LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

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