The House on the Hill

My eldest boy, nearly five years old, taps on the window to get my attention. I’m hanging up the washing outside, trying to have a moment of peace in a day otherwise dominated by childcare. He waves at me. I wave back and resume my task. He knocks and waves again, so I wave back. Then I realise he’s trying to open the window. I wince, anticipating that he might accidentally knock over the pottery on the windowsill. I grit my teeth with frustration, tap pause on the podcast playing on my phone, and hurry over to warn him to mind the vase. He recoils from my annoyed face. My heart softens. ‘What do you want?’ He just came to see me and say that he loves me. We tell each other this countless times a day.

Every evening, I take an hour or so away from the kids to make dinner. My husband knows to keep the children contained so that I can have some undisturbed time - to complete tasks without interruption, to consume some media, to listen and reply to voice notes from friends. To do whatever the hell I want whilst preparing food. It’s a very enjoyable slither of my day. However, my eldest rarely gets through the hour without sneaking out to see me. Sometimes he’ll appear in the kitchen and say, “I lied to Dad that I needed the loo, but I just wanted to come and give you a hug”.

How precious to be so adored. Of course, I know it won’t last. It’s just a moment in time, a stage of his wondrous development, where I am his world. I drop to my knees, open my arms wide and pull him close, kissing his head. I know that in a few years, I’ll be the one hoping for a hug and these embraces will become rarer and rarer.

Raising children is intense. You experience time passing in a different way. I’m often spooling forward and back to make sense of the moment. Only a few years ago this child was a baby. Now he’s on the cusp of starting school. I sobbed on his last day of nursery a week ago, hugging the amazing women who cared for him. It marked the end of the first chapter of his life. The first goodbye. There is grief here.

I’ve just finished reading Matrescence by Lucy Jones. She writes about all this beautifully, including how the job of parenting is to make it possible for our children to leave us. She says:

My children are the main actors, and I am the audience. I will always be in thrall to them, but they won’t always be in thrall to me… This intimacy has a shelf life. Already, it hurts. I feel a premonition as I watch them grow before my eyes. This is life, and it is hard, and it is right.

Children reflect our own ageing. Whilst parenthood ages you, there is something kind of sexy about being the mother of young children. Babies and toddlers are cute and attract attention. Whereas being the mother of a school child feels distinctly middle-aged. I remember the parents of my school friends. I thought they were old. I’m joining their ranks now and will be perceived the same way (however young and vibrant I still feel).

It’s all so fleeting, isn’t it? My youngest has just turned two and is at ‘peak cute’. He says funny things and wants constant ‘huggys’. He’s a bundle of pure love. I am addicted to caressing his soft cheeks and pudgy legs. So soft. The softest. I think of old, weathered skin and marvel anew at the softness of his. Nuzzling into him is sensory bliss.

The intensity of my children’s need for me can be suffocating. Sometimes I look forward to the day when they won’t need me all the time and I’ll be free of their demands. But when that time comes, I’ll feel bereft. I’ll long to be needed again. Loved to the point of madness.

I roll out of bed as silently as I can, anxious not to stir my sleeping ten-month-old baby next to me. I’m now on the floor on all fours. I pop my slippers on and stand up. The baby is still asleep. First mission accomplished.

I stealthily creep downstairs. Unfortunately every step creaks. I make it to the bottom, grab some cereal and flip open my laptop to read the news whilst munching away. These could be my blissful moments of calm. But no, I hear a creak on the upstairs landing. My heart sinks.

My three-year-old has woken up and is now descending the stairs, coming to see what I’m up to. I shut my eyes, take a deep breath and muster some cheer in my voice, “Morning darling, shall we go and get dressed?”

I’m now into the routine of dressing and breakfasting whilst plotting whether, if I popped him in front of some cartoons for a bit, I might still have time to send some emails before the baby wakes upstairs and screams for another feed.

This is how I work; frantically in the windows of time available when my children sleep. The baby is still exclusively breastfeeding so at night, when I go to bed and feed him to sleep, I sometimes edge away from him in the dark, get my laptop from under the bed, and do a little bit more work. It’s a lottery. Some nights I manage a productive few hours. Other nights he wakes up, catches me and howls. He hates that laptop glowing in the bed. Fair enough, it’s not healthy. I’ll then end up feeding him to sleep again, trying to work, stopping to feed him to sleep again. On those nights I manage to do around twenty minutes of work whilst spending hours resettling the baby and it’s just not worth it, irritating all involved.

One of my dear friends recently observed that when you have children, all work happens under exam conditions, but you don’t know how much time you have for the exam. If I’m working during nap time, I’ll be typing away, with adrenaline coursing through me, glancing anxiously at the clock, aware that at any minute there could be a wail in place of the bell to signal that it’s over. The baby will cry or the toddler will shout. To be honest, whenever it comes, it will never be enough. And if there is a magic interval when both children sleep for a long time, then I’ll curse, and think ‘If I knew I’d have had a clear hour, I could have written an article, not just got up to date with my emails’.

It’s difficult to work when you have young children. There’s a good reason for that. Looking after small children is more than a full-time job because they require round-the-clock care. You can pay someone else to do that job for part of the time, so you can do another job, or you can do the job yourself. The tragedy is that if you choose to do the work of looking after your own children, few will acknowledge that as work because it’s unpaid.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a mortgage broker about renewing our deal. As a self-employed journalist and full-time mother, my earnings have been pretty low for the last few years as I’ve just taken on odd jobs whilst mothering. As I read out the numbers on my tax returns, the broker audibly sighed, signalling disappointment. I explained that my earnings have dropped because I’ve had two children. A double negative for him; now I had two dependents against my name, while earning less. He then asked, “Do you think you have the potential to earn more?” I was affronted. “Yes, I have the potential to earn more, but at the moment I don’t have time to work more because I am choosing to look after my own children”. He then asked again, “but do you think you could earn more?” I ground my teeth together. His was a mind attuned to calculating the price of everything but knowing the value of nothing. Later in the conversation he cheered up when we got to my childcare costs - they’re close to nothing, as we only use the free nursery hours provided for our three year old. He seemed surprised the outgoings for my children were so low. I grimaced, hating to repeat myself: “Yes, well we don’t pay for childcare because I am caring for them, though nobody pays me”.

The unpaid care work that holds society together is invisible to the money-men.

Whilst I manage to cram fragments of interesting journalistic and campaigning work into the margins of my life, I worry that I’m contributing to a culture which marginalises parenting. Every time a well-intentioned friend congratulates me on getting so much ‘work’ done, I feel a deep unease in the pit of my stomach and fear that I’m perpetuating a toxic ‘doing it all’ myth.

You cannot have it all. When I’m over-committed to external work, I compose messages and emails on my phone when looking after my children. This reduces my eye-contact with the baby. He’s looking at me for validation, for interaction, to see himself reflected back - and he’s building brain cells all the time. What happens when he looks at me and I’m looking at my phone? What happens when that’s a repeated pattern?

My older child regularly asks, ‘Why are you so angry?’ I didn’t think of myself as an angry person until I had children and now I’m livid. Frustrated, irritated, furious. Sometimes I’m angry because my child takes so long to decide what he’d like to watch - “Not ‘Raa Raa the Noisy Lion’, not ‘Moon and Me’, not ‘Kiri and Lou’…” As I hold the remote control waiting for his decision, I start seeing the emails I’d wanted to write disappearing, the time ticking away before we need to leave the house and I’m already calculating how I’ll compensate for that lost work. His voice cuts back into my thoughts, “Mum, why are you so stressed?”

Children luxuriate in the nowness of the now. My mind is too often elsewhere. I hate myself for that. I’ve had enough older people clutch my arm in the street, look at my children and urge, ‘It goes so fast you know. Enjoy it’. I feel the truth of what they say in my bones. Sometimes it has me blinking back tears. The utter preciousness of this fleeting time. The overwhelming love for my children.

I am torn. I love researching, writing and campaigning. I’m lucky that my vocation is something which I can do from home whilst my children sleep. Few jobs have the same perks. I’m impatient to engage with the world now. There is so much to learn and write about and try to change. And I want to help shape the wider world for my kids. I can’t wait for five years until my youngest child starts school and I reclaim hours of time for my own pursuits. But I question my grandiose justifications. The articles I write, which feel so vital to me at the time, will fade away and be forgotten. Today’s newspapers are tomorrow’s chip paper. The foundations of a child will last a lifetime. The real work is everywhere.

My body is in a state of post-birth deflation. My stomach’s slowly shrinking but still looks second-trimester pregnant and feels like dough. I’m perpetually leaking; blood, milk and tears. As often as I change the baby’s nappy, I’m replacing my own sanitary towels, breast pads, and dabbing at my eyes with toilet paper. I’ve been a weepy mess for the first two weeks of my new son’s life; everything has felt utterly overwhelming.

A cartoon caption in the latest Private Eye magazine captures my mood:

My mental health is fine as long as I don’t think about anything

That gifted me one of my first laughs since pushing another person out of my vagina. I can’t think about much without crying. How can I meet the very different needs of my toddler and my newborn baby? Can I cope with the guilt about not being able to do this? Will my body ever recover? When does the ‘baby blues’ become postnatal depression? Every midwife, breast feeding support worker and health visitor who asks me, how are you?, is met with a tsunami of tears. I feel unbearably fragile.

Thinking about the birth is particularly tough. When I last wrote, I said that I was hoping for a natural birth in hospital, without the need for induction. Well I got what I wanted, but it’s been an object lesson in being careful what you wish for.

I’m still trying to make sense of my second birth experience, which was completely different to my first. Writing offers me a way to process what’s happened. Due to the trauma of the event and being off-my-face on gas and air, I fear I’m a rather unreliable narrator. Fortunately, my husband BFG had the presence of mind to make contemporary notes of events on his phone, so we at least have an accurate timeline on which I can hang my recollections.

Things started positively. I woke up just before 5am and felt a mild popping sensation and liquid seeping out from between my legs. My waters had broken. I smiled to myself. I wanted to experience how labour would feel if it started naturally. My body was delivering the goods. I got a maternity pad to absorb the water, laid some towels on the bed and snuggled back under the duvet. I told BFG and messaged my parents to suggest that they might need to come over soon. I was starting to feel some achy cramps, which signalled that labour was beginning and hopefully I wouldn’t need any artificial induction to speed things along.

I was in pretty good cheer as I enjoyed a normal breakfast with my toddler when he woke up around 7am. I called the hospital maternity department to inform them that my waters had broken and they asked me to come in. My parents arrived, we all chatted for a while and then BFG drove us to the hospital. I felt calm and positive. Things were good - our son was being looked after and we weren’t in an emergency driving situation. We were in control.

When we arrived at maternity triage shortly after 9am they explained that my husband couldn’t be with me due to their Covid rules. He had to wait outside in a corridor whilst they assessed me. The midwife dealing with me didn’t have a sympathetic bedside manner. She asked to see my pad so she could assess whether my waters had broken. On inspection she said, ‘I’m not convinced by that’. I explained that it was my fourth or fifth pad and I was sure that my waters had broken. She said she’d need to insert something up my vagina to check. I was already feeling distressed and panicky, especially as I didn’t have BFG with me. Why was I alone? I thought of all the people gathered at festivals, sporting events and in cinemas and theatres, and wondered why my husband couldn’t be at my side in my time of need?

The midwife confirmed what I already knew: my waters had broken. I explained that I was experiencing back ache and cramps and that’s how labour had felt before, when I was induced. She nodded but said, ‘I’m looking at you and you’re not in labour’. She advised that I go home and wait for things to progress and explained that if nothing happened I would have to return in the middle of the night to be induced. I was upset just thinking about being induced and asked if my husband could be with me for that. She said no, he wouldn’t be able to be with me for that either, and could only join me when I was in a delivery suite in full-blown labour. I started crying, frightened of going through the preliminaries alone. Anyway, I explained, I didn’t want to go home because I live half an hour from the hospital. She looked at me and said, ‘I know where you live’. I pleaded, look, I’m really scared and I feel like I’m in labour and I’ve chosen to give birth in a hospital. She shrugged. I don’t know if she actually shrugged, or if I’ve misremembered, but her response was a literal or metaphorical shrug. She offered no words of comfort, compassion or understanding. She was turning me away until things progressed. She said if I didn’t want to go home then I could always walk around town and see what happened. What? How could I walk around when I was in pain and needed to be near a loo to change my pads because my waters were leaking constantly? I felt rejected by the hospital, totally alone and terrified.

I waddled out of the triage department and into the corridor where BFG was waiting. This was around 11am. I was in floods of tears as I relayed what I’d been told. He couldn’t believe we were being sent away. I said I wanted to stay put as there was a toilet in the corridor that I could use. Almost immediately the cramps became more intense. I started pointing at my stomach and saying, That’s pain, that’s real pain. I was having contractions. I never felt them the first time around, assumedly because the drugs I’d taken during my previous induction had shielded me from the pain. I was pacing in the public corridor, wearing a sodding mask, pushing against the walls, inhaling deeply through my nose and trying to suppress the urge to scream. I told BFG to download a contractions app. The pain was intensifying rapidly and ramping up my anxiety. By the time the contractions app had downloaded, they were coming every three minutes and lasting over a minute. The app displayed the message: ‘Go to hospital’. At least we hadn’t left.

Around midday, after nearly an hour of excruciating contractions in the corridor with people walking past, we went back into triage. The same midwife asked me what was going on and what I wanted to do. I said, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know if I want to do a wee or a poo or have a baby. I was petrified and confused. I went to the toilet and she told me not to lock the door. As soon as I sat down I started screaming. Primeval screaming. Noises I never knew I could make. I was out of control. I was yelling, this is a good position. I felt like I was having a baby. They told me to get out of the toilet and onto a bed. I couldn’t fathom how I could walk or get onto a bed. I was incapacitated by the pain. Somehow I did and they examined me. I was 7 centimetres dilated. I think there was already lots of blood. They wanted to get me to the delivery suite.

From this point on everything is a haze. I had to walk to the delivery area. All I remember is BFG’s hand on my back as I clasped the hands of a series of women who were urging me to keep walking. I was screaming and had to keep stopping due to the pain of contractions. I was naked from the waist down with a sheet wrapped around me, howling with abandon.

In the delivery room they urged me to kneel on the bed. I have no idea how I got on to the bed. I was in agony and had lost all control of my breathing in the fear and panic. They gave me gas and air and I gasped on it like a lifeline, sucking it deep into my lungs. I was so grateful to be able to mentally escape my body and detach from the pain but I was also aware that I was totally out of it. The midwives were shouting instructions at me but I couldn’t hear them. I knew I was screaming but I couldn’t hear that either. My recall has totally distorted audio, as if overlaid with static or an industrial form of white noise. Apparently gas and air can cause some people to have hallucinations or experience audio distortion, so that’s my best explanation for the nightmarish jumble in my head. When they asked me to do things I remember shouting I’m on drugs, you’ve put me on drugs, incredulous that they could expect anything from someone who was tripping out.

Somehow, through the screaming and the fog of gas and air, I heard the command to push and knew I had to do it. After two contractions I felt the baby come out of me. It was 12:40. I still felt totally high from the gas and air so I stopped inhaling for a few puffs to ask, was that the baby? Everything was a woozy whirling. Someone passed me the baby from between my legs and told me it was a boy. He was covered in blood and I cradled him and spoke some words of reassurance. I was back on gas and air to push the placenta out and then back on gas and air whilst someone stitched up my vagina to fix the tears.

When the midwife sewed me up she told me that my uterus was very low. ‘It’s straight after birth, so that might go back up by itself, but it might not. If you feel something like a tampon in your vagina, that’s your uterus and if it’s still there after six weeks then you’ll need to go to the doctor about a prolapse’. Prolapse. I thought that only happened to old women. It happened to my Granny. I remember as a child being told that her insides were falling out and being horrified. How could this be me at 36?

I stayed in hospital that night because the baby was full of mucus and wasn’t feeding properly. As he threw up blood and gunge I tried to exorcise my own demons. I held him upright all night so I could wipe away the sick and try and encourage him to feed. We were skin to skin. I was grateful for the long quiet night to decompress. I was struggling to process what had happened. I knew my recall was fuzzy and the sound was weird. I googled birth trauma. I googled gas and air. I started to piece together what had happened. Every time I remembered labouring in the corridor alone, I cried. I felt let down. When I was at my most vulnerable and scared, the hospital had turned me away. I grounded myself by looking at the baby. I told myself: You have one job now. To care for this baby. This baby only exists in the present.

A baby is a ball of unadorned need and vulnerability. It’s an extraordinary challenge to care for a tender infant when you’re tender yourself. I feel broken. My insides are trying to escape to my outsides. I’m constipated and on laxatives. Basic bodily functions, things that we take for granted, have ceased to work.

The baby is unrelenting in his demands. He is pure animal. He goes from sleeping soundly to gnashing at his knuckles to show that he wants to be fed. I watch his frenzied chomping and contemplate pushing his fists aside and pressing my nipple in between his jaws. I bite my lip with the pain when he gets a grip. I brace myself to do it again. And again.

It’s been like this for a couple of weeks but now, three weeks in, I feel myself re-emerging again. Things already feel better and brighter. I can talk without crying. I’m still worried about the prolapse and I’m still on laxatives, but I’m going to consult a physio and I’m sure that help is out there. I hold my husband’s hand. I lean on my parents. I reach out to a sisterhood of women. I have two gorgeous healthy children. I hope that sharing my experience honestly will help me to process it and move on. Being outside helps. I look to the trees and green things for solace. There’s much life to come.

I’m roused by the creak of my child’s bedroom door. I sigh heavily and look at my watch. It’s before six. I watch my nearly-three-year-old stand dazed in the hallway whilst he gains his balance, clutching his cuddly toy monkey. He then shuffles towards me and, on reaching me, exclaims with wide-eyed wonder, “Mummy, you are beautiful”.

Who could fail to smile at such a greeting? It also utterly disarms me.

First, allow me to fill in the rest of the picture. I’m sprawled on top of the duvet nearly full-term pregnant. I’m at the stage where turning over in bed is no longer a roll, but a three-point manoeuvre. I’m wearing old threadbare pants because their elastic has gone and they’re the only ones which fit right now. My t-shirt has become a crop-top, revealing my bulbous belly with its red stretch marks on the underside.

I feel exhausted and anything but beautiful. Yet I can’t burden him with my insecurities. So I smile and graciously accept his compliment. “Thank you darling”. I find a peace within. Children can be our teachers.

I’ve been much more accepting of the strangeness of pregnancy this time around. Unfortunately I discovered that I was pregnant on Christmas Eve, when, after preparing some gravy for Christmas dinner, I found myself sitting on a chair nibbling a cracker trying to stave off a familiar nausea. The dread of pregnancy sickness descended (I refuse to call it ‘morning sickness’ as its symptoms are not confined to the morning). From that moment until mid-March I didn’t make another meal. These were months of misery, shuffling around the house with my sick bowl because any motion could trigger retching.

At least in my first pregnancy, I discovered that I was pregnant before the sickness arrived and so had a pleasant few weeks feeling the joy of new life percolating through my body. This time around, there was no time for celebration. Apparently there’s a phrase for pregnancy sickness in Madarin which translates as ‘sick with joy’. Whilst many choose not to disclose their pregnancy in the early stages, I never feel I have much choice. When someone would ask, ‘how are you?’ I’d feel compelled to answer truthfully, ‘absolutely dreadful, I feel sick all day and all night and can’t cook or read or write and if I focus on anything for too long I throw up - because I’m pregnant’. The answer was invariably, ‘oh, how wonderful, congratulations!’ And I’d think, didn’t you hear the first part of what I just said? Pregnancy is a strange kind of erasure. You find yourself already giving way to another story.

Once the sickness retreated in the second trimester I was flying. Wellness felt like a superpower. I stopped thinking about being pregnant and just cracked on with work and life with my beautiful toddler. Sure, I had to buy some larger bras and bits and pieces, but otherwise I was oblivious. My body expanded and stretched with minimal discomfort second time around and I just let it do its thing.

I’ve also been in a sort of denial. As readers may remember, I’m pretty scared of birth. Less scared now, having survived it once, but still ever-mindful of the many things which can go wrong for mother or baby. I had an appointment with my midwife a few weeks ago to talk through my birth plan. What’s the point of having a plan when anything could happen? She encouraged me to articulate what I’d like to happen. I said I’d like to avoid induction this time, go into labour naturally and then have my baby in the hospital with minimal intervention. Whilst few emerge from birth unscathed, I hope to emerge as little scathed as possible. My midwife then ran through a range of scenarios. ‘How would you feel about a caesarian?’ ‘Well, I don’t want one, but if something happens and you end up cutting me open, I won’t have much choice will I? Similarly, I’d rather someone didn’t slice into my vagina or that it didn’t tear, but I don’t imagine it will be in my hands’. My midwife and her trainee eyed each other with concern and asked me, again, to imagine what might go right about my birth. I shrugged. Whatever happens I will have to breathe through it and endure it until I am on the other side of it and then I’ll deal with the fallout and hopefully my baby will be born healthy and the love I’ll feel will make it all bearable once again.

I also feel a degree of ambivalence about the idea of a new baby. Friends with two children have given us many warnings that the first year is particularly hard, juggling the demands of a toddler with those of a newborn. BFG and I are bracing ourselves for a year of sleep deprivation and frayed tempers. It’s also impossible to imagine who this new person will be and how they’ll change our life.

I’m aware that we’ve had a relatively easy ride with our first child so far - a good sleeper, a good eater, healthy and happy. As one friend put it, ‘you’re due an absolute demon’. My friend went on to deliver an excellent analogy about the predicament of being an expectant new parent: ‘It’s like a meal at someone’s house. You take what you’re given and you just have to eat it and smile and nod and say “yummy”’.

And so you leave me, seated at the table, drumming my fingers, waiting to see what we’re served.

New words are coming fast from my toddler now. They started as a trickle when he was around one year old, but now he’s approaching two, sentences are tumbling out. The sound of big words in his tiny mouth rekindles my delight for language. A well-timed “Whoopsy” when he drops something instantly turns my smile into a laugh. His first three-syllable word was ‘Butterfly’. We worked so hard to encourage him to move on from just saying ‘Butter’ to adding ‘Fly’ that he still drags it out - saying “Butter” with wide-open eyes that keep you hanging on as he draws a deep breath and whispers “Fly” on an exhalation as if it was a punchline to a joke. Sometimes he spreads his arms like wings and soars when he hits the Fly.

Not that it’s all butterflies and whoopsies. Children are mirrors to us parents and we don’t always like what we see. Back in the early days of lockdown BFG and I did a Joe Wicks family workout together. Our child, let’s call him Sprout, mostly watched bemused and joined in with the odd kick or running on the spot. Afterwards he suddenly threw himself on the floor, flailed around like a trapped fly in a web and shouted ‘hard, hard, hard’ relentlessly. Apparently this was an impression of me exercising. I was sweating profusely and probably said ‘this is hard’ more times than I’d realised. Now I saw my efforts reflected. Life comes at you fast, I thought, first as tragedy and then as farce.

This wasn’t the first time I’d felt trolled by my child. I regularly hike up a steep hill with Sprout in a backpack parroting words over my shoulder. He mimics my breathlessness and exclaims, before I’ve even started up, “Oh no, hard”. My laughter makes me more breathless, which feeds the troll. It’s a pitiless impersonation.

A few weeks ago I made a trip to town with two other mums, children in tow. There was a brief moment when all three children were running around laughing in the sun and we mums looked at each other happily as if to say ‘isn’t this what life’s all about?’ - but for the rest of the trip one child was running off, or picking up something dirty from the floor or generally doing something contrary to our desires and it was hot and we all felt a little fraught, though in solidarity with one another’s suffering. On the way home I shared a lift. We collapsed into the car seats in exhaustion, wound the windows down and breathed sighs of relief that our children were finally contained and probably ready to sleep. ‘Oh god’ said a little voice from the back. ‘Oh god’ the other echoed. A volley of ‘Oh God’s went back and forth between them, underscoring our car journey by replaying the day’s petty frustrations and exasperations. We felt seen.

Children don’t just reflect our words back, they soak them up too. That’s the scarier part. Our words have consequences. I’m a worrier and I see every potential hazard in my child’s path, but my commands to ‘be careful’ have been internalised. Now Sprout walks about saying ‘careful, careful, careful’ and then proclaims ‘good boy’ when he’s successfully navigated an obstacle. I think of Dr Frankenstein and his monster. What am I creating? Have I made him overly cautious? Other children rush at life, they throw themselves into danger but Sprout doesn’t walk slowly down a slope without saying ‘careful’ first. And that’s just the first problem with this scenario. ‘Good boy’ can also be unpacked. Before ever having a child I was counselled not to say ‘good boy’ for two reasons. The primary argument is that you should always praise specific behaviour because no child is intrinsically good or bad. So, for example, you could praise ‘good eating’, ‘good walking’, ‘good words’, ‘good manners’ etc. Furthermore, offering specific praise has the benefit of being non-gendered. But Sprout’s persistent use of ‘good boy’, embracing it as a self-description, taunts me with my failure to practice this wisdom.

We recently experienced a good antidote to our caution and hesitancy. We’ve had a summer of gregarious guests and one family rippled with enviable energy and zest for life. After just a few days in their company Sprout adopted a new catchphrase: “Let’s do it”. Suddenly, as I was about to climb over a stile or open a gate or cross a road, the little voice in the backpack on my shoulder would proclaim: Let’s do it!

New energies can be absorbed like a sponge, which floods me with hope, because that suggests it’s not too late to do better. I woke up the other night with the sweaty realisation that I shouldn’t say things about him which are definitive, especially in his hearing. I’d started saying “he’s shy” to people when he’s burying his head in my neck but I don’t want to entrench that to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Better, surely, to say “no need to act shy”. Yes, that’s better, I’m glad I settled that in my head at 4am and then couldn’t get back to sleep.

Watching his language develop is a stirring reminder of the power of words and how we use them - to delight, to charm, and to define. I resolve to avoid words that are cages and choose more that make him soar.

We are living through an extraordinary time. I keep thinking about the origin of the word ‘apocalypse’ which means ‘uncovering’. What is this crisis revealing to us?

During lockdown, as my social interactions have shrunk, my awareness of the non-human world has expanded. I’ve loved spending time in my garden and the surrounding countryside every day. I’ve been noticing and relishing small changes: the blossoming trees, budding flowers and changing light. My toddler blows dandelion heads and we watch them fly in the breeze. He stops to hug trees. He examines sticks and stones and leaves. He’s teaching me to pay closer attention.

I’ve been humbled by my almost-total ignorance of my habitat. I’m now grasping the opportunity to learn more about the wealth of life on my doorstep, starting with trees. When I see a tree I can’t name, I pick a leaf from its branches and take it home to identify with my child. It’s like ‘snap’ for him and an education for us both. It’s overwhelming to think how long it might take me to recognise all the different trees. And then there’s the birds. And the butterflies. The flowers and fronds.

The poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote:

To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields - these are as much as a man can fully experience.

This week I forced myself outside at 4am to listen to the dawn chorus. I’d seen George Monbiot tweet:

Because everything sounds and feels so different, by walking then, you double the size of your world. The northern European dawn chorus is among the most intense on Earth. Don’t go through life without experiencing it.

How had I got to the age of 34 being oblivious to it? I’ve also been listening to a beautiful nature podcast called The Stubborn Light of Things, in which presenter Melissa Harrison urged listeners to get up early, promising the dawn chorus would ‘lift your heart’.

For weeks I’ve been roused by the birdsong outside my single-pane windows. Now I had a name for the phenomenon. I dressed warmly and stepped into the garden. I was needlessly early. BFG joined me around 4.20 with the first chirrups. It was cold so we huddled to keep warm. With one ear pressed against his chest, receiving his steady and familiar heartbeat, my other craned to distinguish the different calls chiming in to the chorus. Their variety filled me with wonder but I also felt sad that I couldn’t identify birds by their song. How much richer it would be if I could know when each bird was joining the fray. Then a bird chirped right above our heads, singing from her nest atop the telegraph pole in our garden, with her chicks around her. Suddenly I was beaming. I didn’t know there was a nest there. I had a front row seat for her contribution to this waking ritual. Now I enjoy the song from our bed, under the comfort of covers, and picture her raising her beak with the rest.

There have been other joyful firsts. Yesterday we saw a mole in our garden with its startling pink nose. I made nettle soup and relished eating weeds that would normally go to waste. BFG even made string from nettles. This homespun education has been rewarding.

I’ve also felt changed by reading The Overstory by Richard Powers. It’s a novel about peoples’ relationship with trees and it invites you to think in tree time. One line:

This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees where humans have just arrived.

A world of trees. That’s it. I have lived in a human-centric world in which the predominant culture is one of our dominion over the earth. But the new coronavirus holds a deep ecological lesson to shatter our illusions of control. We are part of all that surrounds us. Just look at what nature can do. A disease can jump from animals to humans and spread with lethal speed. Imagine the disruption coming down the track from climate change and further ecological collapse, with the looming threat of food shortages. What happens if we lose our pollinators? If global bread baskets are wiped out by drought?

Alongside the fear, I see hope. We now know that another world is possible. The homeless can be housed. Cycling and walking can be prioritised over cars. Flights can be grounded. Carbon emissions can fall. We can breathe cleaner air. As Arundhati Roy said, the pandemic ‘is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next’.

Let’s not talk of ‘saving the planet’, but of saving ourselves. Whatever we do next, our home planet will keep spinning. Nature adapts. We’ve seen, during lockdown, how quickly wildlife recovers when given space. This is what the Rewilders have been preaching for years. I was listening to a recent interview with Paul Kingsnorth where he said:

We’re in the sixth mass extinction at the moment and that’s a big thing but it also tells us that there have been five before. So there’s no reason that earth won’t go on after this one. So our question is whether we want it to go on with us in it.

Musing on what might come after us, he didn’t predict, but observed,

I expect the dinosaurs would have imagined that a planet ruled by hairless apes was pretty hideous, but here we are.

Here we are. For now. Everything is fragile. Nothing can be taken for granted. I’d like us to stick around, to enjoy the blossom and the birdsong for many, many years to come. I’d like my toddler to grow old, knowing far more about trees and birds and bugs than I ever will, and go on to enjoy a toddler of his own discovering it all anew.

I feel that world is within reach. We can use this crisis to better prepare for the next, to build a healthier relationship with the web of life of which we are just one part. There is a remarkable opportunity here for transformation. It’s a time for big ideas and bigger dreams. I hope, like the young British poet Tomos Roberts, that we’ll look back on this time as The Great Realisation. I hope we let the green things in and become changed by them. I hope we have a Green Recovery. I hope our voices calling for it will be as cacophonous as the dawn chorus and just as beautiful.

Life in lockdown was going ok until he ate my cookie.

I’d been looking after our toddler all morning until BFG emerged from bed. It was 10am. I’d been up for four hours and done three hours of childcare. I’d said the word ‘tractor’ with affirmative enthusiasm many times. I was ready for a snack.

The day before I’d bought a bag of four large baked cookies from the Co-op. We’d enjoyed one each the previous day. I went to the cupboard to find the bag gone.

‘Where are the cookies?’ I shouted through to the dining room, trying to suppress a sense of rising panic.

‘I ate them’ BFG shot back, immediately contrite. He knew the severity of the situation.

I didn’t reply. I slumped down beside the washing machine, shut my eyes and counted to ten. Then twenty. Then thirty. The rage wasn’t lessening.

BFG was shouting my name in enquiring concern, ‘Nic? Nic?’

I was shaking my head. Eventually, attempting to speak in a measured tone, ‘Why did you eat my cookie? There were two left. When did you eat them?’

‘I ate one last night and one this morning’.

Now BFG was starting to move from contrition to exasperation and self-justification. Clearly he thought I’d gone too far in making him feel bad.

‘I only ate one more cookie than I should have’.

Was he gaslighting me?

I left the house to go shopping. Driving away, I thought, ‘You ate three times more cookies than me’. The stories we tell ourselves. Both true.

By the time I’d returned home from the farm shop - laden with treats to survive the week ahead - I’d calmed down. Matters were somewhat put in perspective by the fact that I had to wait outside the store for twenty minutes in the cold as they operated a one-in one-out policy with everyone stood two metres apart. It was a little eerie and a potent reminder that a stolen cookie is small fry right now.

I reflected that I could have handled the situation better. In fact, it could have been the perfect chance to trial a new approach to dealing with such scenarios. A home-working couple recently shared some advice (perhaps it was on Twitter) about how to handle domestic irritations. It struck me as a golden solution. So here it is: invent an imaginary third housemate and blame everything on them. I’m going for Gary. So I could have said, ‘Bloody hell, looks like Gary has eaten my cookie! What a dick!’ - and BFG could have nodded in collegiate disgust, and maybe shot back, ‘I know, and Gary left the bathroom floor in a wet mess this morning - he’s so selfish’. This tantalising transference seems capable of defusing tension with humour. I’m going to give it a go next time I start counting to ten.

I can’t bear to make any new year’s resolutions this year. I lack all inclination to do so. I can’t tell whether my resignation is due to the world being in such disarray, or because living with a sixteen-month-old toddler means that I am consumed with trying to survive the now, managing his chaos from moment to moment.

When I greet him in the morning he nearly pokes me in the eye, eager to demonstrate that he can correctly identify my eyes. This is his newest trick. He points to eyes, noses, ears, mouths, chins and cheeks and attempts to say them all. With my eyes firmly closed, I nod encouragingly whilst carrying him in a defensive position, craning my face away from his animated fingers. “Well done darling, clever boy”.

After breakfast I have a series of chores to complete before we leave the house, but as I attempt to tidy up, my little mischief-maker accompanies me, balancing my efforts with a new trail of mess.

I put some books away in his bedroom cupboard, at the same time he pulls all his socks out of a drawer and scatters them across the floor. I hurriedly put the socks back where they were whilst restraining him and shepherd him into my bedroom. As I get dressed, he pulls laundry out of the laundry bag. As I make the bed, he unloads a bag I’ve packed for the charity shop. Whilst I tidy up all the mess, he messes up the newly-made bed. Exasperated I scoop him up and head downstairs. He finds an old oatcake on the dusty floor and attempts to eat it. I feel disgusted by our slovenliness; his findings are a constant reminder of my failures to clean up the previous day. I prize the oatcake from his grip whilst he screams, calmly explaining that we don’t eat dirty things, but that he can have a nice new clean oatcake. I give him a new one, and grab the dustpan and brush to sweep up the remains of the last. As I turn around I see that he’s dropped the new one on the floor and is squashing it with his foot. I tidy that up too. Whilst I load the washing machine, he unloads another drawer, puts a cable in his mouth and scrapes a bowl loudly across a wall. I daren’t look to see if it’s made a scratch. I spot the Chocolate and Coconut Liquor that I was given for Christmas. It’s 9am and I want to have a swig. I resist. It’s the second day of the new year and I must at least attempt to exert willpower. (I later cave in at 10.30am, justifying the indulgence as a midmorning snack).

I see that he’s found a little bowl from the kitchen and is carefully picking up dust and hair from the floor and putting the pieces into his bowl - he looks absorbed for a moment so I seize the chance to make some notes of his behaviour this morning. Ah, now he’s hitting my leg and clamouring for attention, so my moment for reflection is abruptly ended.

Over Christmas I read Rachel Cusk’s memoir of early motherhood, A Life’s Work. I pause to remember a brilliant passage summarising a baby manual by Penelope Leach. Cusk wrote:

Like Mary Poppins, like someone in a fairytale, she [Leach] is on the side of children. This baby is a person she crisply declares, scattering all before her. How would you like it if people just wanted you to go to sleep all the time and never talked to you? Or expected you to spend all night on your own in the dark? Or got angry when you cried and never wanted to play and kept moaning about wanting some time for themselves? Poor babies!

Stop willing him to go to sleep, I tell myself. Stop lusting after time alone. I embrace him and my time with him. There is much to celebrate when I devote myself to playing with him. He laughs alot. He has a wonderfully expressive face with twinkly eyes. He loves brushing his teeth and mimes brushing them with glee throughout the day, so when it’s time to use his real toothbrush he beams at me and BFG with wide eyes, open-mouthed in excited readiness. He’s so cute that sometimes I squeeze his thighs too hard in appreciation.

A funny thing about toddlers is how busy they look. They’re always consumed with what they’re doing - be it pushing a basket around a room, loading and unloading things from bags and boxes, pretending to talk on a toy phone - whilst doing nothing of any importance. This quality always makes me smile, but I struggle to feel superior because it strikes me as a genuine insight - a mirror of our own lives in microcosm. I feel busy all the time, but am I doing anything of any importance? It’s mostly a distraction from the really big stuff. Greenhouse gas emissions are rising, biodiversity is diminishing, wildlife is going extinct - everything else is noise. We’re all behaving like toddlers, emptying drawers and tipping up cups, causing havoc and failing to tidy our own mess - destroying our home. Only where are the adults coming to remedy things?

They say it takes a village to raise a child. But there are no villages anymore.

(Technically I live in a village but let’s not get bogged down in semantics. My closest family and friends are strewn across the country, not close in proximity. Words are tricksy.)

Instead of a village, I’ve found a lovely group of local Mums. We offer each other support, solidarity and good company. But now most of the Mums are back at work and my makeshift village is shrinking.

I am in the chasm of social support that appears between my child being nine months and three years old. As a self-employed person, for the first nine months of motherhood I was paid a maternity allowance of around £145 per week. Once that allowance stopped, the honeymoon period of parenting ended and I felt cut asunder. When my child reaches three, the state will pay for a set number of hours of childcare per week. Until then, I’m on my own with paltry child benefit.

Let’s be clear, my child still requires full-time care. He’s now one, only just starting to walk and not yet talking, utterly dependent upon others for his survival. Looking after him is a full-time job. If I was to take on other work, then I would have to pay someone else to look after my baby-cum-toddler. That person, or institution, would be paid far more than I receive in child benefit (I think the cheapest nearby nursery option is £40 per day). My freelance earnings are too unreliable and meagre to cover such costs. And it seems silly to seek a higher-paid job that I might not like in order to pay someone to look after my child, which is a job that I do like. Today I took my baby to story-time at the library. A childminder and some nursery staff were there too, professionally employed, and me and some fellow Mums were doing the same thing unpaid. Society attributes no financial value to our role, despite rewarding the job when outsourced. Is it any wonder that Mums feel devalued? Why can’t I get that job for which I am surely the most qualified candidate?

This is just one part of a knotty bind. For whilst I want recognition for the job of parenting, I’ve always enjoyed my ‘career’ too. I love journalism. I try to pursue this whenever my child is sleeping. But it’s very difficult to do two jobs well simultaneously: I parent distractedly and work distractedly, doing neither with panache. Furthermore, this squeezes out all the time for relaxation and leisure and then the storm in my head threatens to capsize me.

I don’t know how to parent in the modern world. I am a walking contradiction. I carry around the burden of being primary carer like a martyr’s cross, but if someone relieves me of my duties then I feel bereft. I normally write to find out what I think, but writing this is just proving to me what a muddle I am in.

One problem: my sense of self-worth is too bound up with what job I do. My identity is fused with my journalism. This is because I have been lucky enough, and motivated enough, to be able to do what I enjoy and get paid for it. When people asked what I was up to, I felt I had an interesting story to tell. Now when people ask what I’m up to, I point at my kid. He’s interesting too but it’s a more familiar story.

Another problem: Why do I think I need a salary to feel of social value? Why am I equating money with meaning when I’ve railed against that concept my whole life?

Another problem: I have competing desires. I want to continue pursuing interesting work that I consider useful to society. I also want to parent like my Mum.

My Mum was a full-time, stay-at-home Mum. She gave up her work when I was born. She says this didn’t feel like a sacrifice because her job wasn’t her passion. She loved raising me and my brother. She didn’t want to be anywhere else. She was fortunate that most of her fellow Mums felt the same and were in the same position and they raised their children together in a social web. I feel I owe much of my happiness and contentment to the solid ground that she laid before me.

Probably the best advice that I have been given is to let go of any ambition for a few years. Babies are only young once and this precious time goes vanishingly fast. I see the wisdom of this position and yearn to embrace it, but I’m also reluctant to give up work completely when I dream of throwing myself into investigations.

Non-market solutions are available. I can lean on my parents and partner to assist me with their own unpaid labour. I can arrange time-swaps of childcare with fellow Mums in the same boat. It takes courage to ask for help and effort to build mutual dependency but it seems the most attractive option. Perhaps in this way I will muddle through, being a present parent whilst dabbling in stimulating work.

I know, deep in my bones, that the job of parenting is one of the hardest and most rewarding in the world, and a mighty privilege. I’m also handsomely paid in the truest sense. Though the maternity allowance dried up, the real-world rewards are increasing exponentially. My boy now waves, makes fish faces, blows kisses and gives high-fives. Dancing with him, cheek to cheek, is my favourite thing. When he wraps his tiny arms around my neck and envelops me in a hug, it’s the sweetest sensation. And when his face breaks into a smile as I enter the room, there is nowhere else I’d rather be.

I was walking through town, wearing my baby on my front in his sling, whilst shovelling an iced lemon coconut flapjack into my mouth. (No I’d never tried one before but the novelty appealed - it was very nice, though the layer of icing was as thick as the layer of oats so quite the sugar rush). I couldn’t face sitting through baby story-time at the library on a growling stomach so bought it on impulse to devour on route. The baby rather impeded the journey of the flapjack from hand to mouth, as I clumsily broke off chunks at a time to circle over the baby’s head and gobble up. Being a crumbly flapjack, many of the oats fell onto his head or, worse, into my cleavage where I could feel them collecting, mingling with sweat and suncream in the heat, under the sling. I pondered whether I should pick the crumbs out as I walked along the high street or when I reached the library. The desperation. The indignity.

Whilst lamenting my self-inflicted predicament, I remembered the recurring fear I have about how I will die. I worry that I will die in a car accident whilst reaching for a sweet on the front passenger seat at the moment of impact. It’s a terrible habit that I sometimes buy a little treat for myself as a reward for the chore of supermarket shopping and enjoy it on my drive home. Even whilst doing it I envision an inquest piecing together the chain of events. I imagine my embarrassed family hearing the judgement, laughing through tears at this tragi-comic demise, and making polite conversation afterwards. ‘Yes, she always had a sweet tooth’. ‘She said she was dying for a jelly baby’. I mean can you imagine? I do, frequently.

Motherhood has not changed me - I hoped that I might renounce all sugar by way of shining example to my offspring, whereas in fact breastfeeding has enabled me to eat more of the naughty things than ever before, whilst miraculously losing weight. My Dad has called the baby my ‘fat dialysis machine’. I’m lighter now than I was aged eighteen. Yet the power of the boob is waning as the baby eats more solids, so it’s time to start reigning in my appetite.

But enough about me, how is the baby? An old lady with shiny eyes mischievously addressed him in the library, poking at his chest with her finger, “You want to look around every corner and in every cupboard and behind every door and open every drawer”. That’s exactly the stage we’re at now, one of boundless curiosity.

Most days follow a routine. I set my alarm early so that I can read the news whilst enjoying breakfast alone. If baby wakes early, I feel cheated and irritable. If I’ve finished my hot tea, I’m ready to play Mum and bound up the stairs to scoop up my stirring boy. He immediately reaches up to touch a wooden parrot that hangs above his bed. I lift him towards it. He prods the parrot in wonder, with a look that says, ‘good isn’t it?’ I give him wide-eyed confirmation that it is indeed very special. This is the exact same parrot that swung above my childhood cot and my parents saved it for all these years and the cyclical nature of that makes me smile. I kiss his intoxicatingly soft cheeks. His cuteness makes my heart well.

Then we’re onto breakfast, then I try to get out of the house for a walk or to meet fellow Mum friends, then lunch, then afternoon nap (on a good day), then dinner, bath and bed. Amongst all this I’m breastfeeding, changing nappies, laundering nappies, reading him books, singing him songs, babbling nonsense noises, crawling around on the floor, animating toys, and stopping him from harming himself. The last task requires constant vigilance, especially now he is pulling himself up on all the furniture and trying to walk. Occasionally there is a breakthrough moment; first wave, first clap. All is sparkly and new.

Recently I was at my local farm shop, loading my vegetables onto the til whilst trying to dodge my baby’s tiny arms from intercepting all my goodies. He wants to grab everything at the moment, including my hair. This was hindering my loading speed and so I found myself apologising, “I’m so sorry, this used to be so easy and now it’s an absolute nightmare because he’s grabbing everything”.

The lady at the till flashed me a sympathetic smile and said “He’s grown quick. I remember when you first came in here with him”. “Oh yes, it was my first solo trip out the house”, I responded, amazed that she recognised me, “I was terrified”. I recalled how momentous it had felt to carry this tiny fragile person around a public place and attempt to do normal pre-baby chores in my post-baby state. I remember everyone, including the lady at the till, being so kind to me and congratulating me on passing that first milestone.

Now in many ways things are easier. I’m confident operating in Mum mode. I have a can-do attitude to navigating life’s chores and challenges with a baby. But in another way, it was so easy at the start. The baby was largely still in his sling and I could pretty much do anything. Now he’s active and wriggly and has a will of his own. Everyone tells you it gets easier and in a sense it does, but it also gets harder. One set of problems replaces another. Incidentally, this is how BFG has long described life.

There is another thread to unpick from that tale - one of the kindness of strangers. Babies are goodwill magnets. Wherever we go, my baby cranes his neck to connect with people, locking eyes with them and then widening his face into an ecstatic smile. Passers-by compliment him and coo over him. On train journeys, other passengers have often touched my arm and said things like ‘Well done, you’re doing a great job’. I’ve been really moved by receiving constant reassurance, encouragement and quiet understanding from strangers. BFG says, “I needed people to be this nice to me before I had a baby”.

Not only do babies look like little Buddhas; they are also true teachers of mindfulness. They exist totally in the moment. The best days are those when I can be in each moment with my baby and take the day, and his mood, as it comes, accepting whatever happens. I find myself repeating my Nepalese mountain guide’s mantra: ‘No plan, best plan’. That doesn’t mean that I can’t make social plans; as long as I’m somewhere that I’m able to feed the baby on demand, stand, jiggle and sing to him as required, all will be well.

Things go wrong with inflexible plans, or more specifically when I try to get work done which requires quiet or concentration. I’m learning that working and looking after a baby are not natural bedfellows. It’s impossible to do either thing well if trying to do both at once. I foolishly agreed to some freelance journalism work and find myself unable to schedule a phone call within ordinary working hours because I can’t guarantee my undistracted attention. Inevitably, when I’m on the phone, that’s when the baby demands feeding or changing or being entertained. The baby will generally watch me doing housework in short bursts because it’s active, especially if I’m dancing or singing at the same time, but the baby is most definitely not entertained by me tapping on my computer keyboard. I can make a call if he is in the sling and we’re walking at pace outdoors but then I’m in and out of signal range, can’t make notes and there is a tendency for the wind or a passing tractor to drown out voices. I can also speak whilst breastfeeding, but again I can’t take notes and there is the added jeopardy that I might howl in pain when the baby suddenly chomps on my nipple or pulls it quickly away from my breast to discard it or look elsewhere. At least I have a word for that daily horror now: niplash. But I don’t know if my interviewees need to become acquainted with it.

I’ve been bemoaning this state of affairs to my poor parents, stroppily announcing, “I don’t know why I ever thought I could do this work. How can I ever work whilst looking after a baby? It’s not possible. It’s not actually possible for me to work ever again, or at least, not for years”.

Of course my parents roll their eyes at my hyperbole, tell me that every stage is a phase and that things will get easier. For now, I have to work in the margins of the day when the baby is asleep, which means late at night and early in the morning. In the daytime he doesn’t really sleep, unless it’s on me after a feed and if I try to move he wakes instantly.

I’m frustrated with myself. If I hadn’t committed to work then I wouldn’t have created this tension and could fully embrace every moment with the baby. Breastfeeding is enforced relaxation and me-time, when I can listen to podcasts, watch a film, or read a novel. When he’s not feeding he wants my full attention, but I enjoy this. In fact, it stimulates my imagination to find new ways to entertain and surprise him, like the first time I whistled or trilled at him. Blowing on his face can happily pass twenty minutes before he gets restless again. I talk to him in lots of different accents (badly) which keeps me amused and him wide-eyed. I love lying on the floor next to him, staring at the ceiling or out the window, pretending to be an old Professor or Guru: ‘Look to the stars young one…’ I create a world of characters. We play and play all day. (And yes, I also sing the song my Dad used to sing to me, ‘Me and my teddy bear, we’ve got no worries, got no cares, me and my teddy bear, we play and play all day’). I find myself singing songs constantly, even to myself when in the supermarket or out walking when the baby has long fallen asleep.

There is a widely shared internet meme that says: ‘The days are long, but the years are short’. It’s true. Each day passes slowly yet five months have evaporated before my eyes. Having a child seems to expand and shrink time. I look at my baby and imagine how my parents must once have looked at me. I wonder how quickly my life has gone for them. I have become a mother, my mother a grandmother. We’ve all graduated a generation.

Other mums have told me to cherish my baby falling asleep on me because it soon passes and I’ll long to hold him like this again, looking at his peaceful face whilst he is all cuddled up in my arms. An older father described to me the first time his child dropped his hand whilst walking in public. He went to hold his child’s hand again but his son pulled away. “There is a grief in that”, he said.

I think a lot about the comedian Rob Delaney who lost his two year old son Henry to a brain tumour. He said in a recent interview: “Now, when I hold my other children, I physically feel that they are like stardust that has temporarily assembled into human form and will one day disassemble and become something else and I know that’s true. So now when I hold those kids that still brings me profound joy.”

I have moments of pure bliss. The other day I was sitting on a chair, with my baby son on my lap and the sun streaming in through the window. We were listening to music and I was clicking my fingers in time, which he was watching in dribbly delight, eyes alight. My heart was full and I knew, with absolute throat-constricting clarity, that this is the golden time of my life, when my parents are alive and my husband is alive and my baby is alive, and we’re all sharing our lives together and it’s utterly precious and utterly precarious and we’ll never have it so good.

They said everything would get easier and they were right. Breastfeeding is no longer painful, sleep is more plentiful and the baby grows more rewardingly interactive by the day. Many aspects of motherhood have taken me by surprise, not least how much I enjoy it, having never particularly paid much attention to babies before. Now I find all babies fascinating and adorable, especially my own.

Is there anything more joyful than a baby’s smile? Some days my cheeks ache from smiling at him. The first time he smiled at me, tears pricked my eyes. It was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen. He smiles more and more now and it’s infectious. He also chuckles. Strangely, he first laughed in his sleep. What was he laughing at when he hadn’t yet laughed in his waking world? Sometimes he locks eyes with me and smiles whilst he’s feeding. This makes his mouth break suction so that the milk dribbles out, which really makes me laugh, which makes his smile broaden into a chuckle, exacerbating the leak. We don’t tell BFG. I mop up the mess with a muslin. It’s worth it.

I wasn’t prepared for the explosive poos. I had been warned about baby boys weeing when you change their nappy, and so smugly placed some loo roll over his penis to avoid any sudden spray, thinking I had it all sorted. Then liquid shit shot out of his bottom as if from a pressurised water pistol. It went all over my nightdress. First lesson: never stand in the line of fire. But nappy changing is always hazardous, because wiping his bottom stimulates it. There are often multiple explosions at any one time. I learned to be ready to catch any fresh spray shots in the dirty nappy, but sometimes, just when I thought the show was over and reached for a new nappy, there would be another burst. One went all over a nice rug in the bedroom, so we moved the changing table. Another hit our new bedroom curtains and ran down our white wall. BFG sent a photo of the shit-stained wall to my family and blamed me for ‘holding the baby like a spray can’. This was unfair. You have to hold their legs up whilst you change their nappy. There have been further incidents, too numerous to mention.

I thought, having been a larger lady throughout my life, that I would struggle to lose the weight that I’d gained in pregnancy, but I’m already back to my pre-pregnancy weight and falling, without any effort. Breastfeeding appears to be a miraculous fat burner. I’d read that breastfeeding burned an extra 300+ calories per day, but thought it sounded too good to be true. It seems to be working for me and I celebrate the magical fat transfer. I rejoice in the baby gaining weight; as his squidgy thighs grow chubbier, my own become leaner. Though I hate to think what will happen when I stop breastfeeding. Might have to become a wet nurse.

I spend all day looking after my little Dreamer and entertaining him. When he sleeps in the morning, I work whilst gazing at him. When he wakes up, I greet him with smiles and cuddles. I caress my cheek against his soft head whilst carrying him around. I talk to him throughout the day. I dance for him whilst preparing food and washing up. I bounce him on my knee when sitting talking to people - and of course I also feed him. In the evenings I hand him over to BFG for a brief interval. Sometimes I return to find the baby in his chair or cot and BFG on his computer or playing piano. This makes me indignant. Some days I haven’t even been able to send a text message because I’ve been so consumed with the baby, and BFG’s laissez-faire approach makes a mockery of my efforts. Once I huffed, ‘I don’t think you realise how much is required with a baby’. He shot back, ‘I don’t think you realise how little is required’. I laughed. The truth, I’m sure, lies somewhere in the middle.

I’ve been wrestling with how to tell my birthing story. After such a build-up, it’s destined to be an anti-climax. My fear of the event was so much larger than the event itself. Given that I most feared dying in childbirth or having a stillbirth, the headline is that me and the baby are very much alive. Even better, there was no moment when I felt that either of our lives was in danger. I truly expected that moment. I thought that to give birth was to face death, yet the Grim Reaper didn’t so much as glimmer before me throughout labour, despite being a looming spectre for weeks leading up to it.

As a wise friend observed, this has been an object lesson in the fruitlessness of anxiety. The things that I most feared never came to pass, and lesser things I had never contemplated took their place. Already the event is becoming a blur, bearing out the truism that we’re programmed to forget. There are also parts that I’d rather not share. All this makes it rather difficult to write about. It also seems largely irrelevant now that I’m on the other side. But I feel I ought to say something about the birth, given that I aired all my anxieties about it.

I was over my ‘due date’ (which I put in inverted commas because it is a very unhelpful notion). I still felt healthy and hoped that labour would start naturally when the baby was ready. However, as I approached 42 weeks pregnant, which is considered 2 weeks ‘overdue’, the pressure mounted to get the baby out. The NHS want us to deliver our babies before 42 weeks because they say that after this point evidence suggests that the placenta works less effectively and the risk of stillbirth increases. My midwife repeatedly offered me a ‘sweep’ to try and encourage labour to begin. This would involve her putting her hand up my vagina and wiggling it around my cervix. I declined, repeatedly. She recommended induction, which is where they force labour to start via medical methods. I resisted and was then referred to the hospital to discuss my options.

The conversation didn’t go as I’d hoped. I wanted to come to an informed and reasoned decision about whether to allow induction. In the event, a doctor appeared and confirmed how overdue I was. He then asked me what I wanted to do. I asked what he’d recommend. He said, “I recommend induction days ago. We’re on your time now. How long you want to wait? 50 weeks?” I wasn’t prepared for the glib sarcasm. I didn’t want to be responsible for the increasing risk of stillbirth if the worst transpired so I agreed to induction the next day.

Having wanted to have a natural birth with minimal intervention, I was now on track for a heavily medicalised labour. At this point I asked for a caesarian. My reasoning was - ‘If you want this baby to come out now, and you don’t trust my body to do it naturally, then just cut it out and get it over with’. The doctors and nurses disagreed and encouraged me to try for a vaginal birth. They inserted a pessary to release hormones to attempt to kickstart labour and kept me in hospital for monitoring. My waters broke that evening. This was such a weird sensation. I always imagined a flood of water but actually it was constant leaking. All night, every time I moved, I’d feel a wave of water flood out and trudge off to the loo to change my underwear. I had intense stomach cramps, which felt like bad period pain. I passed this long night by focussing on my breathing and repeating lines from We’re Going on a Bear Hunt as a mantra: ‘We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. We’ve got to go through it!’

In the early hours of the next morning I was moved to a private room. As things weren’t progressing, they put me on a drip to induce contractions and gave me an epidural. I could still feel my legs and retained sensation. I controlled how much pain relief I had by pressing a button if I wanted more. I was bed-bound and hooked up to all sorts of things, but BFG was holding my hand and brilliant midwives were caring for me. At one point I felt something slip on my back. My epidural had fallen out. I then had to decide if I wanted another epidural put in before the pushing stage. I didn’t know how continuing without pain relief would feel, having been shielded from the sensation of contractions. We proceeded without a second epidural. My contractions weren’t strong anyway and I don’t recall any increase in discomfort in the hours after this. I was mainly excited to be nearing the final stage and I’m sure adrenaline kicked in.

Pushing was the best bit. That’s something I never thought I’d say. I finally had an element of control. I felt strong and determined to push the baby out. I didn’t need to scream or yell. The midwife and BFG could see the baby’s head. But the baby’s heart rate was fluctuating and a doctor appeared and said that he wanted to make a cut and use a ventouse to get the baby out quickly. He said, ‘You’ll do it in another ten pushes, whereas if I help we can do it in one, and we want the baby out now’. I didn’t realise that he would make the cut whilst I was pushing. It was the strangest and most counterintuitive thing, to forcefully push your baby in the direction of a man wielding a knife. I felt blind panic but did what I was ordered to. It all happened very fast, I didn’t feel any pain and suddenly there was a baby being placed on my chest.

I didn’t cry. Again, this surprised me. I cried watching Bridget Jones hold her baby for the first time. Heck, I even cried when she had her scan. But not for my baby. I felt relieved and happy and strangely calm and kept whispering things like ‘hello darling’. BFG cut the cord. The baby pooed all over me. Babies’ first poos are thick and black like tar. They don’t show that in films or on TV. BFG cleared up all the poo. This was a fitting introduction to our new life of wonder and cleaning up shit.

The final saga was that my placenta didn’t come out. It’s meant to swiftly follow the birth but it wouldn’t come, even with the doctor tugging. So then I was wheeled off to theatre, given a full spinal block, and they extracted the placenta and stitched me up. Not a great finale, but I was soon reunited with my family. I cooed over the baby and marvelled: I did it, I did it, I did it.

I’m hibernating with my baby; consumed with learning how to meet his needs. I gaze at him, in wonder and in love.

Nothing prepared me for how intensely physical caring for him is. I understand why Anne Enright said, “This is why mothers do not write, because motherhood happens in the body, as much as the mind.”

My baby’s scent fills my nose and mouth, as if I have inhaled him. Even my love for him manifests itself in my throat, infusing every breath. Skin-on-skin contact triggers a barrage of happy hormones. I’ve never taken hard drugs so can only imagine that this is the type of high people chase. When I’m feeding him, stroking his soft pudgy arms and legs, I feel electrified by an ecstatic rush up my spine. It’s utterly intoxicating and disarming.

Chiefly, I am now a massive pair of heavy breasts on legs, feeding whenever he demands. When he cries and roots around with his mouth for a breast, I pluck one out and pop it between his jaws. When he clamps on there are a few seconds of searing pain, and then he starts to suck and gulp and relieve them of some weight.

Babies start off getting colostrum from the breasts before the milk comes in after a few days. When my milk came in my breasts swelled up like lead balloons. I couldn’t even discern a nipple. They were terrifyingly rock solid. I didn’t see how the boy would ever get such a breast into his mouth. I envisioned having to go to hospital to have them pumped. But my baby was undeterred. He persevered in chomping them into shape and fed away. I marvelled triumphantly, ‘we are one organism’. The baby intuitively knows what to do. Lead on, baby.

The midwives tell me that my baby has a good latch. He is feeding well. He is gaining weight. Sometimes he feeds for over an hour at a time, one moment gulping the milk, then sleeping at the breast and using me as a comfort dummy before resuming his sucking again. The midwives tell me not to unlatch him, in case he is slowly taking in the hind milk after the first thirst-quenching milk. This leaves me pinioned to one spot for a long time, frozen as I wait for his feed to end. And then there may just be a short break before the cycle starts again. He also pulls and tugs at my nipples a lot when he is sleeping at the breast but won’t release me from his determined bite. This hurts.

I haven’t figured out how to feed discreetly yet. It seems enough just to be able to feed at all. In the hospital the midwives showed me how to feed lying down, which is most relaxing. I lie on one side and he lies on his side facing me, his nose to my nipple. So I spend most of the first days lying half-naked in bed, feeding the boy. Why bother putting my breasts away? I have never been so naked with such abandon in my life. Just when my body is at its most broken and misshapen, I feel strangely strong and unselfconscious. My body feels both foreign from me and yet also fully inhabited for the first time. It’s purpose is not to be looked at, but to provide for another. Ironically, more people are seeing more of it now than ever before. If people want to visit then I give them the breast warning, or else retreat from their company. I am immodest, beyond worrying about others’ perceptions, I have a mouth to feed.

Sometimes after feeding, he withdraws satisfied and contented, and then lays his head on top of my breast, alongside his tiny hand, using my bosom for a pillow. He exhales deeply in a sleepy milky dream. It is such a tender sight. I behold him with adoration and awe. These are the magic moments.

I am a hormonal soup. I feel overwhelmed - with love, responsibility and worry. When he cries loudly, I sometimes cry too - because I hate to see him distressed, because I feel helpless to take away his pain, because I don’t know what to do, because I worry about how many ways I might fail him now and in the future, and because it’s a godawful sound. I don’t know how to reconcile his supreme innocence and vulnerability with the outside world. I don’t yet know how to be in the world with him, as his Mum. I have to stop my mind racing ahead and just take each day at a time.

I battle all of these emotions in a battered body. We’ve already heard enough about my breasts, but they preoccupy me every moment of the day. They ache because they’re heavy with milk and they’re supremely sensitive. I can’t bear for the towel to even touch them after a shower. I want to press against them between feeds to take away the pains. Meanwhile, down below I’m recovering from the stitches and waiting to heal. Another sensitive area. I have to be careful and gentle when going to the loo, careful when out walking, careful of positions when sitting. I have a numb patch above my right knee, apparently likely to be some (hopefully temporary) nerve damage from the epidural or spinal I had in hospital. And finally, I’m bleeding. My favourite perk of pregnancy was the absence of periods. But then, after birth, you bleed for around six weeks. The shops sell special ‘maternity pads’ for this level of bleeding. One super period to reimburse the universe for all the periods you missed over the last nine months. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

And yet, and yet, none of it really matters. Whilst the baby is feeding and growing and I can meet his needs, all is bearable. More than bearable. Wonderful. I inhale the sight of my precious bundle. I caress his soft skin. The love catches in my throat.

I’ve passed my official due date. Friends have been messaging asking if there is any news and saying things like ‘I bet you can’t wait to meet your baby’ and ‘you must just really want it out now’.

But I confess that most days I’ve quietly thought ‘not yet, please don’t come yet, I’m not ready’. Of course I’m excited to meet this little person who is constantly wriggling around inside me and kicking me, but I’m also terrified. Terrified of giving birth and scared of how life is about to change.

BFG is also oscillating between excitement and fear. Most of the time he is calm and reassuring, constantly telling me that I can do it and that all will be well. But sometimes he wobbles too. The other week he saw me lying down stroking my bump and suddenly said, ‘I can’t cope. Keep it in’.

Just when I think I’m calm and ready, I become seized by panic and anxiety. I worry that I can’t do it, that the baby will get stuck as my body becomes paralysed by fear, that my heart will give up through strain and exhaustion, that I’ll pass out, that I’ll lose too much blood.

Where does all this fear come from? It might go right back to my very beginning, if we are the stories we tell ourselves. My Dad has always described my birth as like a scene from the horror film Alien. My Mum had a caesarean and when she was sliced open, he says that I sat up inside her stomach covered in blood and seized the doctor’s finger with my eyes wide open. He’s told this story at dinner parties and it is even written in my Baby Book. First impressions? Mum wrote ‘Beautiful’. Dad wrote ‘Alien’.

So there is the first seed, an indelible image of my own dramatic birth. In adulthood, I collected birth stories with macabre glee, pushing friends and family to share intimate and horrifying details, relishing the drama. When I fell pregnant, I googled risk factors for every conceivable problem. What are the chances of: dying in childbirth, having a stillborn baby, needing a caesarean, tearing from a vaginal birth, being incontinent after a vaginal birth, permanently losing feeling in your spine after an epidural? And on and on. I have imbibed too many terrifying tales and sordid statistics.

What to do with all this fear? Early on, I turned to hypnobirthing, reading three books on the subject and taking a course. The premise of hypnobirthing is simple, based on the premise:

Fear = Tension = Pain

The more you panic about contractions and try to resist them, the more you will be working against your muscles and the more painful and prolonged the whole process is likely to be. Hypnobirthing is about trusting your body to work naturally and instinctively to birth your baby. It aims to keep your conscious mind out of the way in order to let the body do its job as efficiently as possible. Breathing exercises help you to stay calm and supply your muscles with plenty of oxygen. Our tutor told us that women in comas can give birth - it can all happen without you consciously doing anything.

As I’m not in a coma, the challenge is to keep my mind out of the way. I have a very active mind. Hypnobirthing involves self-hypnosis to reprogramme your brain to eliminate fear and think positively about birth. Whilst I believe the theory and plan to embrace the breathing exercises, I have struggled with re-programming and switching off my conscious mind.

In our classes we’ve watched videos showing hypnobirthing mothers giving birth. These women ‘breathed’ their babies out, without screaming, without being told to push. They maintained a state of controlled calm, even though you could see the discomfort on their faces. It is a world apart from the dramatic births typically depicted on television. We sat silently watching these incredible women whilst the camera zoomed in on the baby coming out. However calm the women were, there was the inescapable reality that these babies were being squeezed out from a small space. After the video our tutor asked us what we thought of what we’d seen. We all sat in awkward silence for a while. The expectation was for comments along the lines of ‘she was so calm, she didn’t scream, it’s amazing’. But instead my friend broke the silence confessing, ‘I don’t want to do it’. My thought exactly.

In class, we’ve done relaxation exercises. One exercise involved trying to lose feeling in your hand, and then transferring that numbness from your hand to your face. BFG achieved this. I didn’t and immediately thought, ‘I’m going to feel everything, there is no escape’.

I turn to my hypnobirthing affirmations, which I listen to lying in bed:

I put all fear aside as I prepare for the birth of my baby

I’m relaxed and happy that my baby is finally coming to me

I’m focussed on a smooth, easy birth

I trust my body to know what to do and I follow its lead

Each surge of my body brings my baby closer to me

I look forward to birthing with joy and ecstasy

Intrusive thought: No, I can’t go this far. I can’t look forward to birthing. I still fear it. I find the other affirmations helpful. I repeat them to myself. I shut my eyes, breathe deeply in and out, feel my lungs and diaphragm inflate, try to think positively. But I haven’t let go of all the fear.

Some friends took a class where everyone wrote down their birth fears and then a shaman ritually burnt them all. I don’t have a shaman. But perhaps writing these fears here will prove an exorcism of sorts. I hope so, I can’t carry them anymore. And I do want this baby to come soon, before the medical professionals intervene and induce my labour. So, once more, with feeling:

I put all fear aside as I prepare for the birth of my baby

Pregnant

I took the pregnancy test because I had a dental appointment for a filling and suddenly thought, ‘What if I’m pregnant and they give me a drug to numb my gums and it harms the baby?’

I peed on the test stick and a horizontal line appeared. I felt the familiar sinking disappointment. I’d taken a pregnancy test before and had a negative result. But this time I kept watching and hoping and started to see a second vertical line appear, forming a cross. A positive result. The second line was fainter so I thought I might be imagining it. I carried the test straight into BFG’s study and showed it to him. ‘What does it say?’ ‘It’s a cross, you’re pregnant’. I lit up.

A few hours later and the next person I told was the dentist. This felt momentous to me, to say ‘I’m pregnant’ aloud. The dentist was unmoved, having met me only once before, and he simply reassured me that this would have no bearing on the procedure. I felt a bit silly for mentioning it, especially as I had on one level expected some huge congratulations and fanfare because my inner world had completely transformed in one morning and it was bizarre that the outer world didn’t reflect this in any way. The dentist left momentarily, whilst I was losing feeling in my face, and his female assistant asked, ‘Is it your first?’ I cheered at her interest and nodded enthusiastically. ’People are starting much later now, aren’t they?’ I wondered how old she thought I was, so I quickly clarified, ‘I’m 32’. She nodded sagely.

It was another week before we shared the news with our families over Christmas and they were markedly more enthusiastic. Delighted, in fact. In those first weeks, as the news started to percolate through my system, I hummed happily to myself and felt full of magic.

Then the sickness started. As every sufferer learns for themselves, ‘morning sickness’ is grossly misnamed. It can be an all-day sickness. I experienced unending nausea from morning until night, but it was particularly severe after mid-afternoon and lasted all evening. It was most similar to motion sickness and felt like I was severely sea sick and trapped below deck, unable to find the horizon. It was debilitating. I couldn’t read or write or do anything at all. I clung to my bed as if it was a life-raft, miserable and self-pitying. This lasted for months. BFG did all the cooking and I regularly threw up the evening meal, sometimes just minutes after slowly swallowing it. When I left the house, I carried sick bags and chewing gum.

My body had been invaded. What was this creature that was making me feel so dreadful? In my darkest moment, I thought about how BFG was more prone to illness than me and wondered whether he had impregnated me with sickly genes that I was now incubating. The reality was more prosaic: pregnancy is commonly this awful. I fled to my midwife for sympathy and help but it was not forthcoming and no cure was offered. ‘I feel sick all day and throw up most days’. ‘Yep, you’re pregnant’. She was completely matter-of-fact. I just had to hope the sickness would end after the first trimester.

In the meantime, I felt imprisoned by my body, victim of a hostile takeover. Sometimes I panicked. I envisaged myself tied to train tracks, helplessly waiting for the train to run me over. This was how I imagined birth - the coming ordeal at the end of the excruciating line. Sylvia Plath also conjured up a train image in her poem Metaphors. She wrote that she had ‘boarded the train there’s no getting off’. She chose a better analogy than me, which is unsurprising because she is a great poet, but it’s also worrying that I conceived a bleaker scenario than Plath. She killed herself only years later.

Whilst in the depths of my morning-and-all-day sickness, I sat in the waiting room of my doctor’s surgery clutching a sick bag. Another lady, heavily pregnant, came out of her appointment and joined her partner in the waiting room. She looked an advert for pregnancy; radiant and blooming, with immaculate make-up and stylish maternity wear. Then I heard her say to her partner, ‘They said I’ve got blood on my lungs so they’ll need to suck it out. It’s a pregnancy thing apparently’. I was horrified. Why did she look so happy? It sounded utterly terrifying. This was the first of many ‘pregnancy things’ that I was to learn about.

Every time I blow my nose some blood comes out. That’s a pregnancy thing. Apparently the pregnant body carries over a third more blood, so those capillaries are full to bursting. I wake up in the night with cramp in my legs. Yep, that’s a pregnancy thing too. After a few months I could feel my stomach muscles stretching. It was quite painful and scary. I knew to prepare for stretch marks as the skin stretched but hadn’t considered how my muscles would be stretched too. I read about how the stomach muscles can move apart during pregnancy, so much so that some women need abdominal surgery afterwards. It’s called diastasis recti. Normally the muscles recover and move back together after birth. I googled ‘How can I keep my bump small?’ to try to minimise the damage, but again, no help was available. I’ve boarded the train there is no getting off. Then I met a pregnant woman who was wearing a giant bandage around her waist. She told me, ‘I went to see a physio and they said that my hip muscles are moving apart as the baby grows so I need to wear this bandage and regularly clench my bum cheeks to try and hold myself together’. Blimey. There is no shortage of ailments to worry about. Pregnancy is hazardous.

Mercifully, after eight weeks of perpetual nausea, my sickness subsided around week 14. I’ve joined the ranks of pregnant women measuring life in weeks, not months. I gradually got my energy back and pregnancy has been far more manageable, and even enjoyable, since then. Now I’m much bigger, which makes bending to tie my shoe laces uncomfortable, but otherwise I feel like myself again. I can also feel the baby moving inside me regularly, wriggling around, and this is completely enchanting. Rather than feeling invaded, I’m now marvelling at sharing my body with another person. I’m never alone. Their little flicks and kicks make me smile to myself. Whatever I’m doing, I’m simultaneously aware of a rich new life growing inside me. I’m now 38 weeks pregnant, in awe of my body and I’m glad that I boarded the train.

In November 2011, when I was aged 26 years, 3 months and 23 days old, my Dad called me to say ‘Happy Daddy’s Day’. It wasn’t Father’s Day so I asked him what he was talking about. He explained, ‘You’ve now reached the age that I was when I had you’. I was struck by this unexpected milestone, which surely passes unnoticed in most families. I wondered at how young he had been when I was born. I didn’t feel remotely ready or inclined to become a parent. I barely saw myself as an adult.

When I was approaching 28, my Welsh neighbours found an abandoned dog and gave it to me and BFG, hoping we could provide a good home for it. I told my parents about the dog and explained that we weren’t really able to look after it long-term. My Mum lamented, ‘If you can’t commit to a dog, what hope is there for a child?’

Whenever people have asked me, ‘Do you want a baby?’ I’ve always struggled to answer. As a teenager, I was adamant that I would never want children and begged my Mum to let me have my womb removed because I wanted my periods to stop. She insisted that it was too early to make this decision.

As an adult, I became increasingly ambivalent. In an abstract sense I started to envisage one day having my own family. I imagine that it must be enchanting to watch a little person growing up and experiencing things for the first time, seeing their delight and wonder. People say it’s a love like no other. Children can look after us when we’re old and help us to see a continuation of ourselves beyond death.

But do I want a baby right now? Even harder to answer. I’ve never looked at babies and craved one of my own. There are lots of other things that I want to do apart from have children. I love my freedom and independence and absence of responsibility. I’m terrified of pregnancy and childbirth and always think how many women historically have died and how my body could be changed beyond recognition; torn, scarred and stretched. A few friends have had near-death experiences in labour, and one described her sister after childbirth as looking like she’d survived a car accident.

That said, I hear my biological clock ticking. I know that the window of opportunity is finite and fertility not to be taken for granted. The warnings of older women echo in my ears: ‘Don’t leave it too late or you’ll regret it’. My Mum once told me about a card she saw with a photo of a woman slapping her head and exclaiming, ‘Oh no, I forgot to have children!’ I laughed at the time, but it also haunted me as a warning. And time is ticking for all of us. Life is short and people die. If I’m going to have children then I’d like them to have as much time as possible with their grandparents.

Then, one day, I was listening to Radio 4 and heard a biological anthropologist called Gillian Ragsdale say that deciding when to have a baby is a decision that we’re ill-equipped to make. She said that it has never been necessary for any animal, including humans, to set out wanting to have children. All that is needed is a sex drive. Then, if you’re having lots of sex, some of it is going to produce children. Once the children come along, it’s then very useful to have a natural urge to look after the child. So being ambivalent about the idea of having a child doesn’t mean you’ll feel ambivalent when the child actually arrives. Contraception has been an emancipation, but it has also given us the burden of choice, of deciding when to have a baby.

Hearing Ragsdale talk was a revelation, enabling me to rationalise my own uncertainty, and emboldening me to contemplate a leap of faith beyond it.

My Mum has always said that there is never a good time to have a child and I’m sure that’s true. Given that, I’d struck upon a reasonably good time. In my working life, I had completed a major project and not yet embarked on any new longterm commitments. BFG and I were settling into a new house. A few close friends had recently had children and blazed a trail, demystifying the transition to parenthood. I was opening up to the possibility.

I kept thinking about how a dear friend expressed the reason behind his desire to have a child: ‘I see how happy my parents are when they see me. They love it. I want a piece of that happiness’.

Then BFG declared, ‘My fear of not having children has now surpassed my fear of having them’.

So we decided to take the leap and try for a baby.