Mum Face: The Memoir of a Woman who Gained a Baby and Lost Her Sh*t

‘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!

On the morning I was due to fly to LA, I woke up at 5am, worrying I’d miss the alarm, so when it went off I sprung out of bed and started busying around the bags. Rich lifted his head sleepily, reached for his glasses and stared at me.

‘Oh God, what?’ My hands immediately jump to my belly, thinking it’s probably ballooned overnight.

‘Have you … spilt something? On your … tits?’

I looked down at my white T-shirt. Two little yellow splodges sat right where my nipples nudge the cloth.

‘What the fuck?!’

It was like a watermark on silk, a ring of yellow syrup. Actually it was more like pus.

I ran into the bathroom, squeezed my nipples and all of this thick yellow mucus dribbled out. Of course, now I know this is a natural process – it’s the colostrum gathering ready for your baby, and actually it would have been worthwhile trying to ‘harvest’ some of this nectar. But I was horrified. Pus tits?!

Other than the fact I had to stuff my bra with the hotel’s complimentary cotton pads every morning, LA was GREAT. Without Rich or my mum there, I could completely deny the pregnancy was taking hold of me. I was in a fabulous hotel with fabulous people, none of whom were parents, and I didn’t really even look that pregnant. I didn’t get jet lag, which was awesome, and by not drinking I felt pretty fresh, actually. My belly had grown while I had been in LA – possibly because of the travel-related water retention, but either way, it got bigger.

I still didn’t feel pregnant, just bloated, but I got slightly panicky about the changes. No going back now, it was happening.

Weeks later, I was in Paris.

Natalie Portman: [passes a beautiful hand over my belly, which is bigger because I just ate a burger while waiting for her] ‘Oh, my! How far along are you?’

Me: ‘I think, like, about five months? But I’m not really sure actually, because I think I got pregnant on New Year’s Day, but there’s of course every chance it was before that and my dates are all messed up because I can’t really remember when my last period was, you know? I mean, it’s possible I just got that wrong, but that’s all the doctors seem to be bothered about and I don’t know when it was, I really don’t. Plus, my husband and I weren’t together for Christmas so we obviously hadn’t really had sex between, like, 15 December and 1 January, that’s two whole weeks! So yes, I’m not really sure.’

Natalie Portman: ‘… OK!’

And that was the last time Glamour sent me to interview a celebrity.

The gender reveal

You get two scans as standard during the second trimester, and at the 20-week scan I actually began to accept this was happening. We had decided to find out the sex of the baby at this scan. I’d been trying to look for signs that it would be a girl – three magpies, SCORE – and was actually pretty desperate not to find out she was a boy. Why? Because the only way I could get my head around having a kid was to imagine it would be like reliving my childhood, which I really enjoyed first time around. And if I had a boy, that would have been my last comforting lie to myself shot to shit.

‘We don’t look for the absence of a penis, now, we can usually see labial folds when it’s a girl,’ the midwife explains, as she presses the ultrasound into my guts.

But as we pretended only to care that the baby was healthy and well-formed, I yelped when the midwife announced:

‘There’s a vagina. I think. Labial folds. I think that is a vagina.’ The baby kept crossing her legs – modest.

‘Don’t go buying everything in pink, now – this isn’t a definitive answer,’ cautioned the midwife, but still: A GIRL. And then she said, ‘And here is your daughter’s face.’

I felt a connection, at least with the concept of what was inside me being a baby. My daughter. Not some weird stomach bug or an alien creature I had no affinity with whatsoever. It was my daughter. She had lost the hooked nose and chin, and looked quite like a baby now, although I still couldn’t feel the movements we saw inside me before. But there it was – I was going to have a daughter. She would be a girl and then a woman.

Rich and I agreed to keep the sex to ourselves. I was gagging to tell everyone, but he wanted to keep something back to surprise our families with so I agreed. I mean, I told my mum, my best friend, all my colleagues and a woman at the bank, but otherwise, it was absolutely a secret.

The nest is a nest for VERMIN

Things with our stop-gap flat started to go quite wrong as spring turned to summer. The line of woodlice marching across our kitchen doubled then trebled and eventually became an infestation. The landlord was all, ‘Oh yeh, they’re so annoying, aren’t they? Hey ho!’ I couldn’t stand on them because they looked like they might be a bit crunchy so I spent hours every day scooping them up using Rich’s driving licence, which I kept by the back door for this purpose.

The flush stopped working in the toilet, and the boiler cut out every other day. It was always cold and our clothes never dried.

Then one day I started to feel really ill while I was waiting for my train home. Sick, shivery, aching all over, like I was either going to puke, shit or die. I called Rich, who drove to meet my train at the station and took me home, where he put me to bed.

‘It feels so cold,’ I moaned as I fell into a fitful sleep. The next morning my throat was sore, my nose ached and I was breathless. Mum suggested I spend a few days with her so she could keep an eye on me while Rich was working. Rich and I went to throw a few things in a bag and discovered every single pair of shoes in the bottom of our wardrobe was covered in a thick coating of green mould. Rich pulled the wardrobe out of its recess and it turned out the whole of the wardrobe’s back was green, too, with a swirling nucleus of thick white fur. That’s when I realised our bed was damp, not cold, and the floor felt wet and greasy underfoot. He began stuffing salvageable stuff into bin liners, organising the stuff we’d need to decamp to my mum’s again, and I watched him becoming a dad before my very eyes.

I was furious. Now, I probably always would have done so but what was interesting is how I kept referring to the unborn baby rather than myself as implicated in this gross situation. I got all my ducks in order first, calling the Environment Agency for advice on how to report this and how to handle our landlord. Then I itemised the cost of everything that had been ruined – furniture, clothes, the bed, mattress, shoes, bags – so I could provide a clear invoice to offset against our security deposit and the next two months rent, since I was NOT going to be spending a moment longer in that hell hole. Finally, I got him on the phone.

‘This is frankly untenable, and for the sake of my unborn child, I will not live here a day longer,’ I concluded. ‘I AM WITH CHILD!’