I’ll just go up to her and be all, HEY, ANNA! I know your daughter! Super-casual, just one professional to another. So I straightened my shirt, smoothed my hair down. I got ready to make the ultimate career move.

But instead? I burped. Like, really loudly. Loud enough that the people to the rear of her entourage cloud turned around. I turned around too, as if to ask, WHO WAS THAT?! Then I lurched forward, stumbled backwards, and then hid behind a rail of clothes for the next 40 minutes, dry heaving.

Well, this is new, I thought. Not the dry heaving at work – we’ve all done the morning-after-the-Christmas-party-retch – but the complete lack of control and professionalism in the face of a potentially big career moment. Being pregnant was definitely jamming my work mode and it scared me – what if, no matter how much I try to stay the same, it would actually be impossible? It was so frustrating and terrifying to feel the bit of me that got my mortgage paid and fulfilled my ambitions was under fire.

I managed to write the reports and by staying away from the other beauty editors who would have known what was up when they smelt my acrid breath and the fact that I wasn’t stealing the models’ croissants, nobody was any the wiser. And I decided that once the morning sickness had completely stopped, I’d be able to continue unchanged. The fact is, I’d been in the room with Anna and co., I was still allowed in. I just needed to rein in the impulse to vomit.

We need a new nest

OK, so I was still adamant that nothing had to change. But one thing really did – where we lived. Yes, quite a big thing, actually. The flat that we’d scrimped and saved for, and made our mark on by way of two floating shelves and a new catch on the shower door, had to go. It had been perfect, pre-fertilised-egg – a living room with giant sofas that doubled as a large dormitory for friends to crash out in, and a windowsill over the tub, for stacking candles, books and the occasional bathtime sandwich.

The summer before I’d got up the stick, we decided to put the flat on the market because we thought it might be time to splash out on a garden of our own. Somewhere to drink coffee on a Sunday morning, maybe a box room I could make my office now that I worked from home. It sold at the first viewing (and that shower catch made us £15,000 – snap!) but we couldn’t find anything nice we could actually afford. We dawdled and ummed and ahhed, because we were under zero pressure – so what if the buyer pulls out, we don’t HAVE to move, and we’ll just get another buyer.

But at the end of February, as I entered my eighth week of pregnancy from my mum’s sofa in Chichester, our buyer finally threatened to pull out if we didn’t vacate within four weeks. Rich started to rush over to Brighton after work to check out other flats and back to me in Chichester each evening to endure my rants about his breath. One evening he arrived back from our flat, another bag of my clothes slung over his back, and slumped down next to me on the sofa. I didn’t mention his personal stank because he looked so broken. I’d basically been ignoring him for a month and hadn’t noticed how the commuting and lack of support was getting to him.

‘Look, we need a plan. Nothing new is coming up, we can’t afford anything suitable in Brighton. We have to be realistic.’

Nonononononononono!

‘I think we ought to start looking outside of Brighton. We’ll get more for our money. And I won’t have to commute as far, which means I’ll be back before the baby goes to bed. Brighton is not going to work for us, not right now.’

He’d said it. It was out there. Our life was going to change. But there was a caveat – NOT RIGHT NOW. Once we’d saved a bit of money, maybe we would be able to go back to Brighton, to a proper house. This wasn’t forever, this was for now.

‘And I think the most sensible choice is right here, because I won’t be far from work, you won’t be far from the hospital and your parents will be nearby to help out.’

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck! I’d no longer be the city girl, living a stone’s throw from her favourite bar, the beach and an ATM machine. I’d be back to where I started, back to bad phone signals, no nightclubs and a lot of fields. Back to socialising with my mum and wider family without having a cool flat and glamorous job to jet back to afterwards. Back to feeling gawky and isolated and frustrated.

‘OK,’ I say, in the tiniest voice, hoping he might not hear and we can just pretend this hasn’t happened. I have no fight in me, and I’m pleased that he seems buoyed by this decision at least. I can deal with the finer details later. At least I wouldn’t have to meet another set of midwives either, or try to navigate a new set of roundabouts, my bête noir as a driver.

My mum was delighted, Rich was grim, and I was escaping it all on Rightmove. It had replaced ASOS as my favourite virtual shopping basket. I was already changing, OH GOD, NO! Ooh, but wait, look, a double garage!

I was supposed to start my job in six weeks’ time, and we would have to have moved before that. And actually, there was a whole bunch of small houses – HOUSES – for the amount of money we’d saved for a one-bed garden flat in Hove. They were mostly new builds – small Tardis houses with boxy rooms and a manicured lawn of fake grass. Then behind door number four was a 122-year-old tiny cottage, with pink roses and a rambling garden full of wild flowers. We both had to duck as we entered and quickly calculated we’d have to ditch both of our sofas. The owners had a baby, so a metre from the main bedroom on a floor that inexplicably sloped and creaked was a tiny box room, barely big enough for a single bed, but already decked out with a cot and shelves of stuffed toys. My mum warned us off it – ‘It’s old! It probably has damp! And what about the sloping floors?!’ – and Rich scraped the skin off his scalp by head-butting the doorframe, but I was in love.

Rich was less keen.

‘There’s no room for our sofas. And what about the floating shelves, where will they go?’

‘It’s bigger than a flat though, isn’t it? And there’s a garden.’

‘Well, we wouldn’t be able to have the Wii out. It would have to go in a box or something.’

‘Um, OK. Or we could plug it in upstairs in the loft? Hey, you could have your own game room, bubs!’

‘Hmm … But what about my bar? Where would I put my bar?’

DEEP BREATH.

‘Rich, I’m not sure we can discount a house on the sole fact that your bar – which maaaaybe isn’t the priority when we have a baby on the way – doesn’t fit in. AMIRIGHT?’

‘Fuck.’

‘I know, dude. But … well, why don’t you build a shed in the garden and put your bar in there? It could be proper bar, then, couldn’t it?!’

‘Hmm …’

For Rich it was the realisation that we were settling down, becoming a family, but true to form, it took him 24 hours before he was immersed in the positives, excited about building a shed with a bar in the garden, and as we stood outside Boots with a bag of breath mints (attempting to continue to abate nausea), the estate agent called to say we’d had our offer accepted and would hopefully exchange in June. The next day I drove back to Hove with my mum, stopping en route to dry heave onto the hard shoulder, and put down a deposit on the first flat I viewed for rent, based purely on the fact that it was near the station. Currently occupied by a woman with cats, it smelled like cats.

It would be the stopgap between our old life and new, a quick commute to London until I could commute no more and would be hoisted into our new cottage, ready to hang up lines of tiny baby-sized washing and start puréeing apple sauce. I could take the stack of magazines we used as a coffee table and our collection of novelty shot glasses, it could still feel like home. Sure, we’d have to pay rent and a mortgage for two months, but we would otherwise be homeless. It was all coming together and I had two major projects to occupy the part of my brain that would have otherwise freaked out about the baby. It was still half a year away – no biggie. I helped pack up our flat (well, I lay on the bathroom floor, shouting instructions to Rich), and although I felt those glum feelings returning – we were essentially packing up our youth and independence into those boxes – I focused on the immediate future: an exciting new job and a slightly briefer walk to the station in the morning.

The fabulous thing about moving while pregnant – which we would do twice – was that nobody wanted me to do anything. I went a bit peaky, fetching sandwiches for lunch, and all the removal men stopped what they were doing to pep talk me into sitting down. Rich rolled his eyes as one of them picked me up and put me on the one remaining chair they’d left in the middle of the now-empty living room. Sweet.

Rich and I went to a swanky fish restaurant that night.

‘This is the new us, bubs – OK, so maybe no to nightclubs, but this is really nice, isn’t it? We’ll go to nice restaurants and widen our culinary horizons! We’ll be fine, actually, won’t we?’

He nodded, as he poked the skeleton of his sea bass, wondering which bits he could actually eat.

Bloated yet professional

Finally, we were installed in our new flat and the day arrived – I was to begin my new job at Glamour on a shoot day, interviewing the model Lily Cole while my beauty boss styled her and directed the shots. And it was like I’d never left. There was no mention of babies or morning sickness or the future. I was singing showtunes with the manicurist, wheedling Lily’s favourite lipstick out of her when all she wanted to discuss was her work for Greenpeace, and fingering a rail of glitzy threads I could never afford. I WAS BACK. It was familiar, it was comforting, and it was work.

Nobody knew I was pregnant, of course, and I wondered if the information about my expectancy would be announced officially or would drip-feed down from the higher echelons. It’s the latter, and one by one, startled staffers came by my desk when my boss was out to hiss, Is it true?! One wasn’t convinced, even when I showed her the shape of my belly under the massive shirt I was wearing.

‘Yeh, but your boobs haven’t got any bigger, though, have they? They’re still really tiny.’

Always a pleasure chatting with that one.

I called on an old colleague from Vogue one lunchtime and she helped me navigate Topshop’s maternity section. I was finally kitted out and my belly was no longer covered in livid red indents from my savage jeans.

Work was a true sanctuary, and even as my bump swelled and became more noticeable, the team mostly ignored it as per my request and I was not once sidelined. In fact, when I was five months pregnant, my boss assigned me two trips: one to Paris to interview Natalie Portman and just before that, one to LA to launch a new shampoo. I know that sounds ridiculous, but yes, we were flying to LA in order to sit around a table in a conference room and discuss a new shampoo. I said yes to both without hesitation, calling Virgin on my boss’s request to check I would be OK to fly. All was approved and I was off to LA!

On the morning I was due to fly to LA, I woke up at 5am, worrying I’d miss the alarm, so when it went off I sprung out of bed and started busying around the bags. Rich lifted his head sleepily, reached for his glasses and stared at me.

‘Oh God, what?’ My hands immediately jump to my belly, thinking it’s probably ballooned overnight.

‘Have you … spilt something? On your … tits?’

I looked down at my white T-shirt. Two little yellow splodges sat right where my nipples nudge the cloth.

‘What the fuck?!’

It was like a watermark on silk, a ring of yellow syrup. Actually it was more like pus.

I ran into the bathroom, squeezed my nipples and all of this thick yellow mucus dribbled out. Of course, now I know this is a natural process – it’s the colostrum gathering ready for your baby, and actually it would have been worthwhile trying to ‘harvest’ some of this nectar. But I was horrified. Pus tits?!

Other than the fact I had to stuff my bra with the hotel’s complimentary cotton pads every morning, LA was GREAT. Without Rich or my mum there, I could completely deny the pregnancy was taking hold of me. I was in a fabulous hotel with fabulous people, none of whom were parents, and I didn’t really even look that pregnant. I didn’t get jet lag, which was awesome, and by not drinking I felt pretty fresh, actually. My belly had grown while I had been in LA – possibly because of the travel-related water retention, but either way, it got bigger.

I still didn’t feel pregnant, just bloated, but I got slightly panicky about the changes. No going back now, it was happening.

Weeks later, I was in Paris.

Natalie Portman: [passes a beautiful hand over my belly, which is bigger because I just ate a burger while waiting for her] ‘Oh, my! How far along are you?’

Me: ‘I think, like, about five months? But I’m not really sure actually, because I think I got pregnant on New Year’s Day, but there’s of course every chance it was before that and my dates are all messed up because I can’t really remember when my last period was, you know? I mean, it’s possible I just got that wrong, but that’s all the doctors seem to be bothered about and I don’t know when it was, I really don’t. Plus, my husband and I weren’t together for Christmas so we obviously hadn’t really had sex between, like, 15 December and 1 January, that’s two whole weeks! So yes, I’m not really sure.’

Natalie Portman: ‘… OK!’

And that was the last time Glamour sent me to interview a celebrity.

The gender reveal

You get two scans as standard during the second trimester, and at the 20-week scan I actually began to accept this was happening. We had decided to find out the sex of the baby at this scan. I’d been trying to look for signs that it would be a girl – three magpies, SCORE – and was actually pretty desperate not to find out she was a boy. Why? Because the only way I could get my head around having a kid was to imagine it would be like reliving my childhood, which I really enjoyed first time around. And if I had a boy, that would have been my last comforting lie to myself shot to shit.

‘We don’t look for the absence of a penis, now, we can usually see labial folds when it’s a girl,’ the midwife explains, as she presses the ultrasound into my guts.

But as we pretended only to care that the baby was healthy and well-formed, I yelped when the midwife announced:

‘There’s a vagina. I think. Labial folds. I think that is a vagina.’ The baby kept crossing her legs – modest.

‘Don’t go buying everything in pink, now – this isn’t a definitive answer,’ cautioned the midwife, but still: A GIRL. And then she said, ‘And here is your daughter’s face.’

I felt a connection, at least with the concept of what was inside me being a baby. My daughter. Not some weird stomach bug or an alien creature I had no affinity with whatsoever. It was my daughter. She had lost the hooked nose and chin, and looked quite like a baby now, although I still couldn’t feel the movements we saw inside me before. But there it was – I was going to have a daughter. She would be a girl and then a woman.

Rich and I agreed to keep the sex to ourselves. I was gagging to tell everyone, but he wanted to keep something back to surprise our families with so I agreed. I mean, I told my mum, my best friend, all my colleagues and a woman at the bank, but otherwise, it was absolutely a secret.

The nest is a nest for VERMIN

Things with our stop-gap flat started to go quite wrong as spring turned to summer. The line of woodlice marching across our kitchen doubled then trebled and eventually became an infestation. The landlord was all, ‘Oh yeh, they’re so annoying, aren’t they? Hey ho!’ I couldn’t stand on them because they looked like they might be a bit crunchy so I spent hours every day scooping them up using Rich’s driving licence, which I kept by the back door for this purpose.

The flush stopped working in the toilet, and the boiler cut out every other day. It was always cold and our clothes never dried.

Then one day I started to feel really ill while I was waiting for my train home. Sick, shivery, aching all over, like I was either going to puke, shit or die. I called Rich, who drove to meet my train at the station and took me home, where he put me to bed.

‘It feels so cold,’ I moaned as I fell into a fitful sleep. The next morning my throat was sore, my nose ached and I was breathless. Mum suggested I spend a few days with her so she could keep an eye on me while Rich was working. Rich and I went to throw a few things in a bag and discovered every single pair of shoes in the bottom of our wardrobe was covered in a thick coating of green mould. Rich pulled the wardrobe out of its recess and it turned out the whole of the wardrobe’s back was green, too, with a swirling nucleus of thick white fur. That’s when I realised our bed was damp, not cold, and the floor felt wet and greasy underfoot. He began stuffing salvageable stuff into bin liners, organising the stuff we’d need to decamp to my mum’s again, and I watched him becoming a dad before my very eyes.

I was furious. Now, I probably always would have done so but what was interesting is how I kept referring to the unborn baby rather than myself as implicated in this gross situation. I got all my ducks in order first, calling the Environment Agency for advice on how to report this and how to handle our landlord. Then I itemised the cost of everything that had been ruined – furniture, clothes, the bed, mattress, shoes, bags – so I could provide a clear invoice to offset against our security deposit and the next two months rent, since I was NOT going to be spending a moment longer in that hell hole. Finally, I got him on the phone.

‘This is frankly untenable, and for the sake of my unborn child, I will not live here a day longer,’ I concluded. ‘I AM WITH CHILD!’

Well, this is interesting, I thought to myself, it seems my maternal instinct is kicking in. Either that or I’m just trying to guilt him into giving us more money. But it was the first time I had balled someone out for threatening the wellbeing of my kid.

So while we waited to move into our new home and our rental flat was being deep-cleaned, I was back at my mum’s and she was nursing me through a fresh bout of morning sickness, but I was still adamant: I will not lose myself, I will be different. I will remain ambitious, capable and when it comes, this baby will fit in around us, it’ll do what we want to do. I just need to get my body back, and then? Back to normal for us. Even my mum backed me up.

‘We just went out for dinner with you, you know, once I was upright again.’ She winced at the memory but quickly continued, ‘I mean, you just slept in your pram while we had dinner with friends, went to parties – you simply came with us. I went to Annie Nightingale’s flat once and shaved half my head.’

This buoyed me. Rich and I agreed to dine out as soon as the baby arrived. None of this ‘baby bubble’, lying around in pyjamas for weeks on end, watching Lorraine. We’d get out there, get amongst it. We wouldn’t have a single takeaway or frozen ready meal, and we would not get a microwave. Our new house would be a party house, always full of guests. We’d simply be US with a plus one.

To prove just how unchanged I was, I got dolled up and went to the GLAMOUR Women of the Year Awards.

‘You don’t have to come,’ my boss explained. ‘We totally get that all the standing around and the late night might be too much.’

‘No, no, I’ll be there!’ I said, perhaps too enthusiastically.

I could still party, get my hair done, wear a dress that wasn’t even from the maternity-tent section. Well, until 9pm, when the caterers cleared the plates, forcing me to stop minesweeping the leftover canapés, and I got a bit weepy in the queue for the toilets. As I was helped into a cab, I felt tired, a bit sick and very, VERY pregnant.

* Although, to be fair, I think we’re reclaiming that one with the ubiquitous topknot and young people seem to love those. The rattier the better. So maybe we can still turn this one around.

† I mean, I actually met the OXO Mum. I met her! She also played my dad’s wife on TV. And to be totally honest off-screen I didn’t even know she had kids. She had a filthy laugh, a killer body and lots of mascara on. Everybody stared at her, she was magnetic.

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