A letter to my pregnant self: put down the birthing trainer.
By: Lisa Key
Tags: Motherhood, UK, Birth, Humour, Baby

There are women in this world, apparently, who don’t even know they’re pregnant until they’re three or four months gone. They get up off the toilet one day and think — Hello, these jeans are a bit tight. Hasn’t it been quite a while since… Oh shit. And that’s how they find out. There are women who breeze through pregnancy like it’s a mild cold, keeping up their HIIT workouts and punishing work schedules the whole time, and popping out their offspring at the end with little more than a cough. There are labouring mothers who wave away the gas-and-air, who sip a herbal tea between contractions and say — Honestly, I know there’s a watermelon trying to demonstrate the unstoppable force paradox against my pelvic floor right now, but it just doesn’t hurt that much.

Well, I’ll tell you for nowt: I wasn’t one of those. Pregnancy came at me like a ton of bricks with a score to settle. I had brutal morning sickness and headaches; I was persistently exhausted. I didn’t breeze, I wallowed; my only high-intensity encounters were with back episodes of Escape to the Chateau and family sized boxes of McNuggets. Not for me the mysterious tightening of jeans, I was at the opposite end of the spectrum, and knew I was pregnant from the moment I passed Go, several days before a missed period even prompted me to take the test.

The upshot, if there can be an upshot to 40 weeks of worry that your baby is trying to eat you from the inside out, was that I had plenty of time to prepare. Pregnant-me prepared for motherhood like it was an exam. She made spreadsheets and lists, she researched countless products. She read What To Expect from beginning to end, she even started reading the appendix — an alphabetised catalogue of everything that might go wrong during labour — and had reached the letter I (incompetent cervix. Yikes) when her partner took the book away and hid it.

Pregnant-me paid a significant sum of money to go to NCT classes, where — instead of learning how to change a nappy and give a baby a bath, as she had hoped — she was coerced into six unwanted and excruciating sessions of group therapy, and forced to sit around in a circle with several other couples discussing such topics as how they would keep the romance alive in their relationships after the babies were born. (Top tip from our course leader: if you can’t go out for dinner any more, consider ordering a takeaway. I couldn’t help but feel that some of the original aims of the Natural Childbirth Trust had been lost.)

But Pregnant-me didn’t do too badly, overall. She drew the correct conclusion about TENS machines (pointless) and prams (get the one that looks like a collaboration between Mary Poppins and Dyson if you want, but if you can’t fold the thing up and put it into the boot of your own car without punching a bystander in the face, you’ve failed). She did not, contrary to forceful urgings from the aforementioned NCT lady, pack a scented candle and a couple of soft furnishings from home in her hospital bag, in order that her child might enter the world in an atmosphere of yogic bliss. (’That lot!’ a frustrated midwife said to me when I was actually in labour, and mentioned this instruction. ‘If one more woman tries to bring an open flame into this hospital…’).

Pregnant-me had a couple of false starts, sure. If I could, I would confiscate her credit card as she tries to pay £60 plus postage for the Aniball birthing trainer, a device designed in the Czech Republic, by people who were surely seeking to answer the question: what actually happens if you crossbreed a party balloon with a rubber dildo, and then whack a hand operated pump on the end of it? ‘My dear,’ I would say to the beached whale wearing my face that languishes on the sofa, phone-in-hand, looking for ways to spend all the money she’s saving on tequila shots and surge priced Ubers. ‘Put the Mastercard down. Do not try to prepare your vagina for delivery using an inflatable approximation of a baby’s head. Do not go into the bathroom each night with gritted teeth, think of England, and birth the Aniball onto the mat, while the father of your unborn hovers nervously outside and asks if he can get you anything. You will have an emergency c-section. Your vagina, for better or worse, will not come into it. Your vagina will stand on the sidelines and sulk, like a Premier League substitute who, after warming up, is told to go back to the bench — he’s not going to play after all.’

Of course, it’s too late for that now. It’s too late to tell Pregnant-me not to bother with that 90 minute breastfeeding workshop, that breastfeeding is far from a theoretical subject, and must be learned on the job. Trying to teach yourself to breastfeed without — if you’ll pardon my French — a tit full of milk and a baby to go with it, is like trying to teach yourself to water-ski in a car park with a Transit van and a skateboard. You’re only going to get so far.

What else would I say to my formerly spherical self, as the weeks and months that separate us become an entire year, and carry on going? She will not grow old as we that are new parents grow old, she’s trapped in time, paging through Amazon reviews of bedside cribs like they’re the Da Vinci Code and fretting about the possible incompetence of her cervix. Maybe I would tell her to forget about those Sundays sacrificed in the church of Christ the Hungover — whole days when the curtains would stay closed, when only the TV and the Deliveroo driver were allowed to enter her kingdom of peace. Those days are gone, I tell her, as she gapes at me in horror, but don’t worry. I know this sounds insane, but you won’t miss them. You’ll wonder that you ever needed them in the first place, not because you’re more resilient to pain that you were before, but because you’ve forgotten what a proper hangover even feels like. When you’re a mum, you will share a single bottle of Sauv with a friend over dinner and feel like a character from Trainspotting. You will cackle at your own wanton hedonism as you write a message to your baby father afterwards to tell him you’re ‘going for a cocktail’, and to hell with the darn consequences, and be disappointed when he replies a minute later with: ‘That’s fine babe. It’s twenty to nine?’

Right now, I know, you’re looking forward more than anything to the day the umbilical cord is severed, and your blood alcohol level is no longer shared with an innocent. You think that, within a matter of weeks, you’ll be back in one of those dark and sweaty warehouses you used to like so much, competing against your best pals to reach the highest score on The Depravity Standard, while someone else (don’t mind who) looks after the child. But you won’t. The umbilical cord, I’m afraid to tell you, was nothing, compared to the web of emotional attachments that will spring up in its place once the baby is born. These are the ties that will drag you back to your daughter every time you step away from her for more than a few seconds; every time someone plucks her out of your arms at a barbecue, wedding or family occasion under the ruse of giving you a break (I’ll show you a break, you’ll think, smiling sedately as if you are the Virgin Mary herself, if you don’t give me back my fucking baby); that will light up like a string of fairy lights when you look at her, even when she’s not doing anything — when she’s just sitting there in the supermarket trolley burbling nonsense to herself, or eating baked beans one-by-one with single-minded concentration, or snuffling contentedly as she drops off to sleep with a handful of your hair clasped in her fat little hand.

No book or class in the world can prepare you for the way it will feel. The web will wind itself around you from the moment the Bundle picks her head up off your chest in the hospital and gives you a look that says: ‘Mum, is it? You look terrible mate! Come on then, give me a cuddle’; its threads will thicken as she grows from a vacant, blinking swaddle-full of goo into a sentient creature; as she decides that the blender is a sworn enemy but the washer-dryer a cherished friend; that cheesy pasta is a rare delicacy and orange segments are not for eating but for hurling at the fridge; as she figures out who she is and what she likes; what makes her squeal with laughter and what makes her flap her arms with rage; as she crawls to the mirror to lick her reflection with unconcealed delight, then busily sets about the task of emptying the laundry basket and scattering the socks around the room. Other people will say — ‘Isn’t she amazing, she changes so fast’ — but to you it’s not the changes that are amazing, it’s the way she never really changes that takes you by surprise, that everything she would turn out to be was wrapped up in that first look, in those first few minutes under the blue canopy of the operating theatre as the doctors rushed around. Wriggling on your chest, she didn’t cry, she seemed pretty much unfazed by the whole debacle, stretching her fingers and squeaking with an expression of stoical bemusement, curious to see what would happen next. For months you’d been saying ‘I can’t wait to meet her’, but now she was here, it felt like you already had, and this probably sounds crazy, but you will come to wonder if she’s always been there, somehow, waiting in the wings; if you carried her with you long before you were pregnant, before you even knew that you wanted her, even in the days when you believed you might never have her and be happy, she was there; and maybe that’s the reason why every time her eyes catch yours it’s the first time again, in a lot of ways, and you think: of course, it’s you. I’ve known you all along.