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CHAPTER 2

IT’S TIME TO GO BACK … WAAAY BACK

So, seeing as you are still with me and haven’t been put off by my Poo Pants of Shame confession, I think it’s safe to say we are now buddies, amigos, mates, gal pals and fellow Every Mum allies. Therefore, there’s only one thing for it. It’s time for a Craig David ‘Re-Rewind’ moment to cement some fellow mum history between these sheets and find out how this mum came to think she was capable of taking care of a tiny human, let alone writing a book about it.

SHE’LL BE COMING ROUND THE MOUNTAIN WHEN SHE COMES

Being pregnant, living up a mountain in a foreign country miles away from my family and the things I cared about most in this world (namely my mum and Boots the Chemist) was not something I ever imagined when I used to flirt with the rose-tinted idea of becoming a mum in my mid-twenties.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t as treacherous or as exotic as it may first appear. The mountain was in France, not the Himalayas. It’s not as though we were living in a mountainside shack, miles away from civilisation – even though sometimes, when everything in the village shut down between the hours of 12 noon and 2 p.m. and I couldn’t go to the supermarket twenty-four hours a day it could feel like it. (Wow! Talk about First World problems!) No, it was France and the Alps – a ski resort called Morzine, to be exact. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever lived and had fresh running water and an amazing health care system (albeit a ride down the mountain – the hospital not the running water).

So how the hell did I end up here I can hear you asking?

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we, and meet the pre-baby me. Let’s take a good, long look at her so we can see how far the free as a bird mighty have fallen. Hang on a second, I think I can hear her shiny Geneva heels clicking down the shiny Geneva pavement now, clicking and swooshing her way to a swanky client meeting in a swanky Swiss building. (I know, I almost can’t believe this me actually existed either!)

So, I know what you’re thinking, how the hell did the now disheveled and slightly unhinged me find herself once upon a time clicking down a shiny Swiss high street in shiny Swiss heels?

Well, it went a little something like this. My hubby, Jamie, had lived in France since a teenager and after I went on a ski holiday in his French hometown of Morzine, we were properly Cilla Blacked and hooked up by mutual friends. We were smitten from the word go – or should I say smitten from the first of many drunken snogs as we tried (and failed) to ski home from an end-of-season party on the slopes. The holiday and the snogging ended and I returned back to my life and career in marketing back in the UK. (Yes, I once was a functioning member of society who had a pretty successful career under her belt.) However, six months of long-distance dating later, I’d packed up my career, said goodbye to my City Girl bachelorette pad, hung up my heels and moved to the mountains to be with the boy of my dreams. Bang! No messing! In for a penny, in for a pound – or, as it transpired, a wedding and two tiny humans!

Our life together in France was pretty damn sweet. It was one of doing whatever the hell we wanted, snowboarding, skiing, hanging out with friends, boozy picnics by the lake, and road trips to Italy for lunch that turned into a weekend away. We were carving out a life together that was universes away from my daily commute, 9–5 city life back in the UK. (I could poke my old self bang in the eye right about now: I had NO bloody clue how good I’d got it!)

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a city girl at heart; I love the dirt, the noise and the bristling energy on which a city thrives. However, this new life in the Alpine mountains, was one of adventure, great food, freedom and possibility, all shared with the love of my life. The downside was that I really missed my family. We are a really close bunch – like EastEnders close – which drives me bonkers at times when it becomes more dramatic than an EastEnders storyline – but I wouldn’t be without them. And as they were only a short plane ride away; I went back regularly and they came out to see us when they could.

After a year and a half together (living together and working together on his online ski holiday business), Jamie dragged me out on a snowy walk, bent down on one knee in waist-deep snow and proposed to me in front of our favourite waterfall. (Yes, this place I now found myself living in was so ridiculous we actually had enough choice of waterfalls to class one as our favourite!) A year later, we were married in a beautiful château in front of all our most favourite people, followed by the mother of all parties that rocked le château well into the early hours.

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!