Her third kid, who has only just got here
Francesca’s Facebook is an absolute thing to behold. There are forty near-identical pictures of Atticus, with a slew of comments underneath each one as though he’s being announced to the world for the very first time. Amazingly,no one seems sick of him, or of Francesca, yet. How many times can a person write ‘Wow, congratulations!’ before wanting to punch themselves in the head? A hell of a lot, is the answer to that.
Francesca tells us online that she is clearly elated, but there’s something in her eyes in these pictures, the heavy lids, that scares me. Fine, it’s a 4 a.m.-feed photo, but the lights in her eyes have gone out. Far from a glow, there’s a paleness to her. Maybe this is what new motherhood is. An ongoing battle between the full heart and a body forever in catch-up.
In between heralding the nascent genius of Atticus Stax, Francesca has also managed to remind us that her oldest, Barnaby, is now a philosopher in the making. There’s not a febrile utterance of his that hasn’t been held to the light and relayed as a gleaming, this-is-good-enough-to-save-mankind profundity. ‘The five-year-old has changed the lyrics of “Barbie Girl” to “Life’s fantastic, my knicks are elastic”,’ she posts. ‘Soon to be top of the charts.’
Overdosed on Francesca, I head over to Brigitte’s Facebook page, which is still untrammelled chaos, and all grainy, badly lit pictures. She looks scuttered in 94.2 per cent of them and I feel strangely jealous. I spy Carrie in one of Brigitte’s pictures, glowing from her four pints of aloe vera juice. So they’re hanging out without me, then. Something soupy makes itself known in my stomach.
In addition to the life-changing magic of aloe vera, Carrie’s Facebook wall is all cushion slogans and ‘Pass this on to five people’ shite. ‘Delete me if you support the Tories,’ she posts but never says in real life, and Lord knows it is tempting. The joy of being able to invent and make yourself up from scratch, I guess. It doesn’t always go the right way.
Days like this I hate Facebook and MySpace, but it is handy for keeping in touch with Jilly, one of my oldest Dublin pals.
‘How’s Londinium? The big smoke?’ she writes. I don’t have the heart to tell her we don’t ever call it that.
‘You know yourself,’ I write back. ‘Loud, busy, takes an hour to get a couple of miles down the road. Black snot.’
‘Gerourofit,’ she writes back. ‘Don’t pretend you’re not living the dream, you and that wonderful hubby of yours.’
I don’t feel like disrobing her of the reality she has built up in her own brain. It’s living the dream all right, except in this airless basement, with a raft of codes I don’t even understand the purpose of, stretched out in front of me every single day like the start of winter, the Dream definitely feels like someone else’s.
4
I can’t stop thinking about the stories the stuff from our bodies can tell.
A drop of blood can reveal if you’re 3 per cent Spanish, or have a secret cousin you never knew about on the other side of the world. Semen can help create a whole other life. Breast milk can keep a person alive. Sweat helps us attract someone, supposedly. Even saliva can tell a story or two about us.
And piss can utterly change your life.
I am googling ‘Do tears carry DNA information?’ while I wait for one line, or two lines. This is how determined I am that it will be a single line, again– I go into the living room to watch a whole episode ofDeal Or No Deal. The contestant has gone and won £300 by the time I remember the test still sitting on the lip of the bath. I go to check it, expecting to see the single red line that would let me get on with the rest of my day.
But the second line is even stronger and redder than the control one. Almost defiant in its redness. I feel the floor wobble beneath me. This is pureAlice in Wonderlandstuff: walking through one door, mainly to see if you can, then turning around to find the door, the way back out, has vanished.
I know I’m meant to feel some sort of euphoria. Yes, we were trying and trying, almost to a point where it was not much more between Johnny and I than chat about mucus and cycles and implantation. And now we have moved from using all the language into a new reality. A whole new place. All that hope has gone and created something.
For a brief, fluttering cicada of a moment, I feel a little bit proud of Johnny and me. But a chaser of something else, a surety that things will never be the same again and maybe that’s not such a good thing, creates a strange aftertaste. What about all the stuff I wanted to do? Would I have ever done it, pregnancy or not?
Something else bears down on me. I have eighteen years, possibly more, of hard, unpaid labour ahead of me. I will probably never have a day without worry ever again. I feel immediately wrecked; so much so that what I once thought would be a euphoric moment becomes a ‘take to the bed’ moment.
It’s a weird brew of feelings, this guilt that I wasn’t more immediately happy at the two lines, and the terror that I’m nowhere near ready for what comes next. What business have I, a person who thinks ungenerous things about almost everyone around her, being in this position? I send annoying baby toys to new parents for kicks. I glare at screechy babies in cafes. What sane world would entrust me with my own one?
The more I think of it, this could well be a very human and understandable reaction to the idea of a screaming, shitting thing entering your life.
In quick succession, I think of the mums on the Goat’s Milk Mile and their glossy, satiating happiness. I think of the other women whose cohort I was in amongst only a few minutes ago. The ones that maybe want this even morethan me, and are denied it month after month, their hopes dashed with a horrid little single line.
I’m still heady with wonderment about how this one moment that happened right afterDeal Or No Dealhas changed everything in my life, when I hear the scrape of Johnny’s key in the front door downstairs.
We may be already married, but this will mean we are truly, definitely, in it for the long haul.
Johnny walks into the bedroom, loosening the tie he absolutely doesn’t have to wear to his trendy tech job. (Again, I don’t know exactly what type of tech job Johnny has. He has explained it time and time again with Job-like patience, but like the offside rule, it refuses to absorb into my brain.)
Despite a tiny part of me telling myself to stay quiet, to find some more time to let this just be something between the baby and me, I find it impossible to hold on to it. Before my head even knows what’s going on, I hand him the pregnancy test, wordlessly.
‘What does that…’ he says, confused.
‘Well, I’m hardly handing you a negative pregnancy test now, am I?’
He peers at it again. His brow unknots and he breaks out into a smile.
