Grace Timothy - Lost in Motherhood

‘What about partying with your friends and your career, and what about the flat?’

‘Well, those things will be there whenever we decide to have kids, won’t they?’

I decided to try on a different hat for a moment. I’d never delivered this as good news; I’d rung him bawling my head off, after all.

‘Fuck it,’ I said, ‘Let’s have a baby.’

‘OK, bubs.’

He said later it was like a switch had been flicked inside me, some kind of maternal ignition or something. The mood had changed and he went with it.

So I decided to get my ducks in a row, starting with work. I plumped for an email because 1. I am chicken shit 2. I still couldn’t talk coherently, and knew for sure heaving over the phone was not going to help my cause. I’ve always hated that a phone call gives you the opportunity to talk in the wrong place, to stumble over your words. My boss replied – congratulations, I still want you for the job, we’ll see how it goes.

Oh! So it’s fine then. Huh.

It felt as if the final concerns had been washed away by this woman who couldn’t see any harm in me doing both – pregnancy and a job – so now I really had the chance to mould this situation to suit us. It felt like she was all, you can handle both – you can do it. It didn’t have to be the end of life as we knew it.

I carried on feeling sick, hopeful that I’d feel better at 12 weeks because I’d heard this was quite likely. I was counting down the days, either sweating under a blanket on my mum’s sofa or sleeping. Usually sleeping.

When I was 10 weeks pregnant, I had a bleed. Nothing dramatic but a definite red bloom in the gusset, sticky and ominous. I called the antenatal unit at the hospital and was finally put through to a midwife who was eating her lunch at her desk.

‘Nothing you can do, love,’ was her brusque summation. ‘It might be that you’re miscarrying but we don’t do scans this early on, so you’ll know at your 12-week scan. If you lose a lot of blood, call 999.’ And that was it. I might be miscarrying, I might not. It could all be gone in the next 12 hours if the blood continued to come and the little clot of cells fell out of me.

I felt that hot prickling around my hairline, a signal that my body was preparing to fight or flee. Interesting, I thought, I’m definitely not relieved. I am worried. I don’t want to miscarry, actually. The contrary brain had turned. The fragility of this baby came shrieking into my brain, and I felt protective. An hour or so later, I was reading the copy of What To Expect When You’re Expecting, which my mum had popped on my bedside table weeks ago and had sat there gathering dust ever since. I let them talk to me as if I was a happy, expectant mother, as if this was all part of the plan and I was now excitedly entering the second trimester. Suddenly, when it was suggested in real terms of life and death – that this wasn’t a fait accompli I simply had to come round to – I could feel something different. By not worrying about my identity, my career or my relationship, something else broke through … An instinct? I’d be the first to call bullshit on that – I hate the idea that we’re biologically structured to make decisions that will make us good mothers – but just as the antenatal depression and sickness had felt out of my control, so too this new acceptance and sense of calm came without a rational thought.

I just knew I wouldn’t miscarry. I knew this baby would come and although I wasn’t sure what would follow, I looked forward to that moment. Of course, I could very easily have miscarried and I’m astounded I didn’t. I am not a doctor, I know nothing. But the awful chemical reaction that was making me feel so hopeless and frightened seemed to slow, the hormones settled, and I was sure. I know, it sounds like I was properly crazy, and I was, but that’s hormones for you. Or at least, I hope it was the hormones. Otherwise I was/am properly crazy. I began to look beyond the immediate moment, just a little bit past it to the 12-week scan.

Oh, and by the way: I hate turtles. I hated getting up at 4.30am for our beach treks, I hated the smell when I had to dig down to help the little cretins reach the top, I hated the fact that you’d think they were dead, lodged in the sandy cavern, but then they’d suddenly flip around and spray sand in your face. I went on the trip to drink rum, meet guys and party with my friend, who had coerced me into including this turtle crusade in our itinerary so we had something to put on our CVs. I remember thinking, if these tiny creatures that everyone finds so cute are lost on me, I’m clearly NOT a maternal person in any way. But, remember: HORMONES.

*Am I a millennial? I suspect I’m too old. It’s loosely defined as one who reaches early adulthood in the 21st century, but I would argue I haven’t really reached adulthood yet.

†Just to clear something up (as that nice GP did with my chlamydia, thankfully) – I contracted this symptom-less disease when I was in my late teens. My boyfriend at the time, a lovely Catholic boy from the countryside, who waited patiently for months before having sex, was secretly riddled.

CHAPTER TWO

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

A midwife calls me ‘mum’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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