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      ‘Why don’t we do Christmas alone, just the three of us?’ I suggested to Rich when his mum first enquired, even though I was still a whole month away from even having the baby.

      ‘We can’t do that!’ He was clearly up for sharing. Typical youngest-of-three. ‘I want her to be around her cousins and her grandparents. Christmases should be huge for her!’

      I sulked.

      I’d read somewhere that it was wise to lock everyone out for the first two weeks, and I agreed this was a sensible idea, based solely on the fact I don’t like lots of people around and I planned on bingeing on series 4–6 of Dexter. But nobody agreed. My mother-in-law said she’d never heard of such a thing, and my mum refused to return her key. And now I get it – it’s their grandchild – but at the time, I was just thinking of ME. I do not want a house full of people when I’ve just given birth! I want time to adjust away from judging eyes, I want time to suss it all out and see if I develop postnatal depression before I have to think about entertaining guests. What, will I breastfeed and then make a bloody pot of tea for everyone?! Hoover when I should be SEEING TO THE NEEDS OF MY NEWBORN BABY?!

      But from then on it would be a battle of wills between me and the elders, who felt they had part-ownership of the baby. Not just in terms of the time they would claim, but also in terms of furnishings, apparently. Who will buy the pram, who will knit a blanket, who will provide second-hand monitors that already smell like electrical fires? My mum had already offered to buy us a new cot and changing station as a house-warming gift, and I’d agreed happily when I saw how much the bloody things cost. But then it was a bunfight in reverse. A car seat, baby bath and Moses basket were delivered within weeks of each other. I dumped them all in the shed in a fit of pique. If shopping was the only joy I’d get while my haemorrhoids were raging, I’d bloody well do it myself. You know, once the baby had arrived so as not to tempt fate, or whatever. Plus, we’d kept our mouths shut about what sex the baby would be, and it was killing my mother-in-law.

      ‘But how will we know what colour to buy for it?’

      ‘I mean, blue, pink, does it matter? Neither colour is going to harm the child, whatever its sex.’

      ‘Well, you can’t put a baby boy in pink, though, can you?’

      OK. Deep breath.

      ‘Well, what about grey? That’s neutral, isn’t it?’

      ‘GREY?! You can’t put a baby in grey!’

      We dropped the subject but my mother-in-law later sent down a parcel of hand-knitted baby blankets, all in grey. And every grey babygro she could find. And it turns out they’re quite hard to come by in Mothercare. So that made me cry, and also wonder if she wasn’t actually trying to take control at all, but that my mad hormones had made me a bit paranoid.

      My body is somebody else’s temple

      By the time I got to 28 weeks, I was bigger than anyone would have expected and there was definitely no denying it anymore. I heaved myself up onto the bus to work, sweating, huffing and puffing just taking the lift to the office. Eventually, my editor took me aside to tell me I could work from home if The Time comes sooner than we’d expected. And she was right. I kept on keeping on, thighs chaffing, bump propelling Londoners into oncoming traffic, but eventually I had to admit it: I was too massive to do the commute anymore. Enough. In July I agreed to work from home until the baby was born.

      I started to think that the Victorian model of confinement wasn’t such a terrible idea after all.

      At that time I started going out a lot less, a sort of self-enforced confinement. I needed people to properly acknowledge that what was going on with my body was wholly peculiar. A break with life might be helpful, or at the very least an admission that it’s very odd rather than everyone constantly poo-pooing your anxiety attacks because ‘this is the most natural thing in the world’. That just makes people who don’t find it natural feel crap. Pregnancy felt so unnatural, so utterly alien to me. It’s no less shocking for its regularity. Everything felt different.

      I want to look back and think, I was a warrior. I want to encourage other women to carry on being kickass while they gestate their kids. I’m not into any form of reverting back to Victorian-style womanhood. But I did a lot of reclining, swooning and weeping. Hell, if you’re going to indulge in some naval-gazing at any point in your life, you might as well wait until that naval is swelling to epic proportions.

      Meanwhile, Rich was getting a bit … chatty. I sensed he was getting nervous. He didn’t ask how I was feeling a lot, or watch me with concern, he just kept asking incessantly, ‘Do you fancy a wine yet, then? Or maybe some sex?’ as if those were the markers of me being the same person still. As it happened I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for alcohol because it made me feel even sicker, and my sexual appetite had trebled because of my now-huge vagina, so again, nothing to persuade him all was unchanged. All the blood was rushing down there, presumably in readiness for the stretch of its life, but that also meant that it was sensitive as hell and I could basically get off just by wearing the right jeans. Going sofa shopping was way more fun than it should have been, and emergency stops were my new favourite car manoeuvre. I was a massive vagina with legs, basically. It did mean that sometimes when I went to the loo, the pee would spring up like a fountain rather than down into the bowl, but otherwise: good.

      Rich was watching my body do some pretty weird shit, too. Despite the fact that I’d been slopping various oils across my bump for the past eight months (thanks to the dire warning from my mum that if I didn’t I’d be ‘riddled’ with stretch marks), with two weeks to go, the piercing through my belly button which I’d removed months before grew a red forked-tongue out of the top and then a map of red threads snaking out of the bottom. A week later I had more red lines on either side of my belly button, and within days there was a tube map of livid scratches covering my entire stomach. Some of them sprang beads of blood as my skin started to break over the shape of the baby. I felt like it was only a matter of time before my skin would peel back and my stomach would burst. I still had a couple of weeks to go, when little spots began to crop up within the widest lines, followed by a rash that crept down my thighs and across my chest. It felt like my skin was on fire, it was so itchy. I went to the doctor, convinced I was about to explode, and he diagnosed something called PEP – Polymorphic Eruption of Pregnancy – which is an inflammation of the stretch marks. Nothing I could do or take, of course, because when you’re pregnant, there’s bugger all you CAN do or take. I tried icing it but nothing worked to calm the itch, and so I went up a whole new level of crazy.

      I had been DUPED – I had done all the oiling and slathering I was told to do, despite the fact it felt horrible, and I had still got stretch marks so bad that they had their own acronym. I used to scream, ‘BIO OIL!’ as I dug my nails into my stomach when the urge to itch was overwhelming.

      I only felt comfortable standing in the freezer aisle in Sainsbury’s. I had to remain alert – if the sales team were aware I was loitering for too long they might think my enormous bump was actually a stash of petit pois stuffed up my dress, and strip search me. And while the walking vagina wasn’t completely averse to that, I didn’t want to have my Nectar card taken off me. In amongst the potato waffles and Cornettos I could peacefully waddle along, lunging to separate my thighs from each other as I went. I had a trolley to hold onto and a freezer to lean against – life was good. Maybe I could give birth in here, I thought, the idea of a warm pool making me wince.

      Massive vagina aside, I was not enjoying this tail-end of pregnancy, which was clever of the pregnancy gods (who I assume are chaired by Heidi Murkoff, author of What to Expect When You’re Expecting) because it meant I’d gone from fairly reluctant to give birth to actually thinking anything would be better than pregnancy. Maybe I’d even have an orgasmic birth,† I’d be that bloody happy to get things underway. Birth meant the end of PEP, the end of all the chafing and sweating and bleeding and gasping. I’d sleep again, pee normally again, maybe even fancy eating again if there wasn’t someone

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