Bonkers
Following the wedding and honeymoon, I landed myself a marketing job in Geneva, earning more money than I’d ever earned or could earn back in the UK. I somehow managed to convince my employer that I should only work four days a week (and one of those from home), and, not surprisingly, we were loving life thanks to the much-coveted disposable income. If it helps, I now want to run back in time and throttle my old self for thinking this type of life and financial freedom would go on forever, even after having babies – pah, fool! So there we were, happily married, with good jobs and living in a beautiful place. It was inevitable that sooner or later talk of tiny humans started to pop up.
GETTING PREGNANT
We’d been really open about both wanting a family from pretty early on, and knew that once we were married we’d want a family of our own. However, it was my hubby who was the first one to suggest that we actively stopped not trying for a baby. I still remember where we were when he first said that he thought it was time: a karaoke bar. We were on a six-week trip to Vietnam – our postponed honeymoon that I’d also managed to wangle before starting my new job (seriously, I love Geneva) – drinking way too many two-for-one mojitos and about to be taken to a club by a member of the Vietnam mafia and his security guards. Yes, I said mafia! #bloodyidiots (us, not the mafia).
I turned to him like he was a loon, looking at where we were right then and trying to imagine our life with a baby in it, and told him I wasn’t sure. (No shit Sherlock! You were about to go clubbing with the mafia. How the hell was a tiny human going to fit into those plans?) Life-changing conversation over, we then proceeded to do the final shot, sing one last rendition of Jessie J’s ‘Price Tag’ (It’s all about the money money money) and went clubbing with our well-connected new friends.
However, after he had planted the reality of a baby in my mind (and the mother of all hangovers had worn off), it grew from a ridiculous idea to an exciting butterfly in my tummy that developed into something we both wanted – and we started not not trying for the rest of the trip. I found myself googling ‘ovulation calculators’ from our dodgy hotel in Ho Chi Min City whilst planning our next stopover, and daydreaming of going home pregnant and ready, after six weeks of adventures, to start the next chapter of our lives (because life is always that textbook, right?).
The idea of being a mum – of going from the two of us to the three of us – went from being a drunken conversation to something I couldn’t stop thinking about.
With a mix of naivety and a sprinkle of pre-baby arrogance, I believed that deciding to have a baby meant that we would start trying and, bam, we would be pregnant. I blame the crap sex education we received in Year 9. You see, when us girls are growing up, we are full of fear that we only have to see an erect penis and we will be with child. That unprotected sex leads us on a one-way street to either STDs or pregnancy (both terrifying destinations aged 16). And we grow up safe in the knowledge that one day when we decide, we will become mothers to deliciously chubby and healthy tiny humans and continue to have as many as we want until we decide to call time on our ovaries once we’ve reached our perfect number of children.
What we are not told is that in fact there is only a small window of opportunity each month to get pregnant. That our biology and cycles have to be aligned to ensure it’s possible for us to get pregnant. That even once we become pregnant the journey our tiny human has to complete to finally end up safe, healthy and in our arms can be so precarious that some don’t make it or if they do are not able to stay with us for long. We don’t realise that our ovaries may have already called time on us, long before we even decided we are ready to become a mum. It’s bloody terrifying to realise that something we are programmed to believe is our natural right as a woman – to grow and bring a tiny human into this world – may not be our right after all. That our bodies, despite being in good physical condition, are not able to produce the one thing we want most in the world.
So back to me and my foolish notion that we would get pregnant purely because we were on our honeymoon and I was off the pill. I missed a period a couple of weeks before coming back from the trip, we got overly excited – only to do a test and taste the first taste of disappointment, a taste with a strength that amazed us. A few weeks earlier, we hadn’t even known we wanted a baby. Now, we’d spoken about it, and it was all we wanted. We ended up shrugging this off and calmly chastising ourselves for thinking it would have happened so quickly, but also being happy that it proved to us without a shadow of a doubt how much we wanted this little person in our lives.
This calm nonchalance was all well and good at the start. However, once the months started to tick by, without a blue line making an appearance, we started to worry. We both told each other it was crazy; it had only been a few months and we knew rationally that it could take up to a year or longer. But we still couldn’t stop the little niggling of fear of ‘What if it isn’t going to happen for us?’ and ‘What if there is something wrong with one of us?’.
I’d heard about ovulation sticks from family and friends, but I didn’t know if this was the right way to go about things or just let things happen naturally. This worry was compounded by a remark someone said to me when we were talking about couples ‘actively trying’ for a baby and using these sticks to help them know the best time to be having sex: ‘Oh, I would hate to do that. To be one of those couples who have to have sex even if they don’t want to, just to have a baby. I’d much rather just go with the flow and see what happens.’
My response to this?
BULLSHIT!
Give yourself a couple of months of ‘just seeing what happens’ and, when nothing does, of feeling the anxiety start to build along with the fear that it may not ‘just happen’ for you, that you may not be lucky enough to have the baby you’ve been dreaming about. Give yourself a couple of months of that and then tell me what you think about increasing your chances of conceiving by knowing the optimum time to get pregnant thanks to weeing on a stick? Anyone who has ever tried for a baby knows that once you get a few failed months under your unfastened chastity belt you will try ANYTHING to get with child – from having sex on the smiley days even when you are feeling more knackered than turned on to trying more ‘effective’ positions and the waiting with yours leg in the air after having sex. Literally ANYTHING. And you know what? So, you should. There is no shame in it, nothing to feel embarrassed or unnatural about trying anything you can to get pregnant, even peeing on a stick.
Therefore, never feel ashamed or embarrassed about whatever route you take to being able to bring your tiny human into this world – and, most importantly, never feel judged on it. Never!
FINDING OUT WE WERE PREGNANT
So, these Bad Boy ovulation sticks worked a treat and after a couple of months of using them along with every other Old Wives’ trick in the book, we were officially in the club. However, thanks to me being crap at calculating my cycle dates – or, if I’m honest, anything mathematical (sorry, Mr Warton, all that GCSE maths tuition never really stuck!) – I didn’t realise I was late until almost a week afterwards! Oh yes, thanks to me miscounting the days on my work calendar, I was nearly a week late, and the smell of coffee (hard to escape when working in an office in Geneva because it runs through the veins of these people) was making me want to throw up during every meeting. In true Swiss fashion, we had a lot of meetings and a lot of coffee.
So, there I was at my desk in Geneva, when it struck me that I might have miscalculated. I started to recount the days and yes, yes, divvy here had made a mistake. My stomach somersaulted (not just because of the reek of coffee) as I dared to let myself believe that I might have a little person already growing inside me. I reached for my phone and called my hubby straightaway.
‘I think I’m five days late.’
He was so excited, and we both couldn’t wait to get home so we could do the test together. So there we were, hours later, at home surrounded by a wide-grinned bubble of nervous energy wanting it so much to be true. Not quite believing it could be and trying to hold onto our heads and our hearts in case the lines did not appear – or, in the case of our French digital Clear Blue test, the word enceinte did not appear.
It was the longest few minutes of our lives. I did the test, saw the timer start and was so scared to keep looking at it that we placed it on the coffee table, out of sight and out of reach, and sat on the sofa together like two bunnies in the headlights, grinning and giggling at each other like loons.
‘Shall we look?’
‘No, it won’t have worked yet.’
‘The timer’s still going.’
‘Stop looking.’
‘OK.’
‘Stop peeking at it, I can see you looking, come and sit back down.’
‘Oh my God, do you think we could be?’
‘I don’t know, do you?’
‘What if it’s positive, can you imagine?’
More grinning like loons.
‘Do you feel like you are?’
‘Yes. No. Oh God, I don’t know!’
‘Shit, we really could be pregnant!’
Fingers crossed harder than ever before.
‘Right, time’s up. What should we do?’
‘You look.’
‘No, you look.’
‘OK.’
‘Wait! Let’s look together.’
‘OK.’
And there it was for the world to see: Enceinte – 3–4 semaines.
We were pregnant. We were three to four weeks pregnant. It had only bloody worked!
We both stood in the middle of our lounge, clutching the test stick, clutching each other and crying tears of disbelief and happiness.
We couldn’t stop staring at each other in wide-eyed disbelief, fast calculating the due date to be sometime in late January, hugging each other, minds blown that there were now three of us sat together on the sofa, and wondering: When would I start showing? When we should go to the doctor? Would it be a boy or a girl? So many questions, so many emotions, so many exciting times ahead of us. A whole new world. A world we had no idea about.
Those first moments finding out we were going to be parents, that we were going to bring another being into the world, reminded me of how I feel when looking into the vastness of the night sky, so enormous, so unexplainable and breathtakingly beautiful. We were staring into the face of a miracle no words or thoughts could explain or even begin to contain.
So what do you do when faced with such a miracle? Well, if you’re greedy beggars like us, you get your asses out for a slap-up mountain dinner, of course! So, we packed ourselves and our new beautiful little secret into the car and went to a remote mountainside restaurant, where we were guaranteed not to bump into anyone we knew (word travels fast in a mountain village) and were therefore able to talk freely about our new little person and start making plans for our future as a family of three.
BRING IT ON!
CHAPTER 3
PREGNANT AND BLOOMING – (AKA BLOOMING DEMONIC, STARVING AND WILLING TO KILL FOR A CHEESE BURGER AND A FULL-FAT COKE)
Those weeks when we carried around our secret really were magical. Just the two of us, feeling excited and special, sharing the baby whilst the rest of the world was unawares. We went to the doctor and he assigned us a gynaecologist (down the mountain). We already knew of him thanks to his God-like status; he had delivered most of the babies in our village. My mates and I used to joke about how the same man had seen all our fannies! Bit crude maybe, but hey, when you’re pregnant and not drinking you have to get your kicks somewhere right?
MORNING SICKNESS – AKA FEELING CONSTANTLY HUNGOVER MINUS THE FUN OF GETTING INAPPROPRIATELY SMASHED!
Boy, oh boy, do we need these kicks when the all-day, ‘When is this going to end?’ morning sickness kicks in.
Oh yes, along came the seven weeks pregnant mark, bringing its stomach-turning mate with him, and so ensued six weeks of me feeling worse than I did the morning after drinking my body weight in Jaegar with the Vietnamese mafia. Oh and not to forget me looking radiant and blooming aka stuffing my face with Fizzy Haribo, Cheese Burgers and full fat Coke under a blanket on the sofa whenever I got the chance.
God, it was hell (not the stuffing my face obvs that was pretty, darn special). The sickness. Ugghhhh! My early pregnancy days consisted of peeling myself out of bed and wanting to puke or crumble into smithereens of exhaustion (usually both). And then having to get my sorry-for-myself ass ready to face the long and winding drive down the mountain and then across the border into Switzerland. All whilst switching between wanting to suck the life out of orange segments to wanting to puke up in the plastic carrier bag I now carried as a staple accessory on the passenger seat.
So, as you can imagine the last thing I felt at nine weeks pregnant was sociable! And I so wish someone at the time had told me it was OK to want to cocoon myself away from the world, to be able to come home, put on my fat bum pants and flake – after a day of fooling the rest of the outside world that I was feeling my usual normal self. If you are currently pregnant and wanting to do nothing more than sit on your gorgeous pregnant bottom and chill out, then guess what? You can! Now, go get your stretchy telly pants on, get horizontal and enjoy every moment of it, my lovely.
I was not prepared mentally for the level of emotions and exhaustion I felt. I had brought into the ‘I’m not sick, I’m just pregnant’ malarkey and was determined to carry on as normal despite just wanting to rest. No one had told me to ease off the pressure, to allow myself to be pregnant and tired and to know that this is OK. This is normal.
Without this little nugget of advice, my hubby had to learn the hard way of what it is like to cross swords with a knackered creator of human life.
One evening, I was feeling like total and utter dog turd thanks to the morning sickness. I’d spent the day at work pretending I was on top of my game to all my work colleagues whilst taking sneaky naps in the staff loos. I’d finally made it home after a particularly stomach-churning and exhausting drive home up the winding mountain roads, which had me dry-retching at every bend like a rabid dog. I walked into the house desperate to get into my PJs and onto the sofa, bury my face into my standard bag of Haribo, when my darling hubby reminded me that, there were other plans afoot: I now had to get my glad rags on because we were leaving in ten minutes to go for dinner with friends.
WTF?
I had no words. Literally not even one bloody syllable.
However, I did have huge, ugly, face-distorting, snot-dripping sobs, and proceeded to soak him, the kitchen floor and anything within three feet of me with them.
The look on my hubby’s face was priceless. Like some weird bugeyed, snot-a-whalling creature had just slithered her way in, pretending to be his wife. (He had no idea what was yet to come!)
Bewildered and fearing for his life, he dared to approach and try to convince me that it would be a good and enjoyable thing to go out for dinner with our friends.
He might as well have been inviting me to dine with Satan himself whilst sat on a pile of upturned drawing pins.
Now obviously, he was not growing body parts, so he couldn’t quite get his head around either my hysterics or the levels of unadulterated exhaustion and irrationality. As far as he was concerned, I had just finished work for the week and we could now look forward to a lovely night with our friends. However, for knackered and pregnant me, it was the end of my sofa-obsessed world. I’d driven to and from a different country to get to work, whilst trying not to puke my guts up on the mountainside or at the border control. Then I’d faced a long day of meetings talking about internal ad campaigns, meeting agendas and newsletters; endured a team meeting where everyone stank of coffee and fags; listened until my brain hurt trying to fathom out what everyone was saying in their lightning speed French – all whilst wanting to crawl under my desk, puke in the plant pot and take a nap on my colleague Jean-Luc’s discarded and very expensive laptop bag. I’d kept up the farcical charade that all was well, I was ‘fine’, on top of the world and my job.
Now the thought of having to continue the pretence and lie to my good friends, to desperately think of a believable excuse as to why I was not drinking my usual Friday night gallon of vin blanc whilst watching everyone else get pissed – when all I wanted to do was put on my elasticated PJ bottoms, curl up under a blanket and stuff my face with anything that would stop this nausea – was all just too much for this pregnant lady to take.
After more sobbing and some demonic grunts from my good self, the pregnancy penny finally dropped and my hubby realised that holy hell, he was actually talking to his wife who was now pregnant, overtired, overemotional and wanting to puke and then sleep for a billion years. With his life hanging in the balance, he got the message, tucked me up on the sofa and went to dinner armed with apologies and excuses for me not being able to make it. The moral of this story? Listen to yourself and do what’s best for you. You ARE allowed.
PREGNANCY CAN BE BLOODY SCARY
All was going well with my pregnancy. I felt like dog turd most of the time, but I’d read on one of the baby websites now bombarding me with emails, that it was a good sign to feel so ill. Then, at around seven weeks, we had the shock of our lives: I noticed I was bleeding. I felt sick and devastated, immediately thinking the worst. We phoned our doctor, who reassured us that this can be normal at this stage, but we wanted to go into hospital just to be on the safe side. The hospital was an hour away down the mountain (I was now beginning to curse the fact we were so far away!) and it became one of the longest drives of our lives. We drove most of the way in silence, not daring to voice our fears that the little person we had been secretly planning and celebrating was being taken away from us. We tried to fill that hour with reassuring words, but the fear in the air of our car was palpable.
Once we got to the hospital and were ushered into our room, the nurse explained she was going to do a scan and see if she could find a heartbeat. I felt sick, panicked and couldn’t dare let my mind wonder: What if she can’t?
They were long and terrifying minutes as she smothered my unpregnant-looking tummy with cold jelly and then proceeded to look for the baby and any sign of a tiny heart beat. She assured us that she was having trouble finding it only because the pregnancy was so early. Then she pressed down harder and bingo, she found it! We were relieved for a millisecond – until she informed us that she was worried that it was very faint and told us that we’d have to come back in a week’s time.
Faint? What the hell did that mean? Did she know something we didn’t and was holding out on us? Was there something wrong and we were going to find out the full extent of how wrong at the next scan? I wanted to scream at her for not giving us the reassurance that everything was OK! I knew that it wasn’t her fault and that she had to be as matter-of-fact as possible with us, but I could have swung at her for being so black and white and unemotional with us.
So, relieved and worried sick all at the same time, we left the hospital and somehow got through the next week, worrying that any little twinge meant something sinister – and worrying even more if I didn’t feel as sick as I thought I should be or had been a few days prior. Thankfully one week and another scan later we got the news we had been longing for: so far, all was OK with our baby and the heartbeat was now normal for the time in its pregnancy. We left the hospital clutching the scan picture of our alien-like but perfectly normal tiny human and cried with relief and happiness all the way back up the mountain. Now, we thought, we could get on with the rest of the pregnancy, knowing the baby was healthy.
However, the night before our twelve-week scan, I started to bleed heavily. This made our previous scare seem like nothing. It was dinnertime when it happened, and in despair and blind panic we called the hospital to see what we should do. ‘Nothing’ was their pragmatic, black and white response. I was advised to stay where I was, to take it easy, and monitor the bleeding – and, if I started to get severe pains, to go straight in. The harsh and heartbreaking reality was that if I was having a miscarriage, then medically there was nothing they could do to stop it. We would have no choice but to let nature run its course. So, we did. I sat there numb, with my feet up on a cushion (thinking this would help keep the baby where it should be), not daring to move, just waiting to see what happened. Since we had our twelve-week scan booked for the following day, I knew I just had to sit tight, keep calm and hope beyond hope that everything was going to be OK.
We arrived the next morning, grim-faced, racked with anxiety and fearing the worst – and got to see why our gynaecologist was held in such God-like esteem. As soon as we told him what had happened the night before, he cut our conversations short and whisked me into the scan room. Before I knew what was happening or had any time to worry further, he had the probe on my tummy and a heartbeat booming out on high volume around the room.
‘C’est bon!’ – ‘It’s fine’
I could have French kissed that French man right there and then in front of my hubby and my unborn child. Happy, relieved, over the moon – none of that comes even close to the delight that I felt. And this wasn’t only to do with the obvious and overwhelming relief that our baby was OK and had survived another scare, but also the way in which he dealt with the whole situation. No messing about, no long lingering wait to find the heartbeat, no doubt-filled seconds of dread. Just bang, boom, everything fine!
Our tiny human was only twelve weeks in creation and was already causing heart-stopping drama and keeping us well and truly on our toes. We were soon to find out this would follow us into later pregnancy and out into the real world. (More of this little beauty later!)
IT’S NOT ‘C’EST BON’ FOR EVERYONE
I hope you don’t mind, but I’d like to take a little pause here to pay respect to those mums and dads who don’t get the news they are longing to hear about their tiny humans. Who don’t get to feel the relief the words ‘everything’s normal’ brings. Whose scares are not just scares but are instead warning signs that something is terribly wrong or that their little person is having to leave them. I want to honour all the precious tiny humans who are no longer with us, and show my love and respect to all the mums, dads and families who have suffered.
** Anyone needing support after going through child bereavement please see the list of support services detailed in the back of the book on page 236
TRYING AND FAILING TO KEEP UP THE ‘I’M NOT PREGNANT!’ CHARADE!
I think one of the most exhausting things when you first become pregnant (alongside the raging hormones and zapping of energy due to your body performing its very own hidden miracle) is the whole bloody effort of keeping it hidden from your nearest and dearest. I have no idea what I was thinking when I concocted my own tall tales of ‘I’m not pregnant bullshit’, but wow, they were pretty special.
I took my big pregnancy cover-up to epic proportions. You see, not quite satisfied with the bog standard and tried-and-tested cover-ups used by millions of pregnant ladies before me – ‘I’m on antibiotics’, ‘I’m on a detox’, ‘I’m the designated driver’ etc., etc. – I instead concocted such a ridiculous tale that not even I was convinced by it. Now, before we carry on with this, I’m going to apologise to you right now for how much you are going to cringe throughout the next section and also question (probably not for the first or the last time) how much level of crazy and downright idiotic one person can be. Read on, my friend, read on …