Mum Face: The Memoir of a Woman who Gained a Baby and Lost Her Sh*t - Grace Timothy

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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. Our new house would be a party house, always full of guests. We’d simply be US with a plus one.

      To prove just how unchanged I was, I got dolled up and went to the GLAMOUR Women of the Year Awards.

      ‘You don’t have to come,’ my boss explained. ‘We totally get that all the standing around and the late night might be too much.’

      ‘No, no, I’ll be there!’ I said, perhaps too enthusiastically.

      I could still party, get my hair done, wear a dress that wasn’t even from the maternity-tent section. Well, until 9pm, when the caterers cleared the plates, forcing me to stop minesweeping the leftover canapés, and I got a bit weepy in the queue for the toilets. As I was helped into a cab, I felt tired, a bit sick and very, VERY pregnant.

      CHAPTER THREE

       THE THIRD TRIMESTER/ACCEPTANCE

       There’s no denying it now – I’m huge. I’m fully repurposed. It’s damned obvious there’s a baby on its way. I’m a MUM and everyone knows it …

      I was under the distinct impression that a baby gestated for nine months. There was that film starring Hugh Grant, wasn’t there? And everyone says ‘nine months’ a lot, like it’s the absolute maximum time you’ll be pregnant for. But as I counted backwards on my fingers to the moment we think Rich impregnated me, I realise nine months is up and I’m still gestating. I ask the midwife, Look, babe, are we nearly done here? Has someone made a cock-up with the calculations? Because I’m pretty sure we should be entering the labour phase now. And she explained it was more like 40 weeks. THAT’S 10 MONTHS. More lies.

      The grim realities of the final trimester – stretch marks, piles, breathlessness, aching joints – make it impossible to ignore the changes. Your body is totally foreign, you’re staring down the coming weeks of what feels like the end of your career, and of course, the birth. The brain changes again – you must nest, clean, furnish your home with the buggies, cots and digital thermometers, all of which suddenly seem full of potential hazards, each decision weightier than before. Your priorities are already shifting. Your old self can still be heard – Don’t do it, don’t do it! Remember, we’re not going to change! – but it’s all you can do not to bulk buy nappies and dribble bibs. It was then I started talking about myself in the past tense a lot.

      Growing a grandchild

      The other thing that was worrying me a bit was the ownership of the baby. Namely, the two grandmothers awaiting THEIR new baby. I was fiercely independent and actually very selfish with my time. But suddenly it wasn’t about me anymore. HOLD UP, WHAT?! There was a lot of talk about them not making plans around our due date, so they could be there (UM, unlikely! You are strictly NFI to this cervical hoedown and that’s a definite). Then there were the various debates over who we would spend Christmas with, from both sides. Now there was a child added to the mix, I could no longer decide for myself where we’d go and for how long – we were merely there to present her to either side. It was the first encroachment

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