Grace Timothy - Lost in Motherhood

‘But I can’t feel it,’ I said, completely unable to see this image on the screen as a snapshot of my insides. Not like with a transvaginal scan, where you can feel the probe knocking your ovaries like a piñata. It still wasn’t a baby there on the screen, but it definitely looked like something which might grow into one. Rich was transfixed and I felt bad that I wasn’t bonding with the squiggly little creature that could have been anywhere. It was still sexless in my head, without an identity. But I took the picture they printed and tried to see Rich and I in the image. There was my long chin at any rate, but the long hooked nose looked like a little old man’s. I stared at the picture long and hard to try and see our future – this is our kid , I thought, this is our kid. This is Rich’s kid! I love Rich and this is his child, inside me. This is my very own kid … It didn’t really work, but I’ve never been very good at pep talks.

Then we left and went back to real life, away from this crazy world where we gazed into my belly, and pressed on with the present.

I nearly puke on Anna Wintour

When you’re pregnant you can deal in these diametric opposites quite comfortably as the future is all hypothetical and you can’t imagine not being in control of your own destiny. Moving on from the fear of a baby changing everything, I had resolved that it would change nothing. I don’t want to go to soft play or parks, so I just won’t! I thought, making a mental list of the things I didn’t like about childcare and so would just not indulge. I practised full-scale denial, thanks to the advice of mostly childless people and from reading books by women who had nannies, even though I knew we’d never be able to afford one.

And continuing as if nothing was going to change was actually completely possible during my second trimester, as my energy returned and the sickness calmed down. My belly started growing but the bump was still very much of IBS-bloating proportions and sometimes barely appeared at all. I hadn’t bought a stitch of maternity wear, I was working out the perfect anti-nausea routine in readiness for a return to work, and I was about to prove my theories and capabilities in the most sane way I thought possible: attending Fashion Week. Unfortunately, it would instead be the moment I narrowly missed vomiting on Anna Wintour.

To give you a bit of background information, when I left university I went straight to The Times as a fashion intern. From day 1 at the newspaper, I was hooked. I had a string of badly paid internships and quickly realised that to make the knockbacks and hard graft worthwhile I would need to become fiercely ambitious.

I eventually got a job at Vogue based solely on the fact that my boss at The Times gave me a good reference, and that I spoke Italian (which actually was not true).

Then a job as an actual WRITER came up at Glamour , where I stayed until I’d amassed enough experience to go it alone as a freelance beauty writer. I compiled a list of dream titles I’d try to write for, and at the very top was American Vogue .

So when Style.com – the sister site from the same publisher – asked me to report backstage at London Fashion Week the week I was diagnosed with Hyperemesis Gravidarum, I was like, obviously, yes. At the time they were THE authority on the shows, I’d be mad to turn it down. And if I stepped aside for even one season I’d be quickly replaced by someone who wasn’t inconveniently breeding.

It was just a shame I felt so sick.

I decided to keep my ‘condition’ top secret from those around me.

The first show was at the top of a very high, very glass building, and as I’d over-planned I arrived about an hour early. I stepped out of the elevator, into a vast warehouse-style room, with all the action focused in one corner of rails and pop-up hairdressing stations. I took in the view and as I swayed aboard my ridiculous 4-inch heels, my mouth began to froth. NOT NOW, NOT NOW! I reached for a cracker and scoffed it down like the Cookie Monster, spraying flecks all around me. Then the lift pinged again and out stepped La Wintour. Maker and breaker of careers. Editor-in-chief of the magazine at the top of my wishlist, the doyenne of cut-throat fashion-ism. On any other day, had I not left the top button of my jeans undone and just sprayed water biscuit down my front, I would have approached her. I knew it could be a terrible idea, for sure – she had a brutal way of dismissing people, I’d heard – but her daughter had interned with me at Vogue and I’d met her again on a trip not long after and she was lovely, warm and generous. I had an opener. I wanted it so badly. I wasn’t scared, I was ballsy.

I’ll just go up to her and be all, HEY, ANNA! I know your daughter! Super-casual, just one professional to another. So I straightened my shirt, smoothed my hair down. I got ready to make the ultimate career move.

But instead? I burped. Like, really loudly. Loud enough that the people to the rear of her entourage cloud turned around. I turned around too, as if to ask, WHO WAS THAT?! Then I lurched forward, stumbled backwards, and then hid behind a rail of clothes for the next 40 minutes, dry heaving.

Well, this is new, I thought. Not the dry heaving at work – we’ve all done the morning-after-the-Christmas-party-retch – but the complete lack of control and professionalism in the face of a potentially big career moment. Being pregnant was definitely jamming my work mode and it scared me – what if, no matter how much I try to stay the same, it would actually be impossible? It was so frustrating and terrifying to feel the bit of me that got my mortgage paid and fulfilled my ambitions was under fire.

I managed to write the reports and by staying away from the other beauty editors who would have known what was up when they smelt my acrid breath and the fact that I wasn’t stealing the models’ croissants, nobody was any the wiser. And I decided that once the morning sickness had completely stopped, I’d be able to continue unchanged. The fact is, I’d been in the room with Anna and co., I was still allowed in. I just needed to rein in the impulse to vomit.

We need a new nest

OK, so I was still adamant that nothing had to change. But one thing really did – where we lived. Yes, quite a big thing, actually. The flat that we’d scrimped and saved for, and made our mark on by way of two floating shelves and a new catch on the shower door, had to go. It had been perfect, pre-fertilised-egg – a living room with giant sofas that doubled as a large dormitory for friends to crash out in, and a windowsill over the tub, for stacking candles, books and the occasional bathtime sandwich.

The summer before I’d got up the stick, we decided to put the flat on the market because we thought it might be time to splash out on a garden of our own. Somewhere to drink coffee on a Sunday morning, maybe a box room I could make my office now that I worked from home. It sold at the first viewing (and that shower catch made us £15,000 – snap!) but we couldn’t find anything nice we could actually afford. We dawdled and ummed and ahhed, because we were under zero pressure – so what if the buyer pulls out, we don’t HAVE to move, and we’ll just get another buyer.

But at the end of February, as I entered my eighth week of pregnancy from my mum’s sofa in Chichester, our buyer finally threatened to pull out if we didn’t vacate within four weeks. Rich started to rush over to Brighton after work to check out other flats and back to me in Chichester each evening to endure my rants about his breath. One evening he arrived back from our flat, another bag of my clothes slung over his back, and slumped down next to me on the sofa. I didn’t mention his personal stank because he looked so broken. I’d basically been ignoring him for a month and hadn’t noticed how the commuting and lack of support was getting to him.