LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER TWO

       THE SECOND TRIMESTER/DENIAL

      OK, nothing’s going to change. We are in control. We will be FINE. A baby is just us plus one.

      A midwife calls me ‘mum’

      The 12-week scan arrived and we sat alongside other women at various stages of pregnancy in a corridor outside the ultrasound room. We were back in Chichester because I hadn’t yet mustered the energy to leave my mum’s and go back to Brighton, it’s where Rich worked and my gynaecologist was right there. Without making any hard and fast decisions about how it would work when I was due to give birth, we had opted to register at this hospital, an hour’s drive from our flat.

      A colleague of Rich’s waved at us – Rich, my mum and me – from across the room, his wife bulging at the seams, and thus our cover was blown. But it didn’t worry me now that we had a plan of sorts. Plus, we were a party of three – four, if you counted unborn foetus – so we stood out a bit. My dad was due to come but I wasn’t sure if it would be another transvaginal scan or not. Transvaginal is so not my dad’s thing, weirdly.

      I still had trouble equating everything I felt with an actual baby – I felt like I had been hijacked, but possibly by some kind of government-funded scheme to secretly investigate chlamydia scar tissue in 28-year-old women. Not a bouncing baby. But the nausea had finally chilled out to a low-level feeling of crap, which I could thankfully eat through, so I was feeling better at any rate.

      The midwife bellowed my name into the waiting room – cool, officially and publicly pregnant then, thanks, love. I was convinced that since I felt so inadequately equipped to become a mother everyone waiting probably thought I was too. I had this feeling that they all thought I was a young teen mum despite the fact that I definitely looked like a 28-year-old mum.

      We went in and the nurse signalled to the bed while looking over my NHS-issued purple book of notes.

      ‘Now, if Mum could just jump up on the bed, and pop your jeans down, please.’ She was still looking at her notes, and so I wondered why on earth she would want my mum to pull her jeans down. Mum looked back at me with the same confusion, until Rich edged me towards the table. And just like that, this woman changed my name.

      I felt like saying, Oh, actually, we’ve decided nothing’s going to change? Yeh, so just call me Grace. Grace is GOOD, thanks.

      I really like my name. Grace is easy and singular. It’s what my parents chose and I love them very much. And so I love Timothy as well – it’s pretty much the only thing I have in common with my six half-siblings. It’s what I took into new schools as a little one, it’s the thing I still have from those days. In fact, other than a brief phase around eight or nine when I’d asked my parents to call me Olivia Graceland, I had always been called Grace. I didn’t qualify for nicknames really, because it’s not something that needed shortening and I probably didn’t have any strong enough traits to mark with a cool moniker. I didn’t even change my surname when I got married. As a journalist you work so hard to get it known, handing out business cards whenever possible, repeating it over and over so all and sundry know who to call back for another internship. I was by no means well known, but if I rocked up with another name all of a sudden, wouldn’t I be someone else? Wouldn’t I lose a key bit of myself, and potentially not be remembered? Rich had made a big deal of the ‘emotional emasculation’ in his wedding speech, but he was actually behind me on this. We hadn’t quite got to the whole what-will-our-kid-be-called? convo, and I had already decided I didn’t mind a bit if she or he was a Holmes. But anyway, I spent a bit of time thinking about it and explaining it, and now this stranger had changed my name in one swift move. I was officially ‘Mum’, despite the fact my child was a mere cluster of cells. I don’t even know why I’m defending this whole debacle actually – it’s my name, I want to keep it! End of!

      Being referred to and introduced as ‘Baby’s Mum’ is as reductive as it gets. I mean, I am used to being introduced as something to place me in someone’s mind – so-and-so’s assistant, The Intern, Rich’s wife, Blonde Grace (at uni, I was one of two Graces, Boobs Grace and Blonde Grace) – but being called ‘Mum’ was a bit like being renamed.

      I know it sounds like I was worried about losing my cool, but in all honesty, I was never cool. Anyone who mewls, ‘I used to work at Vogue!’ four years after they’ve left and relies on a knock-off designer handbag to help her be taken seriously in her industry isn’t genuinely cool or really that OK with her choices. BUT, I did have a sort of mask of cool perfected. I had some of the right clothes, I had focused on constructing this career that would take me to cool places where I would sweat profusely and wonder if I ever pronounced anything correctly. It was definitely a façade and I’m guessing the imposter syndrome was what was causing my upper lip to be perennially moist. It was a relief to go freelance and only have to maintain over email. But I did believe the last vestiges of anything resembling cool would trickle out of my vagina with the baby. Or, ideally, be delicately lifted from my insides by the surgeon who was performing the C-section I was fantasising about. Because I’d then forever be known as MUM.

And is it any wonder?! When do we fetishise or even celebrate motherhood in our vocabulary? When do we use the words in praise? In fact, my generation have advanced the field by adding the prefix ‘mum’ to things that are really rubbish, to really drive their naffness home. For example, ‘You’re such a mum’ – you nag, you worry, you piss everyone off, you big fat bore. ‘You’re so mumsy’ – you’re dowdy and dumpy and nobody fancies you. ‘Mom jeans’ – the ugliest fucking jeans known to man. They make your vagina look like a big ass and your ass look like a big vagina. FACT. ‘Mommy porn’ – 50 Shades of grammatical errors and submission-based sex. Yuck. I’ll take me some non-parent-related porn, thank you. ‘Mum hair’ – a really crap bob.* ‘Mum face’ – haggard, grey, tired-looking complexion. Probably teary. ‘Yummy Mummy’ – mum who makes a bit of an effort, which for me always had a whiff of the Readers’ Wives about them.

      Sometimes ‘mothering’ someone can be kind of nice, but it’s 100 per cent sexless and non-exciting, and tends to be a way of gently pointing out you’re treating someone like a baby. Rather than being fabulous

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