Sam Binnie - The Baby Diaries

Alice: Are you making me drink alone?

Me: Oh no, I’m so sorry – I’m on these antibiotics –

Alice: [mouth agape]

Me: What?

Alice: [whispering] You’ve been married three months .

Me: [nervous] What?

Alice: [shakes head]

Me: What ?

Alice: Kiki, Kiki, Kiki …

Me: Alice !

Alice: Don’t make me say it, Kiki.

[silence]

Me: Alice, please don’t tell anyone. It wasn’t even supposed to happen – we didn’t even mean it – but we did mean it, but only for one night, and we were drunk, and it just – please, you please mustn’t tell anyone, [almost sobbing] please .

Alice: Kiki, does this face look like it tells secrets?

We talked for a long time. We talked about how I was feeling, and how Thom was feeling, and how Tony and Pamela might take it, and what the maternity package may or may not be at Polka Dot (for some reason we haven’t had anyone go on maternity leave while we’ve been there). And some more about how I was feeling. She also told me, after her fourth Slutty Horse, that everyone knowing about Norman and Carol’s office romance doesn’t seem to have quenched their passion – she caught them snogging in Carol’s office after work the other evening. At the end of the night, as we stumbled to the tube station and down to our platforms (Alice stumbling after taking on all the Slutty Horses, me stumbling after taking on Alice), I realised we still hadn’t talked about how Alice was. ‘Plus ça change, my darling,’ she smiled, as I put her on her train home. Is she OK?

TO DO:

Start carrying around a hipflask filled with apple juice, for when someone next needs to see me drinking

Check Alice is OK tomorrow

Body . Didn’t we have a deal? Didn’t we agree that enough was enough? That you would stop this nonsense? Yes, it’s probably hard work growing another human being, but do you need to make such a fuss? Women do it all over the world. Every day. And they’ve done it since before even my mum was born. So can you just stop? Please?

The last few days, the mild queasiness I’ve had on and off the last month or two has burst into something far worse. I just feel rotten . Tired, aching, and sick, sick, sick. It just doesn’t let up. And I don’t want to be one of those frail Victorian pregnants, hobbled by confinement and sent to rest until the baby is ready to go to boarding school, but I just can’t function like this. It ambushes me at moments throughout the day, but the worst thing – the meanest trick in the whole nausea book – is that this isn’t morning sickness. Oh no. In the morning, I wake feeling perky and wholesome, hoping that this might be the day this sickness has slung its hook. So I enjoy a good breakfast with Thom, and we talk, and we make plans, and behave like civilised, happy humans. Then at work, I might feel a bit odd, but it’s OK, I just need to get on with work. By lunchtime, my mouth tastes gross, and nothing seems that tempting, but I can normally find something to fill the gaping, ever-increasing black hole in my appetite (because, of course! – it wouldn’t be truly funny unless this nausea coincided with a huge increase in appetite!) and I’ll be fine for a few hours. If I get hungry in the afternoon, I’ve stocked my desk with fruit and nuts, plus a huge bottle of water. So I just about make it through the day. I start feeling hopeful. Maybe Thom and I can have a conversation tonight! Maybe I can make him dinner, to thank him for all his recent kindness and consideration! Perhaps we can even do some of that stuff we’re probably contractually obliged to do, post-wedding ceremony! That would be great! But even as I’m waving goodbye to everyone, I can feel it starting. My mouth-taste is switching from weird to bitter, from Status Normal to What The Hell Is Going On Here? By the time I’ve got a seat on the tube, I’m desperately praying that no one near me smells of anything, or, heaven forbid, dares to eat anything. And by the time Thom and I meet at home, all I can do is lie down, slipping tiny slivers of whatever arbitrary foodstuff I can handle that day into my mouth. I am not fun company right now.

I’m sure morning sickness is supposed to fade around now, not get worse every day. This is something hatching in my brain and stomach, where Thom can’t even say particular foods to me without bile pooling in my mouth until I have to go and lie with my head on a really cold pillow, sipping water like an idiot. The first night I had this, Thom was thrown.

Thom: What’s … wrong with you?

Me: I don’t know. That morning sickness I was so delighted to have missed? I think it found me.

Thom: It’s seven pm.

Me: Thank you. I’ll just swallow your watch to let my stomach know and we should have this sorted in two seconds.

Thom: Sarcasm? This does sound serious. [sitting tentatively next to me on the bed]

Me: OH GOD don’t lean on me.

Thom: [leaping up] OK, no problem. Is there anything you can stomach eating?

Me: What have we got?

Thom: Um … pasta? Salad?

Me: [gulping] Nonotpastatalkaboutsomethingelse –

Thom: What would you like? Name it, and I’ll find it.

Me: Mm … Maybe … Do we have any salt and vinegar crisps? And a melon?

Thom: You’re depraved.

Me: I’m sure I’ll feel alright tomorrow. I’m just tired. Tomorrow I’ll be back to eating –

Thom: Don’t. Don’t say anything. I can’t risk you being sick on our bed. I’ll go and fetch your gourmet feast, then we sleep.

Me: Deal. Thank you.

And it’s just got worse since then. I avoid being sick all day, but what I can’t do is stop the feeling that I want to be sick, pretty much all the time now. I can’t tell you how angry it makes me to be reduced to that movie pregnant cliché, and to feel so bad with no purpose. This isn’t something that needs medicating – it’s just my body launching a full-on civil war. Well, Body, I shan’t forget this. You just remember that. This isn’t over.

Christ, I still feel so terrible. The fact that there are some women who feel like this every day of their nine months I think is a pretty reasonable explanation for only children. I just about manage to stay upright at work, but I come home and just lie, with a downturned mouth, either on the bed or the sofa and try not to smell the food Thom is doing his damndest to cook and eat in a secretive manner. Then I eat as many mouthfuls of cornflakes and cold, cold milk as I can before my rebellious stomach sends reinforcements and the refuelling party is over. The enemy has realised my plan and all I can do is retreat to the sofa again, trying not to groan out loud and wishing so very, very hard that the feeling of being on a whirling roundabout would stop. Any time now. Like, now. Or now. Or now?

I’m sorry to feel so sorry for myself. As long as this baby is growing, and healthy, and all that jazz that pregnants say to one another like a mantra, then I can stomach this stomach.

Unless I wake up tomorrow and it’s still like this. In which case, I will not be happy.

OK, I can do this. Millions of people – women, I suppose; millions of women – get pregnant every day, and they just get on with it, don’t they? I mean: there will be frightened girls and women who don’t want their babies and don’t know what to do, and women who want babies so much and can’t have them, and here I am, happily married (for less than three months ) with a supportive husband and family, so what am I worried about?

Yet the reality of this pregnancy rattles around my head. I can actually hear it: rattle rattle rattle, all the time. Are these sound-effect thoughts also a symptom of pregnancy? I’m delighted, then I’m terrified. I think of the fun we shall have with our own child, then I think of my body, and my social life, and – oh GOD – my career . Tony’s hardly a dream boss, but I love Polka Dot. What am I supposed to do? I’ve had this new position for even less time than I’ve been married, and I’ve got to somehow get a carrier pigeon to Tony in distant lands to let him know that he took a punt on me and it backfired? How am I going to face any of them? And Pamela too! She championed me against her son, and now I’m dragging the Polka Dot offices back sixty years, into the dark days when young women married, bred and vanished into a life of baking and school fêtes. Not that that’s even what I want – I don’t want to watch my career dissolve while I stay in the kitchen, weeping while my kids pelt me with Lego. But that’s definitely the assumption Pamela and Tony will make.