Baby Boom!
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Synopsis
** Frank and hilarious fiction from award-winning, potty-mouthed blogger, toddler-survivor and baby-producer, 'Just a Normal Mummy'** ********* No one said the journey to motherhood was easy . . . Increased face-girth, back acne and gagging every time she's in the presence of vegetables isn't quite the beautiful start Emily had planned for her unborn baby . . . Molly's unexpected pregnancy somehow turns her boyfriend into the poncy-vegan-nut-milk-enforcer, but she breezes it, as she breezes everything. (Including still being able to eat avocados much to Emily's annoyance.) Liz quickly realises if she's to move her life on, she needs to get rid of the married man she's in love with - especially now she's realised he's been hiding more than his wedding ring . . . It's a story about becoming parents, but most of all it's a story about love, laughter and chatting to your best friends about your fanny on WhatsApp. 'Perfect for new mums, soon-to-be-mums - and dads!' Soap Magazine
Release date: January 25, 2018
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Print pages: 448
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Baby Boom!
Helen Wallen
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1. Pissy Wrist
Chapter 2. Molly, Molly, Molly
Chapter 3. That Friday Feeling
Chapter 4. Super Sperm
Chapter 5. #ForkDicks
Chapter 6. Last Saturday Club
Chapter 7. Decaf. That.
Chapter 8. If At First You Don’t Succeed . . . Temp.
Chapter 9. Bastard
Chapter 10. Christmas Don’t
Chapter 11. A Molly-Jolly Christmas
Chapter 12. Being Pregnant at Christmas is Shit
Chapter 13. Arnee Liz is Back
Chapter 14. New Year’s Tears (And Unexpected Dale)
Chapter 15. New Year, New You Too
Chapter 16. The Morning After the Test Before
Chapter 17. Thunder. Stealing. Bitch.
Chapter 18. Back to Reality
Chapter 19. Fanny Forest
Chapter 20. And Then There Were Two . . .
Chapter 21. Time to Tell Tom
Chapter 22. Duvet Day
Chapter 23. #TeamLiz
Chapter 24. He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not?
Chapter 25. Being Pregnant on Valentine’s Day . . . is Shit.
Chapter 26. Come Back, Tom
Chapter 27. After-Work Drinks . . .
Chapter 28. Pink or Blue
Chapter 29. All Together Now
Chapter 30. Dinner Date
Chapter 31. Canapés
Chapter 32. Thor and The Pesto Pasta
Chapter 33. Girl-Chat
Chapter 34. Awkward
Chapter 35. The Third Trimester (The Really Twatty One)
Chapter 36. Move Day
Chapter 37. Happy . . .
Chapter 38. Scan Saturday
Chapter 39. NCT
Chapter 40. Settling In
Chapter 41. Being Pregnant on Your Birthday . . . is Shit.
Chapter 42. ‘Him’
Chapter 43. The Birthday BBQ
Chapter 44. Tolly
Chapter 45. ‘Just Friends’
Chapter 46. The Hospital Bag and The ‘Push Present’
Chapter 47. Unofficial
Chapter 48. Last Day of Work
Chapter 49. Last Last Saturday Club
Chapter 50. #TeamThor
Chapter 51. Babymoon
Chapter 52. Don’t Tell Gerald
Chapter 53. ‘Thank You . . .’
Chapter 54. False Alarm
Chapter 55. Everything Is Fine
Chapter 56. Due Day
Chapter 57. Home
Chapter 58. The Wrath of Clover
Chapter 59. The L-Word
Chapter 60. Giz
Chapter 61. One Week Overdue . . .
Chapter 62. Baby Tolly
Chapter 63. The Day of The Blog
Chapter 64. Perfect
Chapter 65. TWO. WEEKS. OVERDUE.
Chapter 66. I Don’t
Chapter 67. I Still Don’t
Chapter 68. Gerald Does
Chapter 69. Tolly–Giz–Pemily
Chapter 70. This Is It . . .
Chapter 71. Hello?
Chapter 72. Cine-Date
Chapter 73. Okay. THIS Really Is It Now . . .
Chapter 74. William
Chapter 75. Willy Pic
Chapter 76. Third Wheel
Chapter 77. What Now?
Chapter 78. Home Birth-Day
Chapter 79. Week One. Done
Chapter 80. Marley
Chapter 81. Giz is Back
Chapter 82. Babies
Acknowledgements
Today, I went to my first-ever ‘Baby-Group’.
Please don’t be fooled by the name. This is not simply some ‘Group’ containing ‘Babies’, oh no. That’s what the Universe wants you to believe, like when they told you childbirth was a ‘constructive pain’ . . .
Baby-Groups are DOG EAT DOG. For some they’re wonderful; for others . . . nothing short of BRUTAL. It’s just the way it is, like some kind of social experiment where new mums of every kind congregate because society very clearly tells you that if you don’t Baby-Sensory the living shit out of your newborn you’re going to die cold and alone in a pile of discarded Sophie the Giraffes (or something).
The pressure is real, people.
And I can tell you right now: it’s TERRIFYING.
I’ve given speeches on branding to rooms full of hundreds of people; I’ve delivered PR presentations to the marketing directors of international companies; I’ve been within licking distance of Jennifer Aniston, and once stroked Justin Bieber’s face before throwing up on his security guard’s foot at a drunken press event. But today? I almost shit myself walking into a room of exhausted-looking new mothers, because I’d have to make real-life conversation with real-life people I don’t know, while somehow looking like I’ve got my real-life shit together and have actually slept longer than twelve minutes and changed my underwear more than twice in the last week.
(Which I have. *high fives self*)
I had imagined a room full of open-armed mummies holding babies, smiling and chatting and welcoming new faces with hugs and songs and kindness and magical sleep goblins . . .
But actually, most women had come in pairs or small groups of NCT chums, and kept to themselves. And the few lone mums without the support of a ‘mummy-buddy’ had holed up near the back, their heads down, seeking solace in their iPhone screens, trying not to blink too often in case they fell asleep through sheer exhaustion. Which I fully sympathised with. As I took another glug of my double-shot latte, and pretended to be checking my emails while secretly looking at funny cat videos on Facebook . . .
I decided to spend most of the hour observing the mums surrounding me. (In between waggling some foil fish at my three-week-old son. As he slept. And occasionally regurgitated a bit of breast milk on to my chest. Which I took as a sign he liked it. Obviously.)
I managed to break it down into five main types of mum you find at Baby-Groups . . .
Floaty, tie-dye, baby-wearing ladies who carry around little pots to catch their nappiless baby’s shit in. Yes. In an age where five-year-olds do their own online banking, and you can 3-D print bionic limbs, people are actually carrying around infant faeces in pots. These women are wrapped in several metres of fabric which they refer to as a ‘sling’ and seem to be covered in lots of knots. They also smell a bit like lentils and have never quite discovered the art of matching colour to skin tone . . .
Yes. They’re wearing actual lipgloss. And their hair has been brushed. Today. And despite their children being under three months old, their waists appear to be about the same size as most people’s forearms. And it appears they have no, I repeat, NO sick permanently piled on their left shoulder. They’re probably not for you. You overheard one of them talking about her AGA . . .
They seem to be able to produce home-made baked goods from about their person at any point. While this in itself is skilful, with a three-week-old child permanently clamped to at least one of their body parts, how exactly in the name of fuck do they have time to decoratively ice cupcakes? They’re feeders. If you can’t say no to cake, you can’t be friends. Trust me.
One appears to have no actual baby with her, another appears to have far too many, and – I shit you not – I’m fairly sure I spotted one newborn that appeared to still be attached to its umbilical cord while the mother carried the rotting placenta around in a Sainsbury’s plastic carrier bag. Again, probably not for you.
Messy bun, eye bags, slightly crispy black leggings, with optional small amount of poo in fringe. Doesn’t pretend to know the words to the nursery rhymes, looks like a complete twat trying to do that weird finger-to-thumb thing for ‘Incy-Wincy Spider’ and will be heading to the pub straight after for a large gin and tonic. Boom.
*whispers* that last one is me . . . see you in the pub . . .
#BabyGroupPolitics
‘Where the fuckety-fuck is it?’ Liz said out loud to herself as she rummaged clumsily in her over-sized designer handbag for the pregnancy test she’d just bought.
She’d scurried home quickly via the pharmacy after meeting her two best friends – Emily and Molly – and their newborn sons in a cafe in High Wycombe. Luckily they were both too distracted by breastfeeding and bone-shattering exhaustion to notice Liz’s slightly rushed exit. The last thing she needed right now was awkward questions. Ones she didn’t know the answers to herself yet …
It was a stuffy, hot, mid-August Saturday and the bathroom in Liz’s neat, modern apartment suddenly seemed very small. And very sticky. And very impractical. Going for the minimal look was all well and good, except when you needed to find places to perch things. Even small things – such as plastic sticks you wee on that can potentially mess up your entire life quite massively, in a not small way at all.
She was aware she was huffing. A lot. She was keen to get on with this, just to know one way or the other. She couldn’t think further than that right now – she wouldn’t allow herself to. She was ignoring the overwhelming feelings of anger, disappointment and stupidity as she located the test, scanned the instructions and quickly ripped the foil-lined wrapping away.
Thank fuck her boyfriend, Gerald, wasn’t staying at hers this weekend, she thought, releasing a long sigh as she squatted down awkwardly on to the toilet, trying her best to wee in a straight line. Which, she now realised, was not quite as easy as the smug diagram on the box, and all the films and TV shows she’d ever watched where women did pregnancy tests, had suggested …
She was done.
She replaced the cap, pulled her knickers and shorts back up. And placed the test in front of her on the sink as she washed her hands, looking directly ahead at her reflection in the spotlit mirror above the basin.
She huffed at herself again.
Fuck.
Why the fuck was this happening?
This was not supposed to happen. Not to her …
She was the sensible one, the one with the soaring career, the one with her shit finally together. The one with the excellent fringe.
This sort of thing was supposed to happen to other people. This was the sort of thing that happened to Molly. In fact it HAD happened to Molly; one of her best friends, one of the most haphazard human beings she’d ever known, and the girl that believed contraception was a ‘bit of a faff really’. And had quite frankly deserved to fall pregnant with that attitude … Which of course she had. But that wasn’t Liz. She was careful, and considered, and in control. HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED TO HER?
Besides, she still wasn’t a hundred per cent sure if she even wanted children … and if she did, now was possibly the worst timing in the history of all timings in the world ever. How was it that she could end up in this situation? Surely, she and Gerald had been careful – hadn’t they? Clearly not careful enough.
Liz blew her fringe up out of her eyeline with a huff of hot breath, as she racked her brain. She began to come to the unsettling realisation that during the weekend she and Gerald had spent at her sister’s house a few weeks ago, there might have been an unsanctioned moment of passion … thanks to an unsanctioned amount of red wine …
Liz frowned and rubbed her face in anguish, annoyed at herself for being so uncharacteristically reckless. She and Gerald had only been seeing each other for a few months, and it was clear that Gerald was a little more into the relationship than Liz was. Liz felt that familiar lump of guilt in her throat that appeared regularly when she questioned whether their relationship was still ‘too much, too soon’ for her. She couldn’t help it. A past laden with shitty men and even shittier times had done that to her. People who didn’t know might well view her as being cold, closed and a little career-obsessed, but she simply saw those things as necessary for self-preservation.
This was not a happy magical moment. This was one filled with utter dread and sickly anticipation, as she became aware that two minutes had more than passed and the result would be ready.
So she should look at the test.
It would be ready.
God, she didn’t want to do this.
But she had to.
She filled her lungs with air and swiped the test up quickly from the sink, letting her eyes fall down on to the results window …
SHIT.
Click here to purchase The Mummy Lessons
I’ve done it. I’ve survived my entire first year without completely losing my shit or my sanity, and managing to keep the majority of my areolas intact.
I can’t actually believe an entire twelve months have passed … It feels like a blur – an amazing, beautiful, wonderful, guilt-ridden, shitty, tearful, and occasionally all-a-bit-too-much-but-completely-incomparable blur.
So here, for every other amazing Mummy (and Daddy) out there who’s made it through the first year, is a breakdown of THE FIRST YEAR OF BABY:
So small, so perfect, so fragile … Yes. Take a moment to remember your vagina the way it was. Then re-grow all your pubic hair to form a secret forest around it, destroy every handheld mirror in the land, and NEVER THINK ABOUT IT AGAIN.
Once that’s done, your first few weeks are spent trying to drown out the four thousand comments you get every day about how fast it goes, pretending breastfeeding doesn’t hurt, and rediscovering wine …
Okay you’re EXHAUSTED but you can do this. You’ve totally got this parenting shit down. You’ve joined every baby class in the county and your main plan is to baby-sign the sensory-baby-massaging f@*k out of your newborn … (If you could only stop them shitting all over themselves, the pram and your only remaining clean pair of leggings every time you try to leave the house, that is.) But still. YOU GOT THIS. Who needs eight hours’ sleep and a Perfect Prep machine anyway, right?
You buy a Perfect Prep machine.
And Ewan the Dream Sheep, a Gro-clock, a Gro-blind and anything else that the Internet tells you to. At 3 a.m. Whilst crying.
THEN. Suddenly. One night. Your baby actually sleeps for five hours straight. This is amazing. You’re a new woman. You’re so excited, you don’t call your husband a penis-wielding voodoo-bastard that night. Instead, you plaster your new magic-sleeping-baby news all over Facebook. With a smug emoticon. And begin planning a city break. Which … means you JINX YOURSELF FOR LIFE … As every day from this point, they mainly survive on forty-five minutes’ sleep a night. And the sound of you gently sobbing into a crusty muslin that’s been on your shoulder since Tuesday.
You used the Bumbo on the coffee table (you fucking rebel). But now, as well as not sleeping because you’ve been propped up in a nursing chair freezing one breast off at 4 a.m., you’re also not sleeping due to the BPG (Bumbo Placement Guilt) so it probably wasn’t worth it …
You try to sell the Bumbo on a Facebook selling site, but the experience is so horrendously tedious and time-wasting that you nearly murder someone who continuously calls you ‘hun’, and decide to just punch yourself in the fucking face next time instead.
Jumperoo. That is all.
Please remove any nice things from your life, as weaning means the end of those now. In fact – why not cut out the middleman, and begin hurling regurgitated broccoli and sweet potato at your own face and sofa. Perhaps some will trickle down your forehead into your mouth whilst still warm and you can count it as your first hot meal since you had a baby. Excellent.
You’ve made it. You’ve survived the first six months. This calls for celebration. An epic night out with breast pads, Spanx, and a new-found disrespect for your bladder … It is entirely amazing. Until forty seconds after you get in; when you know you’ll be spending your impending hangover trying not to gag tequila into the face of your baby whilst desperately Googling ‘breastfeeding after drinking A FUCK TON of alcohol’ and punching Ewan the Dream Sheep in his stupid twatty face.
It’s dawning on you that you’re still in your maternity jeggings. And that breastfeeding somehow hasn’t sucked you into a size 8 … but it’s okay, because to make you feel better about that, you eat an entire cake without breathing and/or chewing. This then makes you feel sad and you start poking your stretch marks. So you manage that with a Toblerone and some gin. The end. #ginwin
Shit. It’s started moving. Cafes aren’t for you any more. You should know that. #beginningoftheend
You’ve discovered the power of CBeebies … But your shame crush on Mr Bloom may be getting out of hand … Heading to the toilet to watch CBeebies on the iPad ‘one-handed’ is just not motherly behaviour *coughs*
(But seriously; if you make it into the loo alone – down a Toffee Crisp and tweet about it so the rest of us have hope … please … PLEASE.)
The Jumperoo doesn’t work any more. And Facebook is NOTHING BUT LIES. And, if you’re going back to work you’re going to have to face the fact that you’ll need to brush your hair and wear a real bra again soon … Shit.
So your ‘tiny baby’ is suddenly capable of head-butting you in the area-formerly-known-as-your-vagina, capturing the footage on your iPhone and uploading it to their own YouTube channel … but the main thing is that you tell everyone four thousand times a day how fast it’s gone, and that you’ve forgotten that breastfeeding ever hurt, and wine … Mainly wine. And wine.
#12monthsofbabydone
#ginwinetheend
‘Shit.’ said Emily.
As she sat on the loo, with her pants stretched awkwardly from one ankle to the other, feeling slightly undignified and more than a little exposed in the middle cubicle of Angel Public Relations unisex toilets.
Why the hell hadn’t she waited until she’d got home? WHAT ON EARTH possessed her to use her lunch break to buy a couscous salad, a packet of diced coconut, and a double pack of Clear Blue pregnancy tests? Well – she’d only bought the coconut because she overheard one of the girls on reception say it made you thin and it sounded easier than actual real-life exercising – but she didn’t even like couscous . . . And the pregnancy tests? Why was she doing this NOW? At work. Ten minutes before a whole agency brainstorming session about a luxury towel brand.
Yet here she was, with her Ted Baker pencil skirt hoisted up round her waist while her own lukewarm urine dribbled into her shirt sleeve.
Excellent, she thought to herself, pursing her lips and using her other (non-pissy) hand to hold back her mane of thick blonde curls.
The box said it took two minutes. Two minutes to show a clear result. Well, frankly, two minutes felt like a bloody lifetime while you were sat with your vagina out listening to Brian from accounting trying to politely cough his way through a spot of IBS.
No. Not exactly ideal. But here she was: pantless, pissy wrist and all, watching in slight disbelief as two very distinct blue lines in the ‘pregnant’ window slowly appeared and stared back at her.
‘Shit.’
‘Hello?’ Brian said tentatively from the sink area.
FUCK OFF, BRIAN.
‘I’m fine. Thanks,’ she called back at him.
Emily took a deep breath and tried to block Brian out as she fixed her gaze on the little white stick that was telling her her life was about to change quite a lot from this point. Probably. Right?
What did this mean?
OKAY, she knew what it ‘meant’. Obviously. But what did it really MEAN . . . Did she need to call her doctor? Find a midwife? Stop eating cheese?
I mean – anyone could take or leave Cheddar, but Camembert? That was going to take some serious commitment. Just thinking about it now was making her crave a Brie-and-bacon sandwich and a large glass of Pinot Grigio.
THIS IS RIDICULOUS. IT’S NOT ABOUT CHEESE. PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER, EMILY. YOU’RE CURRENTLY SITTING WITH YOUR FANNY OUT AND PISS DOWN YOUR ARM WITH SIX MINUTES TO GO UNTIL A MEETING ABOUT TOWELS AND YOU’RE THINKING ABOUT SOFT FRENCH CHEESES.
She took another deep breath.
A smile grew across her face. She couldn’t help her teeth from showing. There were a lot of teeth.
But she was just so happy.
(And semi-naked . . .)
And her mind was racing.
However, in the interest of somehow pulling her shit back together so she could think creatively about towelling, Emily reassembled herself, quickly snapped a picture of the pregnancy-test result on her iPhone and then wrapped the test in loo roll, popped it back into the packet and into her handbag.
Pants and pencil skirt now firmly back in place, she fired a WhatsApp message off to her husband Paul with the photo and a caption simply saying:
You’re going to be a daddy . . .
Swiftly followed by:
But can’t talk now.
Got to go brainstorm the shit out of
some towels.
I love you.
I can’t stop grinning.
Everyone is going to think I REALLY like towels.
And with that, Emily checked her phone was on silent, took a final deep breath and, confident she was now alone, finally left the shelter of the middle cubicle.
As she washed and dried her hands, she imagined laughing in the future about finding out the happiest news of her life at the same time as Brian from accounting had the shits in the loo next door to her . . .
Emily shook her thoughts away, composed herself and left the toilets. She quickly made her way back through the open-plan office attempting not to make eye contact with anyone (especially not Irritable-Bowel-Brian). It felt like her news must be pasted all over her face and might burst out of her any moment. It was almost disappointing that no one so much as glanced at her as she returned to her desk.
Focus, Emily.
She sat in front of her Mac and pulled up the briefing document she’d prepared for the brainstorm.
She stared at the screen. It was impossible to concentrate. All she had to do was press print, but it was so hard to think about towels now that she knew she had a human growing inside of her.
MY UTERUS HAS AN ACTUAL TINY PERSON IN IT.
It was an utterly insane feeling.
Just then, her eyes met her colleague Matilda’s. Matilda was a senior account manager who sat directly opposite her. She was a bit of a bitch, actually. Emily was fairly sure she was after her job, so she would literally be the last person on earth she’d let know it could be up for grabs, even temporarily, in about nine months’ time.
‘Everything okay?’ Matilda suspiciously raised an eyebrow in Emily’s direction. Which irritated Emily way more than it should do.
‘Yes. Everything’s great, thanks,’ Emily snapped. Attempting to remove the persistent grin from her face.
‘It’s just you were gone quite a while.’ Matilda responded with her eyebrow still suspiciously raised. ‘And now you’re grinning like some sort of lunatic. Had some good news?’
MEDDLING. BITCH.
‘I just really like towels,’ she retorted as she pressed print.
Matilda rolled her eyes and looked back at her screen.
Just then Natalie, the managing director, called everyone in to the large meeting room for the brainstorm.
‘Right. Let’s get going everyone. Got those briefing documents, Emily?’
Emily rose to her feet, grabbing the warm sheets from the printing bay on her way to the meeting room.
Right.
Don’t think about what’s in your uterus.
Think towels.
Towels.
Fucking towels.
It had been a pretty ordinary Friday for Molly.
She’d been clock-watching since lunchtime. Which seemed to have the annoying effect of making the afternoon drag even more . . .
She’d spent the week temping at a shitty building site, where she’d mainly been sat in a . . .
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1. Pissy Wrist
Chapter 2. Molly, Molly, Molly
Chapter 3. That Friday Feeling
Chapter 4. Super Sperm
Chapter 5. #ForkDicks
Chapter 6. Last Saturday Club
Chapter 7. Decaf. That.
Chapter 8. If At First You Don’t Succeed . . . Temp.
Chapter 9. Bastard
Chapter 10. Christmas Don’t
Chapter 11. A Molly-Jolly Christmas
Chapter 12. Being Pregnant at Christmas is Shit
Chapter 13. Arnee Liz is Back
Chapter 14. New Year’s Tears (And Unexpected Dale)
Chapter 15. New Year, New You Too
Chapter 16. The Morning After the Test Before
Chapter 17. Thunder. Stealing. Bitch.
Chapter 18. Back to Reality
Chapter 19. Fanny Forest
Chapter 20. And Then There Were Two . . .
Chapter 21. Time to Tell Tom
Chapter 22. Duvet Day
Chapter 23. #TeamLiz
Chapter 24. He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not?
Chapter 25. Being Pregnant on Valentine’s Day . . . is Shit.
Chapter 26. Come Back, Tom
Chapter 27. After-Work Drinks . . .
Chapter 28. Pink or Blue
Chapter 29. All Together Now
Chapter 30. Dinner Date
Chapter 31. Canapés
Chapter 32. Thor and The Pesto Pasta
Chapter 33. Girl-Chat
Chapter 34. Awkward
Chapter 35. The Third Trimester (The Really Twatty One)
Chapter 36. Move Day
Chapter 37. Happy . . .
Chapter 38. Scan Saturday
Chapter 39. NCT
Chapter 40. Settling In
Chapter 41. Being Pregnant on Your Birthday . . . is Shit.
Chapter 42. ‘Him’
Chapter 43. The Birthday BBQ
Chapter 44. Tolly
Chapter 45. ‘Just Friends’
Chapter 46. The Hospital Bag and The ‘Push Present’
Chapter 47. Unofficial
Chapter 48. Last Day of Work
Chapter 49. Last Last Saturday Club
Chapter 50. #TeamThor
Chapter 51. Babymoon
Chapter 52. Don’t Tell Gerald
Chapter 53. ‘Thank You . . .’
Chapter 54. False Alarm
Chapter 55. Everything Is Fine
Chapter 56. Due Day
Chapter 57. Home
Chapter 58. The Wrath of Clover
Chapter 59. The L-Word
Chapter 60. Giz
Chapter 61. One Week Overdue . . .
Chapter 62. Baby Tolly
Chapter 63. The Day of The Blog
Chapter 64. Perfect
Chapter 65. TWO. WEEKS. OVERDUE.
Chapter 66. I Don’t
Chapter 67. I Still Don’t
Chapter 68. Gerald Does
Chapter 69. Tolly–Giz–Pemily
Chapter 70. This Is It . . .
Chapter 71. Hello?
Chapter 72. Cine-Date
Chapter 73. Okay. THIS Really Is It Now . . .
Chapter 74. William
Chapter 75. Willy Pic
Chapter 76. Third Wheel
Chapter 77. What Now?
Chapter 78. Home Birth-Day
Chapter 79. Week One. Done
Chapter 80. Marley
Chapter 81. Giz is Back
Chapter 82. Babies
Acknowledgements
Today, I went to my first-ever ‘Baby-Group’.
Please don’t be fooled by the name. This is not simply some ‘Group’ containing ‘Babies’, oh no. That’s what the Universe wants you to believe, like when they told you childbirth was a ‘constructive pain’ . . .
Baby-Groups are DOG EAT DOG. For some they’re wonderful; for others . . . nothing short of BRUTAL. It’s just the way it is, like some kind of social experiment where new mums of every kind congregate because society very clearly tells you that if you don’t Baby-Sensory the living shit out of your newborn you’re going to die cold and alone in a pile of discarded Sophie the Giraffes (or something).
The pressure is real, people.
And I can tell you right now: it’s TERRIFYING.
I’ve given speeches on branding to rooms full of hundreds of people; I’ve delivered PR presentations to the marketing directors of international companies; I’ve been within licking distance of Jennifer Aniston, and once stroked Justin Bieber’s face before throwing up on his security guard’s foot at a drunken press event. But today? I almost shit myself walking into a room of exhausted-looking new mothers, because I’d have to make real-life conversation with real-life people I don’t know, while somehow looking like I’ve got my real-life shit together and have actually slept longer than twelve minutes and changed my underwear more than twice in the last week.
(Which I have. *high fives self*)
I had imagined a room full of open-armed mummies holding babies, smiling and chatting and welcoming new faces with hugs and songs and kindness and magical sleep goblins . . .
But actually, most women had come in pairs or small groups of NCT chums, and kept to themselves. And the few lone mums without the support of a ‘mummy-buddy’ had holed up near the back, their heads down, seeking solace in their iPhone screens, trying not to blink too often in case they fell asleep through sheer exhaustion. Which I fully sympathised with. As I took another glug of my double-shot latte, and pretended to be checking my emails while secretly looking at funny cat videos on Facebook . . .
I decided to spend most of the hour observing the mums surrounding me. (In between waggling some foil fish at my three-week-old son. As he slept. And occasionally regurgitated a bit of breast milk on to my chest. Which I took as a sign he liked it. Obviously.)
I managed to break it down into five main types of mum you find at Baby-Groups . . .
Floaty, tie-dye, baby-wearing ladies who carry around little pots to catch their nappiless baby’s shit in. Yes. In an age where five-year-olds do their own online banking, and you can 3-D print bionic limbs, people are actually carrying around infant faeces in pots. These women are wrapped in several metres of fabric which they refer to as a ‘sling’ and seem to be covered in lots of knots. They also smell a bit like lentils and have never quite discovered the art of matching colour to skin tone . . .
Yes. They’re wearing actual lipgloss. And their hair has been brushed. Today. And despite their children being under three months old, their waists appear to be about the same size as most people’s forearms. And it appears they have no, I repeat, NO sick permanently piled on their left shoulder. They’re probably not for you. You overheard one of them talking about her AGA . . .
They seem to be able to produce home-made baked goods from about their person at any point. While this in itself is skilful, with a three-week-old child permanently clamped to at least one of their body parts, how exactly in the name of fuck do they have time to decoratively ice cupcakes? They’re feeders. If you can’t say no to cake, you can’t be friends. Trust me.
One appears to have no actual baby with her, another appears to have far too many, and – I shit you not – I’m fairly sure I spotted one newborn that appeared to still be attached to its umbilical cord while the mother carried the rotting placenta around in a Sainsbury’s plastic carrier bag. Again, probably not for you.
Messy bun, eye bags, slightly crispy black leggings, with optional small amount of poo in fringe. Doesn’t pretend to know the words to the nursery rhymes, looks like a complete twat trying to do that weird finger-to-thumb thing for ‘Incy-Wincy Spider’ and will be heading to the pub straight after for a large gin and tonic. Boom.
*whispers* that last one is me . . . see you in the pub . . .
#BabyGroupPolitics
‘Where the fuckety-fuck is it?’ Liz said out loud to herself as she rummaged clumsily in her over-sized designer handbag for the pregnancy test she’d just bought.
She’d scurried home quickly via the pharmacy after meeting her two best friends – Emily and Molly – and their newborn sons in a cafe in High Wycombe. Luckily they were both too distracted by breastfeeding and bone-shattering exhaustion to notice Liz’s slightly rushed exit. The last thing she needed right now was awkward questions. Ones she didn’t know the answers to herself yet …
It was a stuffy, hot, mid-August Saturday and the bathroom in Liz’s neat, modern apartment suddenly seemed very small. And very sticky. And very impractical. Going for the minimal look was all well and good, except when you needed to find places to perch things. Even small things – such as plastic sticks you wee on that can potentially mess up your entire life quite massively, in a not small way at all.
She was aware she was huffing. A lot. She was keen to get on with this, just to know one way or the other. She couldn’t think further than that right now – she wouldn’t allow herself to. She was ignoring the overwhelming feelings of anger, disappointment and stupidity as she located the test, scanned the instructions and quickly ripped the foil-lined wrapping away.
Thank fuck her boyfriend, Gerald, wasn’t staying at hers this weekend, she thought, releasing a long sigh as she squatted down awkwardly on to the toilet, trying her best to wee in a straight line. Which, she now realised, was not quite as easy as the smug diagram on the box, and all the films and TV shows she’d ever watched where women did pregnancy tests, had suggested …
She was done.
She replaced the cap, pulled her knickers and shorts back up. And placed the test in front of her on the sink as she washed her hands, looking directly ahead at her reflection in the spotlit mirror above the basin.
She huffed at herself again.
Fuck.
Why the fuck was this happening?
This was not supposed to happen. Not to her …
She was the sensible one, the one with the soaring career, the one with her shit finally together. The one with the excellent fringe.
This sort of thing was supposed to happen to other people. This was the sort of thing that happened to Molly. In fact it HAD happened to Molly; one of her best friends, one of the most haphazard human beings she’d ever known, and the girl that believed contraception was a ‘bit of a faff really’. And had quite frankly deserved to fall pregnant with that attitude … Which of course she had. But that wasn’t Liz. She was careful, and considered, and in control. HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED TO HER?
Besides, she still wasn’t a hundred per cent sure if she even wanted children … and if she did, now was possibly the worst timing in the history of all timings in the world ever. How was it that she could end up in this situation? Surely, she and Gerald had been careful – hadn’t they? Clearly not careful enough.
Liz blew her fringe up out of her eyeline with a huff of hot breath, as she racked her brain. She began to come to the unsettling realisation that during the weekend she and Gerald had spent at her sister’s house a few weeks ago, there might have been an unsanctioned moment of passion … thanks to an unsanctioned amount of red wine …
Liz frowned and rubbed her face in anguish, annoyed at herself for being so uncharacteristically reckless. She and Gerald had only been seeing each other for a few months, and it was clear that Gerald was a little more into the relationship than Liz was. Liz felt that familiar lump of guilt in her throat that appeared regularly when she questioned whether their relationship was still ‘too much, too soon’ for her. She couldn’t help it. A past laden with shitty men and even shittier times had done that to her. People who didn’t know might well view her as being cold, closed and a little career-obsessed, but she simply saw those things as necessary for self-preservation.
This was not a happy magical moment. This was one filled with utter dread and sickly anticipation, as she became aware that two minutes had more than passed and the result would be ready.
So she should look at the test.
It would be ready.
God, she didn’t want to do this.
But she had to.
She filled her lungs with air and swiped the test up quickly from the sink, letting her eyes fall down on to the results window …
SHIT.
Click here to purchase The Mummy Lessons
I’ve done it. I’ve survived my entire first year without completely losing my shit or my sanity, and managing to keep the majority of my areolas intact.
I can’t actually believe an entire twelve months have passed … It feels like a blur – an amazing, beautiful, wonderful, guilt-ridden, shitty, tearful, and occasionally all-a-bit-too-much-but-completely-incomparable blur.
So here, for every other amazing Mummy (and Daddy) out there who’s made it through the first year, is a breakdown of THE FIRST YEAR OF BABY:
So small, so perfect, so fragile … Yes. Take a moment to remember your vagina the way it was. Then re-grow all your pubic hair to form a secret forest around it, destroy every handheld mirror in the land, and NEVER THINK ABOUT IT AGAIN.
Once that’s done, your first few weeks are spent trying to drown out the four thousand comments you get every day about how fast it goes, pretending breastfeeding doesn’t hurt, and rediscovering wine …
Okay you’re EXHAUSTED but you can do this. You’ve totally got this parenting shit down. You’ve joined every baby class in the county and your main plan is to baby-sign the sensory-baby-massaging f@*k out of your newborn … (If you could only stop them shitting all over themselves, the pram and your only remaining clean pair of leggings every time you try to leave the house, that is.) But still. YOU GOT THIS. Who needs eight hours’ sleep and a Perfect Prep machine anyway, right?
You buy a Perfect Prep machine.
And Ewan the Dream Sheep, a Gro-clock, a Gro-blind and anything else that the Internet tells you to. At 3 a.m. Whilst crying.
THEN. Suddenly. One night. Your baby actually sleeps for five hours straight. This is amazing. You’re a new woman. You’re so excited, you don’t call your husband a penis-wielding voodoo-bastard that night. Instead, you plaster your new magic-sleeping-baby news all over Facebook. With a smug emoticon. And begin planning a city break. Which … means you JINX YOURSELF FOR LIFE … As every day from this point, they mainly survive on forty-five minutes’ sleep a night. And the sound of you gently sobbing into a crusty muslin that’s been on your shoulder since Tuesday.
You used the Bumbo on the coffee table (you fucking rebel). But now, as well as not sleeping because you’ve been propped up in a nursing chair freezing one breast off at 4 a.m., you’re also not sleeping due to the BPG (Bumbo Placement Guilt) so it probably wasn’t worth it …
You try to sell the Bumbo on a Facebook selling site, but the experience is so horrendously tedious and time-wasting that you nearly murder someone who continuously calls you ‘hun’, and decide to just punch yourself in the fucking face next time instead.
Jumperoo. That is all.
Please remove any nice things from your life, as weaning means the end of those now. In fact – why not cut out the middleman, and begin hurling regurgitated broccoli and sweet potato at your own face and sofa. Perhaps some will trickle down your forehead into your mouth whilst still warm and you can count it as your first hot meal since you had a baby. Excellent.
You’ve made it. You’ve survived the first six months. This calls for celebration. An epic night out with breast pads, Spanx, and a new-found disrespect for your bladder … It is entirely amazing. Until forty seconds after you get in; when you know you’ll be spending your impending hangover trying not to gag tequila into the face of your baby whilst desperately Googling ‘breastfeeding after drinking A FUCK TON of alcohol’ and punching Ewan the Dream Sheep in his stupid twatty face.
It’s dawning on you that you’re still in your maternity jeggings. And that breastfeeding somehow hasn’t sucked you into a size 8 … but it’s okay, because to make you feel better about that, you eat an entire cake without breathing and/or chewing. This then makes you feel sad and you start poking your stretch marks. So you manage that with a Toblerone and some gin. The end. #ginwin
Shit. It’s started moving. Cafes aren’t for you any more. You should know that. #beginningoftheend
You’ve discovered the power of CBeebies … But your shame crush on Mr Bloom may be getting out of hand … Heading to the toilet to watch CBeebies on the iPad ‘one-handed’ is just not motherly behaviour *coughs*
(But seriously; if you make it into the loo alone – down a Toffee Crisp and tweet about it so the rest of us have hope … please … PLEASE.)
The Jumperoo doesn’t work any more. And Facebook is NOTHING BUT LIES. And, if you’re going back to work you’re going to have to face the fact that you’ll need to brush your hair and wear a real bra again soon … Shit.
So your ‘tiny baby’ is suddenly capable of head-butting you in the area-formerly-known-as-your-vagina, capturing the footage on your iPhone and uploading it to their own YouTube channel … but the main thing is that you tell everyone four thousand times a day how fast it’s gone, and that you’ve forgotten that breastfeeding ever hurt, and wine … Mainly wine. And wine.
#12monthsofbabydone
#ginwinetheend
‘Shit.’ said Emily.
As she sat on the loo, with her pants stretched awkwardly from one ankle to the other, feeling slightly undignified and more than a little exposed in the middle cubicle of Angel Public Relations unisex toilets.
Why the hell hadn’t she waited until she’d got home? WHAT ON EARTH possessed her to use her lunch break to buy a couscous salad, a packet of diced coconut, and a double pack of Clear Blue pregnancy tests? Well – she’d only bought the coconut because she overheard one of the girls on reception say it made you thin and it sounded easier than actual real-life exercising – but she didn’t even like couscous . . . And the pregnancy tests? Why was she doing this NOW? At work. Ten minutes before a whole agency brainstorming session about a luxury towel brand.
Yet here she was, with her Ted Baker pencil skirt hoisted up round her waist while her own lukewarm urine dribbled into her shirt sleeve.
Excellent, she thought to herself, pursing her lips and using her other (non-pissy) hand to hold back her mane of thick blonde curls.
The box said it took two minutes. Two minutes to show a clear result. Well, frankly, two minutes felt like a bloody lifetime while you were sat with your vagina out listening to Brian from accounting trying to politely cough his way through a spot of IBS.
No. Not exactly ideal. But here she was: pantless, pissy wrist and all, watching in slight disbelief as two very distinct blue lines in the ‘pregnant’ window slowly appeared and stared back at her.
‘Shit.’
‘Hello?’ Brian said tentatively from the sink area.
FUCK OFF, BRIAN.
‘I’m fine. Thanks,’ she called back at him.
Emily took a deep breath and tried to block Brian out as she fixed her gaze on the little white stick that was telling her her life was about to change quite a lot from this point. Probably. Right?
What did this mean?
OKAY, she knew what it ‘meant’. Obviously. But what did it really MEAN . . . Did she need to call her doctor? Find a midwife? Stop eating cheese?
I mean – anyone could take or leave Cheddar, but Camembert? That was going to take some serious commitment. Just thinking about it now was making her crave a Brie-and-bacon sandwich and a large glass of Pinot Grigio.
THIS IS RIDICULOUS. IT’S NOT ABOUT CHEESE. PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER, EMILY. YOU’RE CURRENTLY SITTING WITH YOUR FANNY OUT AND PISS DOWN YOUR ARM WITH SIX MINUTES TO GO UNTIL A MEETING ABOUT TOWELS AND YOU’RE THINKING ABOUT SOFT FRENCH CHEESES.
She took another deep breath.
A smile grew across her face. She couldn’t help her teeth from showing. There were a lot of teeth.
But she was just so happy.
(And semi-naked . . .)
And her mind was racing.
However, in the interest of somehow pulling her shit back together so she could think creatively about towelling, Emily reassembled herself, quickly snapped a picture of the pregnancy-test result on her iPhone and then wrapped the test in loo roll, popped it back into the packet and into her handbag.
Pants and pencil skirt now firmly back in place, she fired a WhatsApp message off to her husband Paul with the photo and a caption simply saying:
You’re going to be a daddy . . .
Swiftly followed by:
But can’t talk now.
Got to go brainstorm the shit out of
some towels.
I love you.
I can’t stop grinning.
Everyone is going to think I REALLY like towels.
And with that, Emily checked her phone was on silent, took a final deep breath and, confident she was now alone, finally left the shelter of the middle cubicle.
As she washed and dried her hands, she imagined laughing in the future about finding out the happiest news of her life at the same time as Brian from accounting had the shits in the loo next door to her . . .
Emily shook her thoughts away, composed herself and left the toilets. She quickly made her way back through the open-plan office attempting not to make eye contact with anyone (especially not Irritable-Bowel-Brian). It felt like her news must be pasted all over her face and might burst out of her any moment. It was almost disappointing that no one so much as glanced at her as she returned to her desk.
Focus, Emily.
She sat in front of her Mac and pulled up the briefing document she’d prepared for the brainstorm.
She stared at the screen. It was impossible to concentrate. All she had to do was press print, but it was so hard to think about towels now that she knew she had a human growing inside of her.
MY UTERUS HAS AN ACTUAL TINY PERSON IN IT.
It was an utterly insane feeling.
Just then, her eyes met her colleague Matilda’s. Matilda was a senior account manager who sat directly opposite her. She was a bit of a bitch, actually. Emily was fairly sure she was after her job, so she would literally be the last person on earth she’d let know it could be up for grabs, even temporarily, in about nine months’ time.
‘Everything okay?’ Matilda suspiciously raised an eyebrow in Emily’s direction. Which irritated Emily way more than it should do.
‘Yes. Everything’s great, thanks,’ Emily snapped. Attempting to remove the persistent grin from her face.
‘It’s just you were gone quite a while.’ Matilda responded with her eyebrow still suspiciously raised. ‘And now you’re grinning like some sort of lunatic. Had some good news?’
MEDDLING. BITCH.
‘I just really like towels,’ she retorted as she pressed print.
Matilda rolled her eyes and looked back at her screen.
Just then Natalie, the managing director, called everyone in to the large meeting room for the brainstorm.
‘Right. Let’s get going everyone. Got those briefing documents, Emily?’
Emily rose to her feet, grabbing the warm sheets from the printing bay on her way to the meeting room.
Right.
Don’t think about what’s in your uterus.
Think towels.
Towels.
Fucking towels.
It had been a pretty ordinary Friday for Molly.
She’d been clock-watching since lunchtime. Which seemed to have the annoying effect of making the afternoon drag even more . . .
She’d spent the week temping at a shitty building site, where she’d mainly been sat in a . . .
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