Giving birth is bloody awful, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying to you, or themselves, or most probably both. Arguably, it’s all worth it in the end, and our brains are made to help us forget just how awful the whole thing was, but that’s just as well, really, because otherwise no one wouldeverdo it twice. But don’t be fooled: in the moment it’s simply the most dreadful, painful, endlessly excruciating thing most women will ever have to live through.
Natural births were trending by the early nineties and, thanks to Thatcher’s cutbacks, NHS resources were stretched. So I was repeatedly asked just how much medical involvement I actually wanted. Doctors asked me this; nurses asked me this; friends asked me this. Everyone seemed to be hoping I’d say, ‘Oh, it’s fine, I’ll just get some evening primrose oil or whatever and sort it myself.’ Shelley, who since Billy’s disappearance I was seeing again, seriously wanted me to have it in a paddling pool in our lounge. ‘We could film it all on Dad’s camcorder,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t that be great?’
But I wasn’t having any of it. Madonna might like to mix up the pain and the pleasure, but pain wasn’t my thing at all. I wanted doctors and nurses and drugs, lots of drugs – all the drugs – and I wasn’t embarrassed to say so repeatedly as the months went by.
Naively, I’d assumed this would mean my birth would be painless. I mean, I understood it would beuncomfortable, but the year was 1991, after all. We had shuttles flying to space stations and home computers and video games and carphones… Surely all those clever scientists had managed to solve something as everyday as the pain of having a baby.
But whether all themenwho dominate science simply hadn’t been that interested in what women go through in order to keep the species going, or whether the team in Margate hospital were just extra-stingy with their medication, the result was that, 1991 or not, it really,reallyhurt.
Eventually, after hours and hours andhoursof snotty weeping and sweating and screaming at people to ‘do something’, they finally gave me an epidural, and almost immediately the whole nightmare sailed off over the horizon. I remember sinking into a soft, warm sea of pain-free exhausted nothingness and being furious about the fact they hadn’t done it twelve hours earlier.
Rob did his best to be present at the birth. He actually seemed to think I might let him watch a baby, an actual, massive baby, push its way out of my fanny, I mean,as if!I had to get a nurse to eject him from the room so that in the end it was just me and Mum present for the greatest show on Earth.
Once it was over – something which, thanks to sheer exhaustion and the epidural, I was only vaguely aware of – they wiped her clean and handed her to me, and, oh my God, I was shocked at how beautiful she was. That’s the moment you forget the pain. It happens pretty quickly.
In films people always seem to be worried there’ll be something major wrong with the baby – missing arms or legs or what-have-you – but I’d believed the gynaecologist when she’d told me my baby would be fine. No, what I’d been worried about was having one of those ugly babies, the ones that look like they’ve popped out of a horror film.
Trudy Rogers – a friend of Shelley’s who lived in the Arlington flats – had given birth to a baby who looked like Shane MacGowan. Actually, it was worse even than that. He was so wrinkly and wizened that he looked how you might imagine Shane MacGowan’sgrandfather.
We’d all told her he was beautiful – as you do – something Trudy must have realised was a lie. And then we’d all laughed ourselves silly about it as we walked home. So I knew that ugly babies could happen. They could even happen to pretty girls like Trudy. And, superficial as it might sound, that was the terror I obsessed over.
But, like I say, even straight from the oven Lucy was a stunner, and I was so relieved I burst into tears. Sometimes I’d have the beginning of a thought, wonderingwhyLucy was sostunningly pretty and who, if anyone, she looked like, but I’d manage to cut that thought process short every time. It really was best not to go there.
Rob was our first visitor. He’d been waiting in the lobby all night.
‘She looks like Betty Boop,’ he said, and, with her little wisp of hair and her big eyes, I knew exactly what he meant. He bopped her on the nose and said, ‘Hello, Betty Boop.’
‘It’s Lucy, actually,’ I told him.
He nodded. ‘Cool,’ he said. ‘I like it.’ Then, ‘Hello, Lucy Boop.’ He glanced over at me with tears in his eyes. ‘You must feel so proud,’ he said. ‘I know I do.’
I started to smile at this but then my smile slipped into a frown. Something about what he’d said troubled me but I was so shattered it took me a moment to figure it out.
‘Rob,’ I said. ‘You’re not to… you know…’
He frowned at me and gave a tiny shake of his head.
‘… to claim this,’ I finally said. It sounded cruel, saying it out loud, but I felt it needed to be done. ‘Don’t start claiming her as your own. We’re not a couple here and you know we don’t know—’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Rob said, interrupting me. ‘Sure. I know all that.’
‘So don’t go telling people, all right?’ I was imagining him calling round the houses telling everyone he was a dad.
‘Telling people?’ he repeated. ‘Of course I’m going totellpeople.’
‘Sure, but I mean, not like you’re the father,’ I said, thinking it sounded even crueller. ‘Don’t go phoning all your mates. Don’t go announcing it to your parents, either.’
Rob snorted at that. ‘Likethat’sgonna happen…’ he said.
‘Oh,’ I said, a little surprised. I’d have hated it if he’d said hewasgoing to tell them, or, worse, that he already had. But I was also quite shocked that he had no desire to.
‘Is it bad?’ I asked. ‘With your folks, I mean. Have you fallen out big-time?’
‘Yeah, something like that,’ Rob said. He’d stopped looking at me and returned to staring at Lucy in her cot.
‘Whatdid you fall out about?’ I asked. ‘I don’t think you ever told me.’
‘Yeah, I’d rather not talk about them, right now,’ Rob said, still without even looking at me. ‘I’d rather talk about lovely Lucy Boop here if it’s all the same to you.’
