Beginnings

Max came completely out of the blue. It was on the back end of a crappy few months and was on a night out with some girl friends away from home. The only thing I can really remember from that night is that he made me laugh and for some drunken reason I gave him my number, then left.

He messaged me before I’d woken up the next morning which was an immediate winner for me as I’d always hated the ‘rule book’ when it came to dating and was sick and tired of all the protocol you’re supposed to follow, i.e having to wait a specific amount of time to get in touch lest you look desperate or god forbid, make the other party think you might actually like them! After a month of emailing, he came up for my birthday and pretty much never left. It was the most hedonistic, romantic few months full of nights out, wine and obviously all the sex!! We were completely in love and had no doubts about our future together. Deciding to have a baby so soon was easy for us, we both knew we wanted the other to be the co-parent of our future child. When I found out I was pregnant, I told my mother immediately, who although seemingly delighted, was concerned about people’s reactions. We didn’t care, we both really wanted her and nothing was going to burst our bubble…

I had spent my whole life looking forward to being pregnant. I was always so maternal and couldn’t wait to embrace my beautiful growing belly. I thought it would be this overwhelmingly wonderful and enriching experience. To say the reality was a bit different is the understatement of the year. I have truly never felt so sick and unhealthy and less like me in my life. I could not believe that something meant to be so natural could make me feel so utterly shite. I could not drum up any enthusiasm for the situation I was in, and while Max was proudly broadcasting it to the world, I took myself to my bed and stayed there, only emerging after about 15 weeks to attempt to regain some kind of normality. I felt nature had played some kind of sick joke on me and this was some kind of punishment for rushing into it so quickly. The irony being, that when I finally stopped vomming my guts up at every opportunity, the illness I’d been feeling was immediately replaced with a ridiculous paranoia that there must be something wrong with the baby. Nothing prepares you for the permanent guilt attached to parenting and the fact that from the second you see that blue line you feel immediately accountable for the way that you raise it. No decision is ever straight forward anymore, everything needs careful consideration and if, heaven forbid, the decision is wrong then you beat yourself up about it until you’ve forgotten what it even was in the first place. Any idea I had of being blooming and beautiful in late pregnancy was soon quashed as the reality was just fatness, everywhere, I lost my knees, my toes and my ankles by 30 wks and my skin was a kind of greyish blue due to the lack of sleep! I think my slow waddle was more of a crawl by the end of it! 

Luckily, I like to think by way of compensation, I was blessed with a pretty good labour. If you overlook the fact that I was tripping off my nut on gas and air (yes, Norman Cook was definitely in the room playing rock-a-rock-a-rocka DJ and the midwife absolutely was really a clown and conspiring against me and no, I did not try and roll over on top of the precious pipe, whilst attached to a drip and fetal heart monitor when I heard them say they needed to take it away as I’d had too much, and I really didn’t have a full blown discussion with my poor midwife about the fact that I needed a big poo and no, it wasn’t my baby), it was as good as it can get by my reckoning, n.b. to anyone reading who may not yet have been blessed with the pleasure of childbirth, it really, truly does feel like you’re poo’ing a concrete net ball, honestly, but once you’ve accepted that reality, its relatively straight forward really. You just have to be prepared for the most excruciating splitting pain you’ll have ever been through in your life, obviously, I mean just look at the size of what you need to squeeze through that small space, but after all that, its over! And the bath and tea and toast you’ll have after that will truly be the best you’ve ever had!

And then suddenly, you’re completely and totally responsible for this tiny, completely dependant human that you love more than you ever thought possible, and realise that despite all the pre-natal classes, books and advice, you literally have no fookin idea what you’re doing with her…

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