Grace Timothy - Lost in Motherhood

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

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

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

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

So then, mums are tedious, past it and irreparably uncool. You are JUST A MUM. Nothing more than that, even though the ‘just’ suggests you ought to be. I sneered at the idea it would be the hardest job in the world, but fully believed it would be the most boring one. Once we’ve started to make progress on making BITCH and CUNT unacceptable, we’re going to have to explain ‘mum’ isn’t really such a hot diss. It’s just another way of reducing women, of dismissing and degrading them. And it totally worked on me.

Mums are parochial and stuck in the 80s – presumably because that’s where we’ve banished our own mums to. They’re subsumed by domestic drudgery, hoovering in the background of the real narrative, ready to cook or wipe a bum. They are overcome with tiredness and the shame of having no sexual appeal whatsoever. In fact, they have sex only to have more babies, surely?

My mum the wild child

It’s weird that I was so convinced by this depressing idea of motherhood, when my own mum wasn’t really like that. It turns out that although she and my dad had been trying for a baby for a couple of weeks when she got pregnant she still had the same pangs as me, worried about the changes she would be going through. Maybe more so, given that her own parents had split up when she was a child and her mum had never really recovered, dying of a broken heart when she was just 58, all her birds having flown the nest. My mum, in comparison, was a wild child. She didn’t so much dabble in drugs as body-slam herself full force into bags of speed and weed. She had a lot of sex with a lot of people. When she met my dad she was a theatre stage manager, working late into the night, partying hard and sleeping until the matinée started the whole cycle again the next day.

‘What did you do on Sundays?’ I once asked. She couldn’t remember there being any Sundays.

Then she met my Dad. She was in love. So in love that she – the least maternal person ever to walk the earth, she says – married him (even though he had six children) and decided to have a baby.

When she got pregnant her sisters laughed and her dad shook his head gravely. She’d been babysitting my baby cousin for a full 30 minutes when he’d rolled off the bed and cracked his head open on the floor. It was a terrifying prospect. But she quit the fags and coffee, got really fat and eventually bore me into the world.

She wasn’t like the other mums. She didn’t bake or sew or knit. She dyed her hair pink. I never thought of her as ‘mumsy’. She and my dad were considered ‘a bit showbiz’ by my friends’ parents, I think because they had a lot of gay friends and said ‘cunt’ a lot. They threw parties, were out every weekend and she was a force to be reckoned with – a strident feminist and purveyor of crude jokes in a village of doctors and accountants, all of whom voted Tory and sailed every weekend.

She never ‘settled’ in motherhood, she still thought everything could be bigger and better. With her on the PTA the school fete suddenly went from a little jumble sale to a gala for over 3,000 people with celebrity guests, hot-air balloon rides and a remote broadcast from the local radio station.

Mumness

So it was weird that I was really preoccupied with an image of mums cleaning floors and loading the washing machine – great work, advertising industry! Drinking insipid tea in front of daytime television with a worried look on your face. I think I got this from Neighbours or Coronation Street . I was also painfully aware I’d need to learn how to make gravy. That seemed important somehow. †‘MUM’ was the refrain moaned by pre-teen boys in grass-stained football shorts or precocious girls with gappy teeth and pigtails. It was a word always whined or howled in my head.

Of course, it ended up being the most loved sound in my universe – when my kid first mumbled ‘mama’ it was like I’d discovered who I most wanted to be right there. So in the right hands, when it was her saying it, it was the most beautiful sound, like liquid gold. To be fair, she once called me a slut (having heard it on the radio, mind – nothing to do with me) and even that sounded bloody lovely. If I reduce it right down to its fundamental parts, it’s love: motherhood is love. So the name really has bugger-all importance. But back to pregnant me, who had no idea that would be the case.

I wasn’t even on Instagram back then. I didn’t have that group of women saying, ‘Look, you can wear neons and you can get shit pierced and take your kid to gigs! Look at our snazzy backpacks and our gin!’ Without social media, your tribe is whatever you have in front of you. And I was working in an industry where having a baby could end you unless you pretend like it didn’t happen. A baby in a sling was about as likely to win me work as suddenly admitting I had shagged the boss. Actually, less so, because most magazines wouldn’t want me to write about my experience of childbearing.

But then the cold jelly was dolloped onto my stomach, that weird barcode reader was pushed down hard and we heard the swooshing ‘thud-thud-thud’ of a heartbeat. I looked at Rich – Oh my God, are those tears in his eyes?! Is he … is he crying?! – and missed the baby coming into view. When I looked back at the screen it looked like a little puppet. It had the hiccups, according to the sonographer, and we watched as it bounced off its soft bed, limbs flailing like a little Thunderbird. It didn’t look biological at all, it was mechanical and cloudy, like really bad TV.