Lost in Motherhood - Grace Timothy

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This coat is enough of an answer to this question. I find a small, plastic toy fish floating around. Found Nemo, didn’t I? That would obviously never have happened to me before I had a child. Nor would the crispy Wet Wipe I’m nudging aside. Nor the coat itself – a navy blue, knee-length puffa coat, waterproof, functional and covered in stains. You don’t have a coat like this unless you’re a mum or a shepherd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      ‘I think you really need to invest in some space for yourself,’ she goes on, ‘Have you tried meditating? Book 15 minutes out to meditate, another 15 for a walk outside, just you. And I think you’d really benefit from some body work too – regular sessions with me and maybe some cranial osteopathy. You need to make time for yourself, Grace.’

      I consider this. ‘Do you have kids, Pat?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Ah.’

PART I

      CHAPTER ONE

       THE FIRST TRIMESTER/SHOCK

      You just know when you first find out you’re pregnant that having a baby is going to change everything. The obvious things like your day-to-day life, your financial status and your independence are hanging in the balance. Your home will quickly fill with plastic toys, the corners softened, the plugholes stuffed. Your body will be repurposed like a dodgy doer-upper on Homes Under The Hammer, which you might start watching because you’ll suddenly be switching from working woman to stay-at-home mum, at least until the stitches heal, but probably for a year.

      I was most worried about how becoming a mum would affect my identity, with which I’d only just felt comfortable at the age of 28. If work, marriage, friendships, your body and even your name are directly affected by this twist in the road, where will YOU end up? ‘Just A Mum’ and nothing else? Finding out I was pregnant felt like taking a pair of scissors to the threads which my future hung from, snip-snip-snip – I knew I would have to change and I didn’t want to.

      I know – this is not how books about child-bearing usually begin. They’re all BLESSED to be with child, the fulfilment of a lifelong dream to be pregnant. Well, I could write that book, for the record. My love for my child is endless, boundless and unconditional. I love being her mother. But this book is not about my baby or my relationship with her. It’s about saying, without caveat or excuse: being a mum is better than I’d ever imagined, harder than I thought possible and I am a completely different person now. I have gone through a transition at a rate that would make your eyes bleed.

      If that’s not enough and you’re about to cast this book down in disgust and write me off as undeserving of the gift of childbirth, let me pre-empt some of the hard stuff with a little story. You’re still getting to know me, after all, and this story is quite a good yardstick for measuring my kind side.

      When I was 19, I saved up for months and months to go on a turtle-saving expedition. If you’ve seen that Attenborough documentary or Moana you’ll know that turtles lay their eggs in the sand at the top of the beach and a baby turtle’s instinct when it hatches is to scratch its way up through the sand then head for the sea, scuttling towards the light of the moon bouncing off the water, where it will swim away and presumably find its mum and live a long and fulfilling life. But, sadly, now there are hotels and traffic to confuse them, many will wander the wrong way and try crossing a road and die under the wheels of a car. Also, they are poached and made into soup.

      So I selflessly left a summer of partying behind me at my peak party age, and started trawling the beaches of Grand Cayman at 5am every morning to check nests and help any little guys that had got stuck to crawl up through the sand and make it to their destiny, to fulfil their little turtle dreams. So when you’re thinking, JESUS, THIS GIRL IS BLOODY AWFUL TO HER HUSBAND/MUM/GYNAECOLOGIST, just remember the tiny turtles I saved and how nurturing and motherly I must be beneath all that bravado. Ahh, little tiny turtles, guys! What’s cuter than that? God, I’m such a good person.

      Before I became a vessel for my mother-in-law’s third grandchild (if that wouldn’t make a great slogan tee I don’t know what would) I felt fairly sure of who I was. Actually, I never paused to think about it. I felt young first and foremost – endless possibilities stretched out ahead of me once I’d earned a bit more money and turned 30. A map of places I would one day visit, a menu of experimental haircuts, clothes that really lasted and a collection of house

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