On any given day, either the baby gets a clean outfit, or I do.
What to expect when you interact with other humans
It’s so rare that some ‘humorous’ ‘lifestyle’ piece engages me at all, let alone makes me feel a burning wrath. But the Guardian Weekend extract from Hadley Freeman’s new book made me want to cry all of the tears. I don’t really have any strong feelings on her writing either way: sometimes her column is one of those ‘can’t believe I spent that time I’ll never get back reading this’, other times it’s sharp, witty and political.
The Guardian’s extract ranges from the former with ‘How to cheer up your friend who is depressed about being single without lying to them, patronising them or making them feel even worse’, which basically assumes that either a) all of her readers are 12 years old, or b) none of her readers have ever had a human relationship before, through to the latter, with ‘Talking about eating disorders without using a single photo of Kate Moss’, which is moving, pointed and angry. Despite her writing that ‘I don’t believe personal experience imbues one with expertise’ and that she has ‘no interest in contributing to that pile [of eating disorder memoirs]’, this section is fascinating; you can tell she actually feels something here, something that has moved and shaped and influenced her, not just something she’s typing to up her word count.
Then we’re fully into the enragement zone. ‘What to expect when your friends are expecting’. In summary (and I really am not being unfair here – this is what she says will happen):
1. After shagging, your friends will have a ‘sleep-depriving, bank-account-emptying bundle of joy’
2. Once the pregnancy is announced, you will ‘learn, in the most extraordinary detail, tales of your friends’ sex lives’
3. The last month of your friend’s pregnancy will be ‘the Gross-Out Stage’, as she will now be so accustomed to simply being ‘treated as a baby pod’ that she will now thoughtlessly use words and phrases to you like ‘mucus plug’, ‘leakage’, ‘dilate’ and ‘vaginal wall’
4. Your friend, having just given birth, will now ‘feel the need to describe the childbirth in varying amounts of detail’
5. Your friend – previously source of ‘chatty cups of tea and many ranting glasses of wine – will become a ‘mewling creature’, ‘covered in babysick’ and ‘living only from feed to feed, nap to nap’ – see what she did there? Your friend is now like a baby herself! Hahahhaha!
6. The only socialisation you now have with your friend is buying their child ridiculously expensive Petit Bateau outfits
7. You will now be so ‘indoctrinated with the thought that ringing a doorbell causes chaos’ that you text your own parents when you’re standing outside their house!
8. You can’t hope for a proper conversation – even if it seems like they’re listening, they’re actually only capable of wondering ‘has he swallowed a pound coin?! Has he stuck his fingers in a plug socket?!’
9. You’ll feel bad because your hilarious child-free adventures are ultimately empty compared to your friend’s attempt to raise a human
10. If they have a second child, don’t expect to hear from them for ‘at least the next five years!’
I’m actually shaking with anger right now. What a fucking load of toxic garbage. It’s exactly this kind of faux-casual ‘God, having kids wrecks your life, doesn’t it!’ rubbish that makes it really hard for (particularly, but not exclusively) women to feel like they are allowed to retain their personality after a baby. When I had my first kid, at 26, I slogged my guts out to reassure friends that I wasn’t about to transform into any of these clichés – not, I hasten to add, that you MUST avoid them; you will be tired, and probably covered with sick, and possibly unphased about showing your rack off to a whole tube carriage because, frankly, if you have to feed your baby you couldn’t really give a fuck if a stranger sees your nipple; and there are plenty of friends of friends I hear about who go down this path whole-hog – but I was young/selfish enough to want to keep my personality. I didn’t want to become one of those parents who say proudly ‘I haven’t read a book since I had the baby’, or that never has a night out or night away (bliss!) because The Baby Needs Me, and I was delighted to see that no one treated me differently. No one was tiptoeing around me, and because my friends and I are humans, with some previous experience of human interaction, I was able to gauge who I could tell about the amazing, fantastic, mindblowing and 100% hilarious experience of pushing that baby out, and who wouldn’t give the smallest monkeys about it. They, in turn, could also gauge that I still wanted to hear about their lives, as I always had done, having had a baby rather than a lobotomy. But slog it was to convince them, to begin with, exactly because of pieces like this.
And as the baby got older, yes, I may have had to occasionally tear my eyes from my pals’ to check that no coins were being swallowed, but those without experience of small children may not appreciate what a simple skill this is – I don’t have to graunchingly change gears to do a two-second check about the location of my spawn, nor does my reaching over to pull some blade from their grasp signal my sudden inability to hear and understand what my friend and I are continuing to talk about. It’s like anything that requires two-track multitasking: stirring one pan and checking the other isn’t boiling over, putting laundry in a washing machine and not adding metal kitchen utensils, answering the phone and breathing.
Each of the ten points of listed here vary from completely untrue – if you’ve got a relationship where you talk about your sex lives, why shouldn’t that continue? And if you haven’t, why should that start? I’ve never come across that pregnancy-banging-detail-insistence, hurt as it may make me feel (it doesn’t) – to the frankly juvenile – ugh! My friend’s having a baby and now she wants to talk about VAGINAL WALLS OH MY GOD I NEED SOME BLEACH AND A SCRUBBING BRUSH FOR MY EARS and NOW SHE’S HAD IT AND WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! God, it’s so tiresome. Just grow up. Vagina vagina vagina, etc.
Ultimately, I think what’s entirely missing from this extract is any sense of empathy, either from this nameless, shameless friend, or Hadley Freeman herself. We all have changes in our life, some chosen, some forced on us; some expected, some surprising, in good and bad ways. We lose parents, siblings, partners; we change jobs; we move house, city, country. We stop liking 20/20 on a night out. We start liking table tennis. We change. That is, really, one of the main features of being alive. But the point of these relationships that we build up over our time on earth is that, while it can be an enormous help to have someone who’s been through what you’re going through, it’s not essential. Friends can still love us and support us when their parents are still alive, when they’re still stuck in a job they hate, when they can’t stand our partner. And we can do the same for them. So when there’s yet another article on those life-wrecking babies and the zombie idiots their mothers turn into, I just want to weep. Can’t we all just be a little kinder (she says, having written a 1,300 word blog on this bullshit)? Can’t we all just be a bit more thoughtful? A pregnant shouldn’t have to live in terror of boring those around her with this terrifying, amazing experience they’re going through, and friends-of-pregnants shouldn’t have this pre-emptive idea that they’ve basically lost their friend until the infants fuck off out of the parental home.
So come on. Let’s stop this nonsense. To hugely butcher-phrase Singin’ in the Rain’s Don Lockwood:
Empathy, always empathy.
A tiny voice
Although you mightn’t guess it from the (in)frequency with which this blog is updated, I have ideas for it all the time: weddings, babies, this pregnancy which today feels like it’s been going on for approximately 48 months, the privatisation of the NHS, Thatcher and the funeral, the power of the gun lobby and other lobbyists in the US, Hilary Mantel and just how fantastic she is, excellent friends, great and not great books I’ve been reading, the joy of playlists, even the weather... I have these thoughts, and start writing the blog entry in my head - then I hear a voice. And it says exactly this:
Still.
Back to nesting*.
*dancing to 6 Music, eating cold lamb offcuts. Because maternity leave, yeah?
The Truth about Publication Day
It’s not all bunches of roses and signings at Waterstones, you know. A factual look at a real publication day of a real-life author (me):
6.45am Alarm goes off. Snooze.
6.55am Snooze again.
7.05am Fairly sure by now that someone, somewhere in the flat must be preparing my Publication Day Celebratory Breakfast. Maybe they’re just distracted by bringing in all the bouquets? Hit snooze again.
7.08am Realise that J is on his way to work, and the kids are probably still asleep. The practicality of a four-year-old and a two-year-old conjuring up the breakfast I have in mind seems unlikely, if not dangerous. Finally get up.
7.10am Remember that my mother is also here (to look after the kids today) and am amazed that she hasn’t rustled up a feast. Make us all porridge, which I eat while having an argument about media coverage of benefit claimants with my mother. The children don’t contribute.
8am After filling myself full to the gills with porridge and apple compote (best winter breakfast in the world) realise that the celebratory breakfast is actually with my agent, in town, fairly soon. Frantically start throwing clothes on.
8.30am Quick listen to The Today Programme, just to check whether they’re discussing the groundbreaking and hilarious look at maternity, The Baby Diaries. John Humphrys shows no signs of having to stifle giggles: maybe Evan Davis has been assigned to the coverage. Give up, and decide to finally break out my Liberty print wedge Nike trainers I’ve been feeling guilty about buying since last summer.
9.30am After a sweaty, breakdown-ridden tube ride, meet my agent at the Soho Hotel. Finally. Order one of everything on the menu.
11.30am Remember that my agent has a job she needs to get back to. Release her from ‘breakfast’. Head to Foyles to buy myself a pub day present, and to do some work in their café.
11.45-3pm Write three blog posts and do some work from my paying life. Bump into the lovely Pushkin Press bigwigs. Learn how to pronounce Stefan Zweig’s name, finally, and feel very literary; also a bit tearful at the congratulatory pub day tweets from v nice twitter people, and emails from my publisher. Realise I’ve probably been here longer than most of the staff today, so head off to choose book for myself.
4pm Enjoy moment of clarity: even if I desperately want a new Jonathan Lethem or Edna O'Brien (and I do), if I come home with a new book when we’ve just shipped almost fifteen boxes of them to our various parents’, I might be dining alone tonight. Buy spinach instead.
5pm Home. After spending much of the day writing pieces that were pretty complimentary about my mother, I find that, rather than fixing the toilet, she has in fact re-broken it. She leaves us, with a confused look at my stomach and the words, ‘Are you sure you’re not due until April?’ When I flip the bird at the closing lift doors, I realise my daughter is behind me, and pretend to be scratching something off the lift button.
6.10-7.30pm Cooking with the infants. I’m an excellent cook (though I say so myself because it’s true), but somehow manage to overcook an entire batch of granola and produce a tray of brownies that are dryer than Dorothy Parker. I’m left with the best part of a kilo of burnt porridge oats and some mealy pecan cake. Mutter about Zadie Smith probably not having to deal with this on her pub days.
8pm Kids in bed, we start packing for our half term holiday, while I also cook for us. The menu: fillet steak, dauphinoise potatoes, spinach with nutmeg, mange tout and button mushrooms, all with a peppercorn sauce. Dessert: chocolate mousse. I have cleverly made three mousses, so I can eat the spare one when J goes to work tomorrow.
9pm We eat. J’s made a lovely table, and is delighted by the fact that there’s no limit on the potatoes. Lack of seconds is the price you pay in restaurants for not having to do your own washing up, I suppose. I’ve put Miles Davis on for backing music, but I can’t stop dancing to it. Distracting. We toast The Baby Diaries, check J’s copy has downloaded to his Kindle, then eat in silence for two minutes until our plates are empty.
10-midnight Celebrations are over. I’ve yet to receive my congratulatory telegram from Salman Rushdie, but there’s still so much packing to do and I can’t wait forever.
12.30am Bed. And so ends my second publication day. Good bits: second breakfasts and the kindness of twitter. Bad bits: all that burnt granola. But I’m sure Virginia Woolf went through exactly the same thing.