wvwvw
12-11-2017, 09:30 PM
Baby, you changed my life!
Pouring myself a large glass of water and peering groggily through the kitchen window, I'm hung- over. It's early - very early. It is raining and the sky is granite grey and barely lit. A man emerges from a flat over the road.
He has a small baby tucked under his arm. With the other arm he unlocks the boot of his car, pulls out a pushchair and erects it.
He then puts the baby into the pushchair, fiddles around with the straps, pulls a plastic hood over the pram and heads off down the road. He looks, bizarrely, quite content.
He is almost jaunty. I shudder and head back to bed where I will stay for at least another four hours, possibly longer. I am 30. I have no children. I am glad.
I am standing in a friend's garden. It is late evening and the sun is setting beyond the rooftops. My friend has 12 cats, all of whom have arranged themselves into graceful silhouettes along the garden fence. I realise that all the grown-ups have gone inside, that I am alone in the garden with my friend's daughter who I have only just met. I feel I should say something. 'Which one's your favourite?' I open, genially. She glances at me with disdain. 'I don't have a favourite,' she hisses.
As she heads indoors, I realise to my horror, that I am crying. Yes, crying - because a seven-year old girl wasn't very nice to me. I am 31 years old. I have no children. I am relieved.
I am in the beer garden of our local pub. A baby is crying in my friend's arms. She gave birth to it two months ago, and all it does is cry. Other friends arrive with their babies.
My friends with children sip mineral water and pace back and forth, fretting and placating. After about half an hour they go.
The child-free are left alone. I pick up my full pint of lager and feel smug. I am 32 years old. I have no children. I am delighted.
I'm 33 and thinking about my nephew. He is clever, funny, energetic, delightful, manic, infuriating, loving, trying, disobedient, exhausting.
Admittedly I do look forward to seeing him, and then, when it is time to go, I look forward to getting into my car, alone, without anyone dragging me out into the garden to play with gravel, without anyone bombarding me with questions, without anyone following me into the loo.
I sigh. I'm still no closer to understanding what on earth children are for.
I never wanted children. As a teenager, I had it all planned. I'd stay single until I was 40 and then I'd marry a divorcee who already had a family.
That way I would get all the benefits of adult children - weddings, grandchildren, people to have Sunday lunch with - without actually having to go through the ignominy, pain and bother of having a child of my own.
But at the age of 31, I blew my teenage master plan by marrying Jascha, a man who had no children of his own.
I dealt with the fact that I was no nearer wanting children as a married woman of 31 than I had been as a teenager by telling myself, and all and sundry, that I would start a family when I was 40.
That seemed reasonable enough and tucked away somewhere, in the fardistant future. In the meantime, I got on with the glorious, liberated, self-centred business of being myself.
I am 33-and-a-half. Nearly everyone I know has become a parent and I'm pretty sure there's a conspiracy going on here.
I secretly believe that they all hate being parents and that they spout all this 'magic' hogwash because they can't admit the truth - that they've made a terrible, dreadful mistake, that their lives are ruined.
When friends try to persuade me to have children I think they're jealous of my freedom and want me to be as unhappy as them.
But then something strange happens to me. I feel vague flutterings of broodiness. They are slight, barely perceptible, in fact, but I pounce on them eagerly.
I always assumed I'd have to force myself to want a baby but now, suddenly, my body is sending me tiny little radar beeps to let me know that it is maybe, just possibly, ready to consider it.
We start trying on January 1, 2002. After using contraception for the best part of 15 years, it comes as something of a surprise when I don't fall pregnant at the merest hint of unfettered sperm - but I breathe a sigh of relief when my period arrives a couple of weeks later.
I feel a sense of reprieve. I can keep drinking, keep smoking, keep on being 'me' for a few weeks more. We try for ten months and the longer we try, the more ambivalent I become. I don't really care if there's something wrong with me or something wrong with my husband.
If we can't have babies then fine, we'll have lots of holidays and lots of fun and lots of nice meals instead.
It is ten months into Project Baby and I am reading A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk. I turn the pages in horror. This is the author's account of her first year of motherhood and it is reinforcing every single misgiving and dread I've had.
Yes, says Rachel, you will lose your identity. Yes, you will feel isolated and cut off from everything. Yes, your old life will fade away like some distant, glorious, long-forgotten dream.
Yes, your husband will disappear every morning, into what used to be your world, and leave you at home, resentful and scared with a weird little baby to look after who does nothing but cry and cry and cry and then they cry some more. Yes, says Rachel Cusk, motherhood is hell.
"Jascha," I say, "I'm not sure about this. Can we stop trying for a while?"
So we stop trying. We avoid my fertile period as assiduously as we targeted it for the preceding ten months. I feel relieved and free. My body is my own again. My life is my own. No demanding, draining, identity-snatching baby is going to be allowed to come along and mess everything up.
But then, two days before my period is due, I have a funny feeling. It is highly unlikely that I'm pregnant but it suddenly occurs to me that I might be.
I unpeel the last of my pregnancy testers - and lo and behold, there it is, a white plastic stick with two pink lines on it. I phone Jascha. I phone my sister. I phone my mother. I phone my other sister.
I pace the flat, wondering exactly how I feel about this miracle conception, about the fact of my impending motherhood.
Jascha comes home that night with a bunch of pink roses and an uncertain smile. Later on, we sit in a wine bar and I have a glass of champagne. I sip it gingerly. I feel sanguine. Not excited, not thrilled, just sanguine.
When I fail to start throwing up or develop weird cravings or feel tearful or tired or tetchy, I spend a small fortune on more pregnancy testers, then another £175 to have an early scan.
And there it is, a tiny blob clinging to the lining of my womb and a loud, thumping, insistent heartbeat reverberating around the consulting room.
Finally, I feel pregnant. And, guess what, I love it. I really love it. I love all the fuss and the attention. I love being so conspicuous, like a ship in full sail.
I love being sober at parties, being this huge, slow moving but totally independent creature, easing myself in and out of my sports car, meeting friends for lunch in town.
I wear my pregnancy like a beautiful new dress, accepting compliments for it wherever I go.
But I am still in denial about what is about to happen to me. As far as I am concerned, I am pregnant but there is not going to be a baby. I avoid prams in the street like you might avoid a drunk tramp.
When I am in the changing rooms at my gym, I sweep through the mayhem of the 'family' area towards the door that says 'children are not permitted to play in this area'.
I fear for the day when I will not be allowed to come in here any more. My mother buys the baby a vest with a small animal embroidered on the breast. I keep it in the spare room and visit it every now and then.
Sometimes I look at it and have to leave the room immediately; other times I pick it up and stare at it in nervous disbelief.
How can it be possible that I am going to produce something from my body that will one day inhabit this tiny bit of cotton? How can it be possible that there is going to be a baby living in our house?
Jascha and I go to see our friend's new baby two weeks before ours is due. I watch Georgia on the sofa, feeding her new baby. In the car on the way home I start to cry. I don't want that to be me.
I don't want a deflated stomach and have that slightly manic look of bliss in my eyes and a child attached to my breasts. I don't want to be a mother.
I just want to be pregnant. I am 35 years old. I am eight-and-a-half months' pregnant. I still don't want a child.
At my last scan my consultant tells me that my little girl is breech. I will have to have a Caesarean.
So now I have a date. I can put it in my diary if I like: July 29, 9am. Have Baby.
On July 28, I get the bus into town and do my last ever walk of freedom. I haul my vast body down Oxford Street, I buy myself a necklace, I eat alone at the sushi conveyor belt in Selfridges. I feel melancholic. This, I tell myself, is the end of 'me'.
It's the strangest feeling, going to bed that night, knowing that tomorrow morning everything in my world is about to spin round on its axis and come crashing down somewhere new and terrifying.
I don't expect to sleep, but somehow I do.
Jascha's parents drive us to the hospital. Both my husband and I are taken down to surgery where I am stripped and redressed in a cotton smock and Jascha is given a suit of green scrubs.
I am administered a drip and an epidural, and then a curtain is dropped between me and the lower half of my body. I feel my flesh being pulled and tugged and pulled again and then I see her.
She is a round-faced, yellow-haired angel with a wide, screaming mouth.
"Oh my God, oh God, Jascha, did you see her? Did you see her? Oh my God, she's so beautiful, so beautiful."
I am gabbling and gushing, stupefied with pride and joy. She is wrapped in white towelling and brought back to me.
I am living the cliche;, the moment of utter perfection, the waves of intense and instantaneous love.
She is everything I could have hoped for and more. The prettiest, best baby that anyone has ever given birth to. The centre of everything. The greatest achievement of my life. We are wheeled into the recovery room and a midwife appears by my side, clutching my new baby.
"Right," she says, "are you ready to try for your first feed?" Perhaps unsurprisingly, my attitude towards breastfeeding has always been somewhat negative. I don't like seeing women breastfeeding in public.
But suddenly I am ready to do anything, absolutely anything for this little parcel of fleshy perfection.
She is laid across my chest and she pulls my nipple into her mouth and I wait, ready for failure, ready for pain, ready for something to go wrong. But to my surprise there is no discomfort and there is no failure.
She sucks and she sucks and she sucks. She sucks non-stop for the first half-an-hour of her life and gets a full belly of milk. "I can't believe how well she's doing," I say to the midwife.
"That's probably because you've got such well-shaped nipples," she says, smiling.
This is the greatest compliment I have ever been paid in my life.
So here I am. Thirty-five years old and a mother, in spite of possessing no maternal instincts, in spite of years of ambivalence, in spite of weird children making me cry and in spite of Rachel Cusk.
I wait and wait for everything to feel different, but it doesn't happen. True, I spend my time differently, but inside my head, inside my heart, I am still, fundamentally, exactly the same.
My baby, I soon realise, is not an appendage but an extension of myself. So not only do I still feel like 'me', but I feel even more sure of myself and who I am.
I am Lisa Jewell: wife, daughter, sister, friend, successful author and mother. I feel empowered and fulfilled by my new role in life. And Amelie, of course, is remarkable. I keep her close to me at all times.
My mother is always trying to get me to put her down, but Amelie doesn't want to be put down and I don't want to put her down. I use a sling instead of a pram, loving the feeling of her body next to mine, wanting her to see the world from my perspective.
I use a sling, in fact, until she is 11 months old, until the insteps ofmy feet have nearly collapsed under the strain. And, of course, I breastfeed her for as long as she wants to be breastfed, until she gets bored of disappearing under my top every morning and wants to do other things instead. Oh my goodness, I am this close to becoming an earth mother.
All the cliches are true. Children do enhance your life. There is no conspiracy. It turns out everyone was telling the truth. Now I believe that the only reason why people who have had children are so desperate for you to join them on the other side is because they know how much you're going to love it.
If I hadn't had a baby, I wouldn't know any of this and I'm sure I'd have been every bit as happy as I am now. I have a great relationship, a great family, great friends and a great career.
My life would have been fulfilling and satisfying without a child in it. But I'm thrilled I've got one, and amazed by how little has really changed.
Children, you see, enjoy nice holidays in exotic countries and meals in smart restaurants just as much as you do. And most good restaurants open at six o'clock. Children like going on trains and like going for walks and like seeing friends for lunch.
My child even likes sitting in the back seat of my car listening to the Arctic Monkeys. We sing along and she tells me off if I turn the volume down. "Make it loud!" she says, "make it loud!"
For every bad afternoon there are ten superb afternoons. For every tantrum there is a cuddle. For every sick stain on your carpet there is a stranger's smile on the street. And for every broken night there is a walk through the park on a sunny day when the sunlight catches the soft wisps of your child's hair.
They turn and smile at you in wonder at their first sighting of a squirrel, and they're dressed in a coat that gave you just as much pleasure to buy as a £200 jacket from Whistles.
As far as you're concerned they are the most beautiful, enchanting, wondrous and special child ever to have been brought into existence.
And you are the luckiest woman in the world.
• Adapted from Mums: A Celebration Of Motherhood, edited by Sarah Brown and Gil McNeil, published by Ebury
Pouring myself a large glass of water and peering groggily through the kitchen window, I'm hung- over. It's early - very early. It is raining and the sky is granite grey and barely lit. A man emerges from a flat over the road.
He has a small baby tucked under his arm. With the other arm he unlocks the boot of his car, pulls out a pushchair and erects it.
He then puts the baby into the pushchair, fiddles around with the straps, pulls a plastic hood over the pram and heads off down the road. He looks, bizarrely, quite content.
He is almost jaunty. I shudder and head back to bed where I will stay for at least another four hours, possibly longer. I am 30. I have no children. I am glad.
I am standing in a friend's garden. It is late evening and the sun is setting beyond the rooftops. My friend has 12 cats, all of whom have arranged themselves into graceful silhouettes along the garden fence. I realise that all the grown-ups have gone inside, that I am alone in the garden with my friend's daughter who I have only just met. I feel I should say something. 'Which one's your favourite?' I open, genially. She glances at me with disdain. 'I don't have a favourite,' she hisses.
As she heads indoors, I realise to my horror, that I am crying. Yes, crying - because a seven-year old girl wasn't very nice to me. I am 31 years old. I have no children. I am relieved.
I am in the beer garden of our local pub. A baby is crying in my friend's arms. She gave birth to it two months ago, and all it does is cry. Other friends arrive with their babies.
My friends with children sip mineral water and pace back and forth, fretting and placating. After about half an hour they go.
The child-free are left alone. I pick up my full pint of lager and feel smug. I am 32 years old. I have no children. I am delighted.
I'm 33 and thinking about my nephew. He is clever, funny, energetic, delightful, manic, infuriating, loving, trying, disobedient, exhausting.
Admittedly I do look forward to seeing him, and then, when it is time to go, I look forward to getting into my car, alone, without anyone dragging me out into the garden to play with gravel, without anyone bombarding me with questions, without anyone following me into the loo.
I sigh. I'm still no closer to understanding what on earth children are for.
I never wanted children. As a teenager, I had it all planned. I'd stay single until I was 40 and then I'd marry a divorcee who already had a family.
That way I would get all the benefits of adult children - weddings, grandchildren, people to have Sunday lunch with - without actually having to go through the ignominy, pain and bother of having a child of my own.
But at the age of 31, I blew my teenage master plan by marrying Jascha, a man who had no children of his own.
I dealt with the fact that I was no nearer wanting children as a married woman of 31 than I had been as a teenager by telling myself, and all and sundry, that I would start a family when I was 40.
That seemed reasonable enough and tucked away somewhere, in the fardistant future. In the meantime, I got on with the glorious, liberated, self-centred business of being myself.
I am 33-and-a-half. Nearly everyone I know has become a parent and I'm pretty sure there's a conspiracy going on here.
I secretly believe that they all hate being parents and that they spout all this 'magic' hogwash because they can't admit the truth - that they've made a terrible, dreadful mistake, that their lives are ruined.
When friends try to persuade me to have children I think they're jealous of my freedom and want me to be as unhappy as them.
But then something strange happens to me. I feel vague flutterings of broodiness. They are slight, barely perceptible, in fact, but I pounce on them eagerly.
I always assumed I'd have to force myself to want a baby but now, suddenly, my body is sending me tiny little radar beeps to let me know that it is maybe, just possibly, ready to consider it.
We start trying on January 1, 2002. After using contraception for the best part of 15 years, it comes as something of a surprise when I don't fall pregnant at the merest hint of unfettered sperm - but I breathe a sigh of relief when my period arrives a couple of weeks later.
I feel a sense of reprieve. I can keep drinking, keep smoking, keep on being 'me' for a few weeks more. We try for ten months and the longer we try, the more ambivalent I become. I don't really care if there's something wrong with me or something wrong with my husband.
If we can't have babies then fine, we'll have lots of holidays and lots of fun and lots of nice meals instead.
It is ten months into Project Baby and I am reading A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk. I turn the pages in horror. This is the author's account of her first year of motherhood and it is reinforcing every single misgiving and dread I've had.
Yes, says Rachel, you will lose your identity. Yes, you will feel isolated and cut off from everything. Yes, your old life will fade away like some distant, glorious, long-forgotten dream.
Yes, your husband will disappear every morning, into what used to be your world, and leave you at home, resentful and scared with a weird little baby to look after who does nothing but cry and cry and cry and then they cry some more. Yes, says Rachel Cusk, motherhood is hell.
"Jascha," I say, "I'm not sure about this. Can we stop trying for a while?"
So we stop trying. We avoid my fertile period as assiduously as we targeted it for the preceding ten months. I feel relieved and free. My body is my own again. My life is my own. No demanding, draining, identity-snatching baby is going to be allowed to come along and mess everything up.
But then, two days before my period is due, I have a funny feeling. It is highly unlikely that I'm pregnant but it suddenly occurs to me that I might be.
I unpeel the last of my pregnancy testers - and lo and behold, there it is, a white plastic stick with two pink lines on it. I phone Jascha. I phone my sister. I phone my mother. I phone my other sister.
I pace the flat, wondering exactly how I feel about this miracle conception, about the fact of my impending motherhood.
Jascha comes home that night with a bunch of pink roses and an uncertain smile. Later on, we sit in a wine bar and I have a glass of champagne. I sip it gingerly. I feel sanguine. Not excited, not thrilled, just sanguine.
When I fail to start throwing up or develop weird cravings or feel tearful or tired or tetchy, I spend a small fortune on more pregnancy testers, then another £175 to have an early scan.
And there it is, a tiny blob clinging to the lining of my womb and a loud, thumping, insistent heartbeat reverberating around the consulting room.
Finally, I feel pregnant. And, guess what, I love it. I really love it. I love all the fuss and the attention. I love being so conspicuous, like a ship in full sail.
I love being sober at parties, being this huge, slow moving but totally independent creature, easing myself in and out of my sports car, meeting friends for lunch in town.
I wear my pregnancy like a beautiful new dress, accepting compliments for it wherever I go.
But I am still in denial about what is about to happen to me. As far as I am concerned, I am pregnant but there is not going to be a baby. I avoid prams in the street like you might avoid a drunk tramp.
When I am in the changing rooms at my gym, I sweep through the mayhem of the 'family' area towards the door that says 'children are not permitted to play in this area'.
I fear for the day when I will not be allowed to come in here any more. My mother buys the baby a vest with a small animal embroidered on the breast. I keep it in the spare room and visit it every now and then.
Sometimes I look at it and have to leave the room immediately; other times I pick it up and stare at it in nervous disbelief.
How can it be possible that I am going to produce something from my body that will one day inhabit this tiny bit of cotton? How can it be possible that there is going to be a baby living in our house?
Jascha and I go to see our friend's new baby two weeks before ours is due. I watch Georgia on the sofa, feeding her new baby. In the car on the way home I start to cry. I don't want that to be me.
I don't want a deflated stomach and have that slightly manic look of bliss in my eyes and a child attached to my breasts. I don't want to be a mother.
I just want to be pregnant. I am 35 years old. I am eight-and-a-half months' pregnant. I still don't want a child.
At my last scan my consultant tells me that my little girl is breech. I will have to have a Caesarean.
So now I have a date. I can put it in my diary if I like: July 29, 9am. Have Baby.
On July 28, I get the bus into town and do my last ever walk of freedom. I haul my vast body down Oxford Street, I buy myself a necklace, I eat alone at the sushi conveyor belt in Selfridges. I feel melancholic. This, I tell myself, is the end of 'me'.
It's the strangest feeling, going to bed that night, knowing that tomorrow morning everything in my world is about to spin round on its axis and come crashing down somewhere new and terrifying.
I don't expect to sleep, but somehow I do.
Jascha's parents drive us to the hospital. Both my husband and I are taken down to surgery where I am stripped and redressed in a cotton smock and Jascha is given a suit of green scrubs.
I am administered a drip and an epidural, and then a curtain is dropped between me and the lower half of my body. I feel my flesh being pulled and tugged and pulled again and then I see her.
She is a round-faced, yellow-haired angel with a wide, screaming mouth.
"Oh my God, oh God, Jascha, did you see her? Did you see her? Oh my God, she's so beautiful, so beautiful."
I am gabbling and gushing, stupefied with pride and joy. She is wrapped in white towelling and brought back to me.
I am living the cliche;, the moment of utter perfection, the waves of intense and instantaneous love.
She is everything I could have hoped for and more. The prettiest, best baby that anyone has ever given birth to. The centre of everything. The greatest achievement of my life. We are wheeled into the recovery room and a midwife appears by my side, clutching my new baby.
"Right," she says, "are you ready to try for your first feed?" Perhaps unsurprisingly, my attitude towards breastfeeding has always been somewhat negative. I don't like seeing women breastfeeding in public.
But suddenly I am ready to do anything, absolutely anything for this little parcel of fleshy perfection.
She is laid across my chest and she pulls my nipple into her mouth and I wait, ready for failure, ready for pain, ready for something to go wrong. But to my surprise there is no discomfort and there is no failure.
She sucks and she sucks and she sucks. She sucks non-stop for the first half-an-hour of her life and gets a full belly of milk. "I can't believe how well she's doing," I say to the midwife.
"That's probably because you've got such well-shaped nipples," she says, smiling.
This is the greatest compliment I have ever been paid in my life.
So here I am. Thirty-five years old and a mother, in spite of possessing no maternal instincts, in spite of years of ambivalence, in spite of weird children making me cry and in spite of Rachel Cusk.
I wait and wait for everything to feel different, but it doesn't happen. True, I spend my time differently, but inside my head, inside my heart, I am still, fundamentally, exactly the same.
My baby, I soon realise, is not an appendage but an extension of myself. So not only do I still feel like 'me', but I feel even more sure of myself and who I am.
I am Lisa Jewell: wife, daughter, sister, friend, successful author and mother. I feel empowered and fulfilled by my new role in life. And Amelie, of course, is remarkable. I keep her close to me at all times.
My mother is always trying to get me to put her down, but Amelie doesn't want to be put down and I don't want to put her down. I use a sling instead of a pram, loving the feeling of her body next to mine, wanting her to see the world from my perspective.
I use a sling, in fact, until she is 11 months old, until the insteps ofmy feet have nearly collapsed under the strain. And, of course, I breastfeed her for as long as she wants to be breastfed, until she gets bored of disappearing under my top every morning and wants to do other things instead. Oh my goodness, I am this close to becoming an earth mother.
All the cliches are true. Children do enhance your life. There is no conspiracy. It turns out everyone was telling the truth. Now I believe that the only reason why people who have had children are so desperate for you to join them on the other side is because they know how much you're going to love it.
If I hadn't had a baby, I wouldn't know any of this and I'm sure I'd have been every bit as happy as I am now. I have a great relationship, a great family, great friends and a great career.
My life would have been fulfilling and satisfying without a child in it. But I'm thrilled I've got one, and amazed by how little has really changed.
Children, you see, enjoy nice holidays in exotic countries and meals in smart restaurants just as much as you do. And most good restaurants open at six o'clock. Children like going on trains and like going for walks and like seeing friends for lunch.
My child even likes sitting in the back seat of my car listening to the Arctic Monkeys. We sing along and she tells me off if I turn the volume down. "Make it loud!" she says, "make it loud!"
For every bad afternoon there are ten superb afternoons. For every tantrum there is a cuddle. For every sick stain on your carpet there is a stranger's smile on the street. And for every broken night there is a walk through the park on a sunny day when the sunlight catches the soft wisps of your child's hair.
They turn and smile at you in wonder at their first sighting of a squirrel, and they're dressed in a coat that gave you just as much pleasure to buy as a £200 jacket from Whistles.
As far as you're concerned they are the most beautiful, enchanting, wondrous and special child ever to have been brought into existence.
And you are the luckiest woman in the world.
• Adapted from Mums: A Celebration Of Motherhood, edited by Sarah Brown and Gil McNeil, published by Ebury