Grace Timothy - Lost in Motherhood

‘Look, we need a plan. Nothing new is coming up, we can’t afford anything suitable in Brighton. We have to be realistic.’

Nonononononononono!

‘I think we ought to start looking outside of Brighton. We’ll get more for our money. And I won’t have to commute as far, which means I’ll be back before the baby goes to bed. Brighton is not going to work for us, not right now.’

He’d said it. It was out there. Our life was going to change. But there was a caveat – NOT RIGHT NOW . Once we’d saved a bit of money, maybe we would be able to go back to Brighton, to a proper house. This wasn’t forever, this was for now.

‘And I think the most sensible choice is right here, because I won’t be far from work, you won’t be far from the hospital and your parents will be nearby to help out.’

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck! I’d no longer be the city girl, living a stone’s throw from her favourite bar, the beach and an ATM machine. I’d be back to where I started, back to bad phone signals, no nightclubs and a lot of fields. Back to socialising with my mum and wider family without having a cool flat and glamorous job to jet back to afterwards. Back to feeling gawky and isolated and frustrated.

‘OK,’ I say, in the tiniest voice, hoping he might not hear and we can just pretend this hasn’t happened. I have no fight in me, and I’m pleased that he seems buoyed by this decision at least. I can deal with the finer details later. At least I wouldn’t have to meet another set of midwives either, or try to navigate a new set of roundabouts, my bête noir as a driver.

My mum was delighted, Rich was grim, and I was escaping it all on Rightmove. It had replaced ASOS as my favourite virtual shopping basket. I was already changing, OH GOD, NO! Ooh, but wait, look, a double garage!

I was supposed to start my job in six weeks’ time, and we would have to have moved before that. And actually, there was a whole bunch of small houses – HOUSES – for the amount of money we’d saved for a one-bed garden flat in Hove. They were mostly new builds – small Tardis houses with boxy rooms and a manicured lawn of fake grass. Then behind door number four was a 122-year-old tiny cottage, with pink roses and a rambling garden full of wild flowers. We both had to duck as we entered and quickly calculated we’d have to ditch both of our sofas. The owners had a baby, so a metre from the main bedroom on a floor that inexplicably sloped and creaked was a tiny box room, barely big enough for a single bed, but already decked out with a cot and shelves of stuffed toys. My mum warned us off it – ‘It’s old! It probably has damp! And what about the sloping floors?!’ – and Rich scraped the skin off his scalp by head-butting the doorframe, but I was in love.

Rich was less keen.

‘There’s no room for our sofas. And what about the floating shelves, where will they go?’

‘It’s bigger than a flat though, isn’t it? And there’s a garden.’

‘Well, we wouldn’t be able to have the Wii out. It would have to go in a box or something.’

‘Um, OK. Or we could plug it in upstairs in the loft? Hey, you could have your own game room, bubs!’

‘Hmm … But what about my bar? Where would I put my bar?’

DEEP BREATH.

‘Rich, I’m not sure we can discount a house on the sole fact that your bar – which maaaaybe isn’t the priority when we have a baby on the way – doesn’t fit in. AMIRIGHT?’

‘Fuck.’

‘I know, dude. But … well, why don’t you build a shed in the garden and put your bar in there? It could be proper bar, then, couldn’t it?!’

‘Hmm …’

For Rich it was the realisation that we were settling down, becoming a family, but true to form, it took him 24 hours before he was immersed in the positives, excited about building a shed with a bar in the garden, and as we stood outside Boots with a bag of breath mints (attempting to continue to abate nausea), the estate agent called to say we’d had our offer accepted and would hopefully exchange in June. The next day I drove back to Hove with my mum, stopping en route to dry heave onto the hard shoulder, and put down a deposit on the first flat I viewed for rent, based purely on the fact that it was near the station. Currently occupied by a woman with cats, it smelled like cats.

It would be the stopgap between our old life and new, a quick commute to London until I could commute no more and would be hoisted into our new cottage, ready to hang up lines of tiny baby-sized washing and start puréeing apple sauce. I could take the stack of magazines we used as a coffee table and our collection of novelty shot glasses, it could still feel like home. Sure, we’d have to pay rent and a mortgage for two months, but we would otherwise be homeless. It was all coming together and I had two major projects to occupy the part of my brain that would have otherwise freaked out about the baby. It was still half a year away – no biggie. I helped pack up our flat (well, I lay on the bathroom floor, shouting instructions to Rich), and although I felt those glum feelings returning – we were essentially packing up our youth and independence into those boxes – I focused on the immediate future: an exciting new job and a slightly briefer walk to the station in the morning.

The fabulous thing about moving while pregnant – which we would do twice – was that nobody wanted me to do anything. I went a bit peaky, fetching sandwiches for lunch, and all the removal men stopped what they were doing to pep talk me into sitting down. Rich rolled his eyes as one of them picked me up and put me on the one remaining chair they’d left in the middle of the now-empty living room. Sweet.

Rich and I went to a swanky fish restaurant that night.

‘This is the new us, bubs – OK, so maybe no to nightclubs, but this is really nice, isn’t it? We’ll go to nice restaurants and widen our culinary horizons! We’ll be fine, actually, won’t we?’

He nodded, as he poked the skeleton of his sea bass, wondering which bits he could actually eat.

Bloated yet professional

Finally, we were installed in our new flat and the day arrived – I was to begin my new job at Glamour on a shoot day, interviewing the model Lily Cole while my beauty boss styled her and directed the shots. And it was like I’d never left. There was no mention of babies or morning sickness or the future. I was singing showtunes with the manicurist, wheedling Lily’s favourite lipstick out of her when all she wanted to discuss was her work for Greenpeace, and fingering a rail of glitzy threads I could never afford. I WAS BACK. It was familiar, it was comforting, and it was work.

Nobody knew I was pregnant, of course, and I wondered if the information about my expectancy would be announced officially or would drip-feed down from the higher echelons. It’s the latter, and one by one, startled staffers came by my desk when my boss was out to hiss, Is it true?! One wasn’t convinced, even when I showed her the shape of my belly under the massive shirt I was wearing.

‘Yeh, but your boobs haven’t got any bigger, though, have they? They’re still really tiny.’

Always a pleasure chatting with that one.

I called on an old colleague from Vogue one lunchtime and she helped me navigate Topshop’s maternity section. I was finally kitted out and my belly was no longer covered in livid red indents from my savage jeans.

Work was a true sanctuary, and even as my bump swelled and became more noticeable, the team mostly ignored it as per my request and I was not once sidelined. In fact, when I was five months pregnant, my boss assigned me two trips: one to Paris to interview Natalie Portman and just before that, one to LA to launch a new shampoo. I know that sounds ridiculous, but yes, we were flying to LA in order to sit around a table in a conference room and discuss a new shampoo. I said yes to both without hesitation, calling Virgin on my boss’s request to check I would be OK to fly. All was approved and I was off to LA!