How to Be a Woman

  Around the time that a man with giant hands comes towards you with some forceps the size of BBQ tongs, you think, Perspective. Yes, yes I do have some perspective now. I doubt that I will get angry about Norwich Union changing its name to ‘Aviva’ ever again.

  To be frank, childbirth gives a woman a gigantic set of balls. The high you get as you realise it’s all over, and that you didn’t actually die, can last the rest of your life. Off their faces with euphoria, and bucked by how brave they were, new mothers finally tell the in-laws to back off, dye their hair red, get driving lessons, go self-employed, learn to use a drill, experiment with Thai condiments, make cheerful jokes about incontinence, and stop being scared of the dark.

  In short, a dose of pain that intense turns you from a girl into a woman. There are other ways of achieving the same effect – as outlined in Chapter 15 – but minute for minute, it’s one of the most effective ways of changing your life. If I compare how I am now to who I was before I gave birth for the first time, the transformation is almost total. Opening my cervix opened my ‘doors of perception’ more than drugs ever did – to be frank, all I learned from Ecstasy was that, if you’re caned enough, you can dance on a podium to someone saying ‘Time to go home now, ladies and gentlemen’ over and over again on a PA.

  Birth, on the other hand, taught me a great many things. Before my first labour, here’s a list of what I was scared of: the dark. Demons. UFO invasion. The sudden dawning of a new Ice Age. The often-reported phenomenon of ‘The Hag’ – where a sleeper wakes up to find themselves paralysed, with a hag sitting on their chest. Scary movies. Pain. Hospitals. General anaesthetic. Insanity. Death. Going up or down a very tall ladder. Spiders. Speaking in public. Talking to people with very strong foreign or regional accents. Driving lessons – particularly changing gear. Cobwebs. Going bald. Lighting fireworks. Asking for help, unusually rapid incoming tides, and ever being sent, in a professional capacity, to interview Lou Reed – who is infamously very grumpy.

  After I had the baby, here’s what I was scared of: waking up, and finding out that the baby had somehow got back inside me, and needed to be heaved back out again. And that was it. Although I don’t recommend anyone have a three-day posterior labour, concluding in an emergency C-section, if you are going to have one, it’s good to know it’s really not a wasted experience. You basically come out of that operating theatre like Tina Turner in Mad Max: Beyond The Thunderdome, but lactating.

  Child Rearing

  Indeed, in the early years of motherhood, all the similes I could think of involved pugilism, battle and mettle. Those with no children are apt to think of parenthood as some winsome idyll, primarily revolving around warm milk, bubble-blowing and hugs.

  For those engaged in it, however, the language is often military; bordering, at times, on Colonel Kurtz in Vietnam. Many consider Marlon Brando’s turn in Apocalypse Now as one of the bravura performances of Hollywood. Personally, I suspect he’d recently looked after colicky three-month-old twins for a week, and based it on that.

  The parallels to war are multiple: you wear the same clothes, day in, day out; you keep saying, hopefully, ‘It’ll all be over by Christmas’; it’s long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror; you get repeatedly infested by vermin; no one seems to know what’s really going on; you will only talk about the true realities of your experiences with other veterans; and you often find yourself lying in the middle of a field in France, at 4am, crying for your mother – although the latter tends to be because you’ve contracted mastitis on a Eurocamp holiday, and realised you’ve only packed one sandal for the six-year-old rather than because you can see your exploded, trousered leg, 20 yards away, and know Wilfred Owen has already started writing a poem about you.

  But whilst it’s easy to slide into a gin-sodden, decade-long bout of Lego-stippled self-pity, I prefer to look at the whole business of being a mother from a more positive angle.

  Firstly, and most obviously, there is the sheer emotional, intellectual, physical, chemical pleasure of your children. The honest truth is that the world holds no greater gratification than lying in bed with your children, putting your leg on top of them, in a semi-crushing manner, whilst saying, sternly, ‘You are a poo.’

  £15,000 bottles of vintage champagne; hot-air balloons flying over wildebeest migrations; sharkskin shoes with a diamond on the sole; Paris: these are all, ultimately, consolation prizes for those who don’t have access to a small, ideally slightly grubby child that they can mess around with, poke and squash a little – high on ridiculous love.

  It’s the silliness – the profligacy, and the silliness – that’s so dizzying: a seven-year-old will run downstairs, kiss you hard, and then run back upstairs again; all in less than 30 seconds. It’s as urgent an item on their daily agenda as eating, or singing. It’s like being mugged by Cupid.

  You, in turn, observe yourself from a distance, simply astonished by the quantities of love you manufacture. It is endless. Your adoration may grow weary but it will never end: it becomes the fuel of your head, your body and your heart. It powers you through the pouring rain, delivering forgotten raincoats for lunch-time play; works overtime, paying for shoes and puppets; keeps you up all night, easing cough, fever and pain – like lust used to, but much, much stronger.

  And the ultimate simplicity of it is awe-inspiring. All you ever want to know – the only question that really matters – is: are the children all right? Are they happy? Are they safe? And so long as the answer is ‘Yes’, nothing, ultimately, matters. You come across this passage in the The Grapes of Wrath, and go cold at the truth: ‘How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can’t scare him – he has known a fear beyond every other.’

  There is a black and white picture in my hallway, of me, Nancy and Lizzie in the bath, when Nancy was eight months old, and Lizzie two-and-a-half. I am gently biting Lizzie. Nancy, in turn, is gumming my face. All eyes are on the person taking the picture – Pete, who was, as the slight camera-wobble shows, laughing. There we are – a tangle of half-shared DNA, all inter-locking with each other; all being watched over by the one who loves us best. If I had to explain to someone what ‘happiness’ is, I would show them this picture.

  ‘It’s biting some kids in a bath, as their dad shouts “Bite your mum’s face! It’s more sensitive there!”,’ I would say.

  But it’s not as if we don’t know about the oozy, woozy sunrise love of becoming a parent. The spangled, Care Bear world of mothering has been long documented. But – whilst the almost indescribable joys of selfless love are not to be underestimated – it does a woman good to ponder parenthood from this, alternative angle, too: ‘What’s in it for me? What’s the good stuff? What am I going to get out of this?’ Like you’re mooching past the Shop of Sperm, ovaries in hand, wondering whether to go in.

  Currently, ten years down the line, I can tell you what I’ve got out of it, so far. It’s a surprisingly good deal:

  ONE: A superlative understanding of how long an hour is. Before I had children, I could spend an hour doing absolutely nothing. Nothing. Indeed, an hour was chickenfeed. I could spend whole days with absolutely no achievement at all. Ask me how my week had been, and I would puff my cheeks out and go, ‘Phew! I have been flat out! There is no rest for the wicked! It’s end-to-end stuff! I am burning the candle at both ends, my friend’ – when all I had really done was maybe write a single article, and then half-heartedly started sorting out the kitchen drawers, before Big Brother came on, and I left all the egg whisks on the floor, for Pete to tread on.

  Three days after having Lizzie, however, I suddenly realised the riches I had squandered. An hour! Oh man, what I could do with an hour now! Sitting on a rocking chair, holding a fitfully sleeping newborn – remote control tantalisingly out of reach – all I could do was watch the huge railway clock on the wall, slowly ticking away each second; thousands of them, in which I could do n
othing at all. Now, of course, all I could think of was how busy I would be, if I could have my life back, and someone else were holding the baby.

  Oh man, I could be learning French now, if I didn’t have this baby, I would think, dolefully. In an hour, I could learn how to order a coffee, a cab and a pancake. Just an hour! If my mother wasn’t so sodding selfish, and simply gave up her life to come here and babysit, I could learn how to tie sailor’s knots! Bag a Munro! Take in the exhibition of ancient maps at the British Museum! Finally buy a curtain for the bedroom instead of thinking it would be a ‘fun thing’ to do ‘when the baby comes’. WHY did I waste all that time before? OH WHY OH WHY? Now I’m not going to be able to do this for years. I will be 50 before I speak French. I am a fool.

  This sudden, hurtling realisation about the fleetingness of time often comes hand in hand with:

  TWO: A sudden, hurtling increase in ambition. Hey, work is for bread-heads, and squares, I used to think, before having kids. You won’t find me selling out my soul to The Man! No – I am happy doing bare minimum, and spending all my spare time on my fascinating hobbies of smoking marijuana, hand-making Christmas cards, fannying away nine hours a day on internet chatboards, having long breakfasts with friends, and watching Cheers. Stroll on, The Man – and take all your ephemeral trappings of success with you!

  Within three weeks of having Lizzie, my opinions on this had taken a 360 degree turn. When people ask my children ‘What does mummy do?’, I don’t want them to look embarrassed, and say ‘She knows Cliff Clavin’s mother’s name’, I thought, sadly, looking down at Lizzie’s soon-to-be embarrassed face. I want her to say, ‘She is the CEO of the international imagineering company that brought peace to the Middle East. And she knows Cliff Clavin’s mother’s name.’ Oh Lizzie, I have let you down. I tell you what, little dude – if you just have a three-year-long nap, starting now, I’ll sort it all out. I get it now. I have to get on with stuff. I am going to be a high flier.

  So, in the tiny windows of time that your child is asleep or someone else is looking after her, you find yourself becoming almost superhumanly productive.

  Give a new mother a sleeping child for an hour, and she can achieve ten times more than a childless person. ‘Multi-tasking’ doesn’t come near to the quantum productivity of someone putting in an online grocery order, writing a report, cooking the tea, counselling a weeping friend on the phone, mending a broken hoover – all within the space of a 3pm nap.

  The aphorism ‘If you want something done, ask a busy woman’ is in direct acknowledgement of the efficiency bootcamp parenthood puts you through. People with twins can even throw their voice into an adjacent room, whilst having an ostensibly uninterrupted conversation with an older child. It really is quite magic.

  If you employ a parent in your place of work, yes, they may occasionally have to take the day off, to nurse a child through Dengue fever. But my God, I bet they’re the only people who know the correct way to kick the photocopier when it’s broken, and can knock you up a six-month strategy plan in the time it takes for the elevator to go from the 24th floor to the lobby.

  THREE: Nothing is impossible any more. One thing’s for sure: by the time your child is two years old, you will look back at what you were like before you had a child, and regard yourself as a weak, spineless, dandified, pampered, ineffectual, shallow time-wasting dilettante – essentially Hugh Laurie in Blackadder, coming into a room and screaming, ‘Row row row your boat gently down the stream/Belts off trousers down isn’t life a scream WOOF!’

  Every parent has their particular moment where they realised that, since they’d had a child, nothing really fazed them any more. For me, it was the day that potty-training Lizzie went wrong, and I had to kick a poo, across a falconry display, in a marquee, at Regent’s Park Zoo. I had the left foot of Beckham, the icy composure of Audrey Hepburn on a catwalk, and the quick-thinking disposal nous of whoever it was that first thought of entombing radioactive material in concrete.

  I can assure you, compared to that, the day I had only 27 minutes to get from my house, in North London, to 10 Downing Street, to interview the prime minister – then received a phone call telling me the taxi was arbitrarily cancelled – was nothing.

  And, of course, I made the interview on time. And you know why? Because I’M A MUM. I technically outrank Barack Obama in at least nine categories.

  A Good Birth

  Two and a half years later, I’m doing it all over again: I’ve put a baby inside me, allowed its head to grow to an inadvisably large circumference, and now I have to trouble my cervix with that whole dilation thing.

  This time around, though, I’m doing things differently. For starters, I haven’t spent the last two months of my pregnancy thinking, Let Christmas last forever! Every morning can start with two mince pies, served with cream, six Miniature Heroes and some Pringles! It’s Crisp-mas! Hurrah for pregnant me!

  As a result, I haven’t put on three stone, and I’m capable of things like ‘walking’, ‘standing’ and ‘getting off the sofa without making an Oooof! sound’. I’ve attended all my birth classes – including a birth-visualisation course, in which a hypnotically voiced woman repeatedly reminds me that my cervix really is a trapdoor, and that mentally jamming a chair against it whilst going ‘Yeah – like that’s going to happen’ is not useful for anyone – least of all me. It’s taken me until I’m 27 years old, but I now genuinely believe that a cervix really is a hole.

  And finally, this time, I have acknowledged something that I just couldn’t before: it’s not going to kill me.

  Deep down, this is what I really believed, the first time I was pregnant. That was the Kraken my birth was sunk by. I found labour and birth truly beyond imagining and – like a medieval peasant, denying anything beyond their conception – presumed this must mean that I would simply, and sadly, have to die when it happened. I was pleased – if incredulous – that other mothers managed to get through it alive; but nobly resigned to my own, poignant gravestone in a churchyard: ‘Died in childbirth. 2001. Like Miss Melly in Gone With the Wind.’

  There is no such virgin fear now, though – no maudlin nine-month dreams of coffins, widowers and wailing babies. I am not penning my own eulogy to myself – ‘She was a reasonably fair person, who could always accessorise well with gloves’ – whilst weeping.

  Now I know how birth works – now I’ve been talked through labour, by that quiet-voiced woman – I feel I’ve finally been told what my task is. It’s simple – so simple I’m amazed I didn’t know it before. One morning I am going to wake up, and before I sleep again, I will have to tick off a long list of contractions, one by one. And when I get to the last one, I will have my girl. Each one of these will be a job in itself – a minute-long experience which would alarm anyone suddenly struck by it, without warning – but I know the one fact that makes it easy: there is nothing awry. Everything is as it should be. Unlike all other pain on earth, these don’t signal something going wrong but something going right.

  This is what I did not realise the first time, when I prayed wildly for the pains to stop. I didn’t know then that these pains were actually the answer, and that their every alternative was much, much worse. Now I know what they are, and what they’re for, I greet each one with calm cheer: 60 seconds to breathe through, as limp as a sleeping child, so that there is nowhere for this wash of sensation to snag – no tensed muscle it can get caught on. I am a clear glass of water; leaf-smoke blown sideways in the wind; empty space, for a moon to sail through.

  By the time I get to the hospital, I’m contracting so hard I dramatically drop to my knees in the doorway, and clutch at the nearest object – a lifesize statue of the Virgin Mary. Four nurses have to run to stop it toppling, and crushing me.

  For this birth, I don’t lie on a bed, helpless – waiting for a baby to be delivered, by room service. I’ve been told to walk, and I do – I pace miles and miles, like I’m on my way to Bethlehem. I use the hospital corridors like the world
’s slowest, fattest race track. I walk for four hours, non-stop. Oh Nancy! I walk from St Paul’s to Hammersmith for you, barefoot, quietly sighing, from Angel to Oval, the Palace to the Heath. Your head is like stone against bone – a quiet pressure I can’t stop now, and neither can you. Gravity is the magic I couldn’t find before, strapped to the bed, two years ago. Gravity was the spell I should have invoked. I was looking in all the wrong grimoires.

  After four hours of pacing, everything changes, and I know I have walked far enough. I climb into the pool, and push Nancy out in five, short bursts. As her face appears – a purple Shar Pei puppy, with a lard-slicked ’fro – even I can see it’s too late to go wrong now.

  ‘That was easy!’ I shout, the first words out of my mouth, before she has even left the water; as the midwives stand by with towels, waiting to wrap her. ‘That was easy! Why doesn’t anyone tell you it’s so easy!’

  CHAPTER 13

  Why You Shouldn’t Have Children

  Of course, whilst having children is hard work – a minimum 18-year commitment at full throttle; followed by another 40 years of part-time fretting, money lending and getting on their nerves when you keep cutting their toast into soldiers, even though they’re 38, and a neurosurgeon now – in many ways, it’s the easy option for a woman. Why?

  Because, if you have children, at least people won’t keep asking you when you’re going to have children.

  Women are always being asked when they’re going to have children. It’s a question they’re asked even more often than, ‘Can I help you, madam?’, when they’ve just come into a shop to make a mobile call somewhere quieter, or ‘Can’t you clip that fringe back? You’ve got a lovely face,’ by their nan.