Liz Fraser - The Yummy Mummy’s Survival Guide

I seem to spend half of my free time pacifying freaked-out childless friends who are terrified of committing to their perceived life of drudgery, lard and frumpiness. ‘Hang on!’ I cry. ‘Are you saying I’m lardy and frumpy? Did I know what I was doing before I started? Do I know now ?’ No, no and no.

However, I have learned quite a few things about what it feels like to become a Yummy Mummy, and I’ll do my best to ease at least some of the stress. Where I fail, watching anything with Paul Bettany in it should relieve any furrowed brows.

Here are some of the most common worries my friends seem to have, and some mildly helpful advice:

I don’t feel very maternal—maybe I’ll be an awful mother

This is a disaster. You will never be a good mother, and you should book in for a hysterectomy immediately. You probably shouldn’t have pets either. Or houseplants.

I’m lying, of course: very few women feel very maternal before they have a baby, and most go on to become fantastic mums. (Many don’t even feel that maternal after the birth, but it’s not something people like to talk about. I like to talk about it a lot, and so I do in Part Five).

It’s not even clear what feeling ‘maternal’ means, anyway. In a similar way to how much libido a woman has, so women have varying degrees of maternal urges, and there’s nothing to say that you should be consumed with the desire to foster every child on the planet before having a baby yourself.

‘Feeling Maternal’ could mean any, or none, of the following:

Realising that babies and children exist.

Being able to sit in the same room as a child without feeling annoyed or put off your food.

Finding children quite cute.

Saying ‘Ahhhhhhh’ when you watch a nappy advert.

Starting to cry at the mere mention that somebody you know, or even somebody you don’t know, has had a baby.

Buying baby clothes when you haven’t even found a prospective father yet (and this is a sure-fire way never to find one, unless you keep it very secret).

Genuinely liking the smell of newborn babies, rather than just saying you do.

Being able to wipe somebody else’s child’s snotty nose without retching (I still haven’t reached this point yet).

Wherever you sit on this scale before you have a baby, you will almost certainly sit somewhere else afterwards, and not necessarily at the more maternal end. I didn’t feel the overwhelming urge to have babies before I became pregnant for the first time, and I was quite able to pass babies in the street without drooling. In fact, I was barely aware of their existence until I was at least five months pregnant, and that was mainly because I was checking out groovy pram models.

Happily, something inside my brain changed the moment I held my first baby, and I have been unable to hear a baby crying or see a child in distress since without being overcome with the compulsion to cheer the poor thing up. It’s just Yummy Mummy Nature doing her bit, and luckily it works for the majority of women. I’ve also had periods of feeling very un-maternal, for reasons I’m yet to understand, but these pass and I get back to being sickeningly in love with all three of mine very quickly.

Don’t worry if you don’t think you feel maternal enough:either you will become more maternal when your baby arrives, or you will remain as you are and do a perfectly good job of looking after your baby anyway. Worrying about it now is pointless: you just have to wait and see what happens, and stop telling yourself that you’re not kitted out to be a mother. If you’ve got a heart, a womb, some self-respect and a sense of humour then you’re good to go.

I don’t want to get fat

This seems to be one of the biggest off-putters for my child-free friends. I can’t believe how many pre-pregnant, gorgeous women freak out about this. Why should you get fat? If you’re not fat now, and if you care about how you look, and if you don’t want to become fat, then why should pregnancy make you fat? It’s a bit like saying: ‘I really want to go to Antigua this summer, but I’m worried I’ll get sunburn.’ Pack some sunblock then, stay in the shade and wear a wide-brimmed hat. Bingo—no sunburn!

Seriously, though, worrying about becoming fat during pregnancy is normal, because it happens to quite a lot of previously slimline ladies. But the news is very good: if you are careful about what you eat, if you continue to exercise and if you don’t treat pregnancy as an excuse to eat all the pies, then you will almost certainly not get fat. A little rounder-of-hip perhaps, but not fat . (See You’re Eating for How Many?in Part Three.)

What about the rest of my body? Won’t it be ruined?

No, it won’t. Lots of bits of your body will change, not necessarily for the better, but with a lot of effort most of this is perfectly fixable. If you are really worried about what will happen to your lovely body when you become a Yummy Mummy, then here are some honest truths:

You might get stretch marks, but many large mothers don’t, many skinny, childless women (and men!) do, and there are ways of reducing the damage, should you be genetically challenged in this department.

Your breasts will first become much bigger, and then much, much smaller and less pert. There’s always surgery, or you could, or probably should, just learn to like them that way.

You might get varicose veins, but rarely after a first pregnancy, and your genetic makeup has more of a role to play than any growing baby does.

Your tummy will become more wobbly for a while, but this is absolutely curable with enough crunching and squeezing, if wobbly’s not your thing.

But: You get a child at the end of it all, and no amount of wobble or droop can outweigh the positives of having a baby. Some perspective, please!

What if I mess it all up?

This is a hard one to answer, because I suppose you might mess it all up; you might be the worst mother ever known; you might leave your new baby in a motorway filling station by mistake because you were busy trying to open a packet of M&Ms and got distracted; your marriage might fall apart because of the sudden droopiness of your boobs; and your children might hate you forever and turn to a life of drugs and crime. You might be forced to spend the rest of your life with ‘The Terrible Mother Who Messed It All Up’ tattooed across your forehead.

Or, you might just surprise yourself and cope very well. That’s the thrill of it—you have no idea how it is going to go, things change every minute and you just have to fly by the seat of your still-gorgeous pants and hope for the best. You may have to readjust what your idea of ‘the best’ is, to fit in with the realities of looking after a baby and keeping your sanity, but you are more than likely to do a fantastic job and not mess anything up at all.