I’ve never been any good at joining in. I’m not a team player. It’s no accident that I choose to spend my days in the corner of a library, head down, ears stuffed with ear-plugs. I don’t ever get lonely - solitude is something I thrive on. Without it I get twitchy and somewhat dysfunctional.
So I wasn’t worried about being on maternity leave. I had no office, no colleagues to leave behind. I liked the idea of me and the boy-child hanging out on our own, just the two of us, doing whatever we liked, without anyone knowing what that was.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t reckoned on the compulsory sociability that descends on first time mothers, the unchallenged assumption that you need new friends in the same position as you – comrades to share the burden and discuss sleeping patterns and bowel movements over cups of coffee and slices of baby-weight maintaining cake.
It started with our NCT class before the birth. I was already starting to get twitchy as Papà A and I dutifully trundled off to a church hall to learn how to be parents. It was all my fault, of course, for insisting that we join because it was the thing to do. All my friends had done it, and made lasting friends who got them through the first crazy months of motherhood. They swore by it.
I swore too on the way back home after the first meeting.
‘?!?!****! I won’t do it,’ I muttered to Papà A. ‘I won’t go to any more meetings. I can’t. And all those women are thinner than me! I hate them.’
‘You don’t have to go.’
‘I do! Everyone does! It’s the way it is. I hate it. I don’t want to have a baby if I have to do that.’
[Silence from Papà A]
I spent the first few weeks after the birth launching my new book, and using it as an excuse for not meeting up with the other mothers. Then, feeling guilty, I bit the bullet and joined an exercise group in the park, a post-pregnancy Pilates group, a baby massage class, and singing in the library. But afterwards, while the other mothers chatted nicely and then went off to lunch, I made my excuses and left, desperate to escape. It wasn’t as if we were actually doing anything – a trip to the supermarket at the most – but it was better, in my sleep-deprived mind, than talking to other people in the same boat.
I knew I was being weird. The other mothers were perfectly nice. We had, at least, the babies in common. They might have been my friends. And everyone else could do it. I hadn’t felt so bad for not joining in since Martha Porter’s party in 1983 when I sat in the corner and refused to sing Happy Birthday.
Even worse, the Boy Child seemed to pick up my bad attitude. Whilst all the other babies lay nicely on their backs in Pilates he would begin a commando attack, inching forward until he could swipe their toys, screeching loudly if anyone stood in his way. I had to struggle not to feel a certain pride and relief when the instructors suggested that it ‘might be time for him to graduate.’ We’d been expelled, and so could leave the class with no guilt.
But the Boy Child must be socialised. He needs an education. And thus it was that I found myself recently in a baby group – not any old baby group, but one with a philosophy, one that leads to a nursery, and up to a school.
The group takes place in the crypt of a church. I approached it somewhat sulkily, intimidated by the mothers milling about outside, chatting while rosy-cheeked children clothed in hand-knitted jumpers ran around screaming.
Everything about the place was wholesome and organic and hand-made. I managed to secrete the Boy Child’s plastic toy under the pram as the playgroup leader (although she declared that no-one was really the leader, and we must develop our own dynamic) welcomed us in a hushed voice. Babies lay on sheepskin rugs, gurgling. Suppressing my fears about the Boy Child’s ability to be quiet, I joined the other mothers, who were sitting cross-legged in a circle on the floor.
‘We’ll just observe them in free play,’ the leader said, ‘let them do as they wish.’
As the Boy Child lurched towards a cupboard, pulling everything out and putting it in his mouth, I calmed myself with a home-made piece of banana cake and a cup of fennel tea.
The other babies rolled and gurgled and cooed. The other mothers smiled.
‘It’s for his education,’ I told myself. ‘You have to do this.’
I held out quite well for the rest of the afternoon. I didn’t flinch when we had to join hands to make a magic circle. I sang songs to the tune of ‘what shall we do with the drunken sailor’, the words changed to cater to the sensibilities of small children and Islington mothers to ‘what shall we do with the lazy baby’. I even participated in ‘craft time’, where we sat and wound wool around cardboard disks to make pom-poms, something I was bad enough at when I was in the Brownies, and at which I clearly haven’t progressed since, looking at the ratty lump of wool.
When it was time for the Boy Child’s milk, I got his bottle out of my bag. As the leader looked slightly nonplussed, I realised that the other mothers had been breastfeeding on and off all the time we’d been there.
‘I need to warm this up,’ I said sheepishly. ‘Is that a microwave over there?’
‘Oh no!’ she said in horror. ‘We don’t use microwaves here.’
I snuck out soon after, raggedy pom-pom dangling forlornly from the Boy Child’s pram…
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