LITMIR.BIZ

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when I went back to my parents’ place, still an idle teenager, glued to their sofa because they had Sky and I wasn’t yet adult enough to sort that out for myself.

      By 28 you kind of know the sort of friend you are, the sort of girlfriend, the sort of daughter. You know what makes you tick, what you can and can’t stomach, which drinks will make you blow chunks all over a car park and which will help you live your best life. You know how you handle work, stress, heartache and you know what kind of social being you are. But you probably have no idea what kind of mother you’ll be.

There was a lot of trial and error to make the 28-year-old me. A lot of hard work to take me from diligent intern to magazine staffer, then finally to this freelance career as a beauty writer, which was just taking off. I had fallen in love with my husband Rich at university and so we had grown up together and whittled ‘young professional’ identities side by side. Like most millennials,* we had lived with my parents for six months, and that’s as hard as it got for us.

      We saved up and bought a tiny flat in Brighton once we were both working, and continued to save for sofas and TVs and maybe a holiday one day. Thanks to Rich’s unshakeably stoic and calm personality, I never had to work very much at being a girlfriend or wife, because it was the easiest gig in the world, but I was very aware of – and grateful for – our dynamic as partners. I remember reading an article in a bridal magazine when we were first engaged which asked, ‘What kind of bride will you be?’ and I remember thinking, just like, me … but in a wedding dress? It hadn’t affected either of us at all, getting married. I hadn’t even changed my name. During the week I was still a hard-working, single-minded writer for women’s magazines, and at the weekend I was a semi-retired party girl. I had just discovered karaoke and how adept I was at Cher’s greatest hits. I hadn’t encountered loss or redundancy or impotence – nothing that could throw me off-course for even a second. I was surrounded by brilliant, funny women all the time, who were just as selfish as me. There wasn’t a baby amongst us, just a working week punctuated by red wine, books, boxsets, shopping for olives and sex with my husband. There was no ill that couldn’t be remedied with a cocktail, a cheese sandwich and at worse, a cigarette. I was solid and robust.

Then one New Year’s Day, my husband thumbed in a softie just before the curry arrived, and somehow that was all it took to derail this well thought-out life. We hadn’t even had sex in a purposeful, deliberate way, really. Having been together for six years already we didn’t do it as often as we used to, and on New Year’s Day I was always overcome by a combination of hangover guilt and the need for fresh starts to announce that we would be doing it more often that year. We would make it a priority; it would be our New Year’s resolution to shag plentifully. And so every year, despite not wanting to, we would have sex, because to not have sex would set the tone for the year. But this perfunctory two-minute act was all it took to get those robust Yorkshire sperm into my reticent, slightly uptight eggs and lo, I was up the stick. Getting pregnant was the biggest curveball I’d ever been thrown. It was the ultimate kick-you-in-the-gut moment for a control freak like me, especially as I assumed I was infertile on account of the chlamydia.†

      Too much? If you’re feeling like you already know more than is necessary about the workings of my genitals, I urge you to continue regardless. (Except you, Dad. If you’re reading this, chlamydia is a rare but very beautiful orchid. Don’t read the footnote, ’kay?) Think of it as an endurance test of sorts. I’m not sure what the reward is for enduring multiple descriptions of my innards, but still.

      I blame motherhood for the need to over-share. I never used to discuss my vagina with anyone who wasn’t directly involved with it, and that was generally confined to my gynaecologist and my husband, and before that, a brief but distinguished list of men in their late teens/early 20s. And most of them didn’t discuss it per se, as much as compliment it or suggest it be better groomed.

      But the minute my vagina was ripped open by a crowning head in a room of eight strangers, it became public property and my number-one topic of conversation. I took back control by talking about it to everyone, presumably so they’d get a fair idea of what it was like before they inevitably saw it. It’s possible I need therapy. Anyway, buckle up, there’s more to come. You’ll be able to draw a very accurate diagram of my labia by Chapter 7, and I urge you to do so.

      Wait, why are there TWO lines?

      Let me take you back to the moment the story really began. It’s 9.15am on 24 January 2012, and I’m at home in Hove, sitting on the toilet, staring down at the knickers looped around my knees. Tears are quietly pooling in the gusset. I have just seen two blue lines darken purposefully on a pregnancy test, where I’d have preferred just the one, and maybe a thumbs-up emoji. Because two lines mean, yeh, you are all kinds of pregnant. You’ve basically AirBNB’ed your womb; another human being is setting up camp in your innards. Your vagina is about to be split in two, then chopped up like mincemeat.

      It was not the news I had hoped for when I planned to fit a quick pregnancy test in between breakfast and the start of my working day, writing about – ironically – whether it’s ever OK to ask a woman when she’s going to have kids, for the Huffington Post. It was off-topic for me, but since our wedding in 2010 it was all anyone asked me and it had really started pissing me off. I mean, sure, on paper, my husband and I were all set for the childbearing years to begin. But the assumption that as a married woman the next logical step would be motherhood irked me. I am a fully practising feminist so I’m not into the yokes forced upon our sex. But also I was still keen to prioritise spontaneous holidays and sleep. Oh, and my career. And I just didn’t fancy it.

      Then I realised I hadn’t had a period since 2011, so when I popped out to get the paper and live yoghurt (in case it was thrush delaying my menstruation) I added a pregnancy test to the basket. There I was, midway through furiously tapping out this angry argument that ‘when are you having kids?’ was an entirely inappropriate question when I saw that the answer from me would be, IN ABOUT NINE MONTHS ACTUALLY.

      My first instinct was to go back in time and nuke that errant sperm, ripping its microscopic little head off and dousing the remains with a shot of spermicide. I know, I know – I seem like such a maternal soul, why on earth would I not want to embrace this little miracle?

      The truth is I enjoyed being an autonomous, self-obsessed, one-blue-line kind of person. I liked who I was. I liked our tiny flat full of sharp corners and bottles of rum. I liked my husband. I even liked my body. I didn’t want all that to change. Plus, I was about to start a new job which I had spent the past seven years working my butt off to bag (often for free): acting beauty editor at Glamour, a part-time gig so I could also start writing a book. It felt like I’d finally got to where I wanted to be.

      Just the week before I’d been sitting in the pub with a group of girlfriends slagging off people with kids for invading our favourite brunch bar – the buggies skinning your ankles and the thoughtless amount of noise and space-invading stuff these women came with. The general gist was: mums are selfish and obsessed with their kids and lose all reason and ambition when they give birth. They moan and stop dyeing their hair. They don’t have sex anymore. They live vicariously through their kids, letting their own lives slip from the radar. They lose the will to engage with the world and crusade for what they believe in, unless it was #FreeTheNipple or banning junkies from parks.

      I was fine with concealing my nipples and would a Brighton park even be a proper Brighton park if it didn’t offer a grassy knoll up to a junkie once in a while? I couldn’t join this gang now, swallow my words about not letting prams on commuter trains. Also, imagine not being able to have a sneaky smoke when you felt like it. What would I do with my right hand when there was a bottle in the left?! I did another test. Still pregnant. Fuck.

      How can you become a mum and not lose your sense of self? I considered the examples of motherhood I had to go by. Kirstie Alley in Look Who’s Talking. Diane Keaton in Baby Boom. She had given up a kickass career to make apple sauce. APPLE SAUCE? I hate apple sauce. And how about Three Men and a Baby? What

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