So, you’re pregnant.
A lifetime of movies, sitcoms, soaps
and friends has taught you what to expect.
You float serenely with a neat bump in
the barest chiffon. You glow. You make plans for the birth, for the
nursery, for the effortless return to slimness.
You do not envisage any problems, any frustrations, any glitches. After all, you have all these friends who
have had children, and they didn’t have the merest negative experience.
Well guess what. These friends ? These members of the sisterhood ? These fellow women who swore pregnancy was
the best thing that ever happened to them, and how “it” was all worth while
? They lied. And they never once had the decency to
explain exactly what “it” means.
The decision to have a baby is one of the most exciting things I think I ever did. It seems
thrilling, illicit, downright sexy to make love with absolutely no
barrier between you. Intimacy – nothing
comes close until you embrace the man you love with all of your body,
all of your hopes, and all of your self.
Well, let me rephrase. It’s the most exciting part till you realise
that despite 4 consecutive days of sex, you should probably do it for another 5
days “just to make sure”. Not so
exciting now. Duty, effort,
function. Of course it remains enjoyable
darling, of course it was great, but you both feel so obligated to your future
child to give him or her every chance to come into being that sex becomes ever
so slightly mechanical.
Gradually, you notice that your
husband looks really tired.
Typically, you had to trick him into
trying for a baby. It’s one of the greatest
truisms of life that There Is NO Right Time to Have A Baby. When your mum died, 2 years earlier, you realised
your father was likely to will himself to death (somehow, 20 years later, he’s
still here) and that you didn’t want to live your old age as an only child. The need to create one of your own took you by
surprise, and now, you were just about the right side of bored to make that happen.
Let me explain – by bored I mean I was
ready. There was nothing else going
on. I was a superstar in my job, the
house was as pretty as it would ever be and well …. I was ready for my next
adventure. The boyfriend, not quite so
ready. As ever, he struggled to commit
to something so I took control in the kick ass way that was my only mode of living
back then and told him it was absolutely fiiiiiine darling if he wasn’t ready,
but I was no longer taking contraception, so if he really didn’t want a baby,
he would have to put a condom on it.
This was probably the only
masterstroke I ever pulled in our relationship.
He hated condoms with a passion, so I knew there was no chance of him
doing it lol, and true to form, at the key moment, he sighed, said “Fuck it”,
and ta-daaaaaah, we were trying for a baby.
But there’s a difference between
trying and actually being. We’ve all
been there. That sickening moment when
we take the plunge and pee on the stick, praying loudly and fervently for the
little square to stay blank. We have
peed with fear, with a feeling of sick anxiety, of ambitions not yet
realised. Never before have we peed with
hope – dizzy, giddy, Christmas Day hope.
So you put the toilet lid down and you
wait. You try not to look at the stick
for 2 minutes, the way you try not to notice the dessert trolley in the
restaurant, but still, it keeps winking at you, flashing its power: Maybe. Maybe not.
You remember the previous month when
you were convinced you were pregnant, when you had already had nausea and
tiredness, when chicken began to make you feel sick, and the shock of blood on
toilet paper all but took your breath away.
As much as you are scared to get pregnant and change your life forever,
you are more scared of not getting pregnant and being the current you forever.
So you take a deep breath and you grab
the stick, and turn it over, look at it.
You open your eyes to see better.
You haven’t noticed that you have stopped breathing. And then you …. Well, I laughed. Spluttered, really. Shook my head in disbelief. A planned pregnancy that ironically, was
unplanned (we were convinced we had had sex on the wrong days that month; I
only did the test cos I get impatient).
And a boyfriend who was 3000 miles away at that moment, working for a month in Qatar.
Pregnancy, so romantic. Really, it should have been a sign.
You break the news to your partner –
ideally not in a trans-continental phone call, but I never have been able to
keep a secret – and you tell your best friend because you know that you are
impatient, impulsive and often downright reckless and it could be a good idea
to have someone around to rein you in and be on standby in case tragedy strikes
you early.
Its amazing people don’t notice. You wear your pregnancy like a secret. I swear any “glow” you get is the smug
satisfied smile of the cat who knows she just ate all the cream, but wants to
stay and watch what happens when the other cats find out.
It’s amazing people don’t notice. You pee.
Frequently.
It’s amazing people don’t notice. You puke.
A lot. Really, I should have just
put my office in the toilets, cos I really wasn’t consuming enough calories to
keep running back and forth. You hide
mouthwash in your locker. You start to
leave work earlier because at 4pm each day you feel as if you have fallen into
a narcotic stupor.
It’s all perfectly natural you tell
yourself. The books you have bought
explain how this is the baby’s greatest period of growth. Well no wonder I feel knackered – my body is
in shock. You tell yourself this, and
you believe it. It won’t last long. Really, you should know better.
You vow to keep it a secret until
you’re safely past 12 weeks – after all, mustn’t tempt fate. But you are also aware of how everybody at
work must be wondering why you are obsessed with a certain toilet cubicle, why
your bladder seems to have the cubic capacity of a gnat’s stomach, and why you
have been off ill a couple of times with “a bug”.
So you come clean at work, even though
you feel a bit of a prat making the announcement. But then once you’ve told work you realise
you should have perhaps told your family first.
Everybody is thrilled for you, everybody is excited.
Everybody except you.
You, well you just feel sick. Not just mildly sick, but all day nausea,
puking, inability to swallow even water kind of sick. Whoever called it morning sickness was a damned
liar. Mine lasted almost all of the day,
every day.
But look, the sisters crowd round to
give you comfort. Don’t worry, they
coo. It will pass. It gets better at 12 weeks (later they will reassure
you it gets better at 16, 20 and any other nice number weeks; rather like the
dream of the never-ending race, the finishing tape of sickness is always just
around the corner). Have you tried
ginger ? Have you tried crackers in the
morning ?
No, but I tried celibacy once and it
never made me feel like this.
It will be several weeks yet before
you realise they have lied. How they
have listened, nodded, empathised and then reassured you that you only have a
couple of weeks left to endure, that this is the worst moment.
It will not get better, but you don’t
know that yet, so you use your formidable talent for positive thinking to
convince yourself that soon you will feel better, soon you will glow. Meanwhile you are signed off work for 2
months with extreme nausea and exhaustion, 15 years before Kate Middleton made
it a well known thing.
So what did I learn? Well, when you want something, you have to
grab it. If you’re ready, Go and Get It,
don’t wait. In life, if you can make it
happen, you should, simple as.
However, pregnancy is the great
conspiracy of silence. Sure, some women
sail through it effortlessly, and you will come to hate these women with every
cell of your being, but so many others just aren’t honest about the horrendous
moments. For me, the 2nd part
of my pregnancy would be even worse than the first, and I never stopped being
shocked by the number of women who would say to me, “I know, the same thing
happened to me, but I didn’t want to tell you.”
So the real lesson is for the women out
there. Be honest. Decades ago, we possibly kept the misery of
pregnancy secret because it wasn’t a polite conversation to have. These days, thankfully, we don’t have that
excuse, which is why it’s so great to see Chrissy Teigen sharing the agony of
losing her baby. Pregnancy is an
experience that bonds us – the sisterhood is unlike anything I have ever
experienced, but we have to be honest.
I wish women had prepared me more for
how awful pregnancy can be. Would it
have stopped me? Absolutely not, but it
would have PREPARED me, and maybe killed off my fantasy of the yoga-chiffon-pregnancy
lol. I hated pretty much every moment
of being pregnant, and I only worked for 2 months in that entire time. Misery doesn’t even come close to describing
it, and despite every intention of agreeing with the fortune teller and having
3 children, it’s the main reason I stopped at 1.
I just couldn’t put my body through it
again.
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