Crying it out

I write this sitting at the kitchen table in the dead of night, the Boy Child asleep upstairs. I am wearing - for the first time in a year and a half - an underwired bra. 

I am not telling you this for salacious reasons, like one of those bored housewives who tells eager callers about her lingerie for cash as she does the ironing. There is, in fact, a link.

The major design flaw in our adorable Boy Child is that he isn’t a fan of going to sleep. Granted, when he was tiny, he would snooze in the corner of the kitchen in his pram.

‘If he carries on like this,’ I told Papà A fondly, ‘I’ll be able to get loads of writing done. You hardly notice he’s there.’

How wrong I was. As he grew bigger, the Boy Child’s naps grew shorter – both during the day and at night. When he was born he’d happily sleep for five hours at a stretch, but by the time he was three months he was waking every two, demanding succour from the Lady V bosom and not giving up until he got it. Bleary-eyed, I would stagger from my bed, pick up the writhing little scrap, get back into bed, lean back and doze off while he slurped and snuffled at my nipple, until, satiated, he would give a sharp flick of his head (gums still attached to tender flesh) to let me know he was finished. I’d put him back in his cot hoping for the best but knowing that in a couple of hours he’d be back for more.

My days were spent on auto-pilot, waiting for when it was time to go back to bed. I pushed his pram around the streets feeling I was wading through mud. My front door keys were left in the lock for passers-by to break in. I filed yoghurt away in the cutlery drawer. I had conversations that I couldn’t remember 5 minutes later. It was like being very drunk but without the fun.

Try as I might, I couldn’t work out what was wrong. At two months we began a bedtime routine, as suggested by all the books and about the only thing they all agree is absolutely vital for a good night’s sleep. Wind-down, story, bath and bed in his own cot away from everyone else. The Boy Child resisted, screaming that he wanted to rejoin the party. 

I talked to other mothers, who smilingly told me about their babies sleeping through the night. The Boy Child’s lack of sleep became a topic of discussion all over Islington, in playgroups, Pilates classes and prams in the park.

Over the summer, in Italy, things got worse. Whipped into a frenzy of excitement by the various goings-on described in my previous post, the Boy Child decided that he didn’t want to miss any of it, and began to wake every hour. One night we even drugged him with Calpol. Instead of dropping off into sweet slumber like all the other babies I know of, he went into a strange, giggly state, stoned, yet alert, and still he did not sleep.

By the time we returned to London I was on my knees. After a particularly embarrassing breakdown at a house party in Somerset, by which time I had begun to hear noises instead of conversation and see dizzying, hallucinatory flashes of colour instead of people, we made the decision: to try controlled crying.

Now, people say all kinds of things about controlled crying. For some, it’s akin to child abuse. For others, it’s the first step on the road to showing your child who’s boss. I didn’t have a position on it. I just knew that I needed to sleep, and that if the Boy Child slept then so would I.  It would also – and here’s the link to the bra – mean that I’d be able to stop breastfeeding, which was vital for me being able to get back to the library and write the masterpiece that would keep us all in Chianti for years to come. As long as the Boy Child kept waking through the night, I would have to keep feeding him, because the thought of going downstairs to warm up bottles was even worse. So the two would happen together. We had just a week to get it right before Papà A went off to Southern Europe in his own frenzy of consultancy hunter-gathering to keep the family fed and watered.

The technique is thus: when the baby cries, you go to it and settle it but don’t pick it up. After a minute in the room you leave, and wait for five more minutes before going in, then a minute inside, then wait for ten. Repeat until the baby has sobbed itself to sleep.

The only strategy, it seemed, was to divide and rule. Everyone I spoke to told me that controlled crying is horrible for the mother, who has to be prevented by the father from going to the child. We decided to swap rooms for the duration - Papà A and Shu Shu T sleeping in my room next to the Boy Child; me and DJ S (delighted at the thought of a week’s proper sleep) scuttling downstairs to the basement out of earshot.

The first evening Papà A and I settled down in front of a movie and waited. When the first small whimpers came, I felt a chill run through my body.

‘This WILL work. I’m going to break him,’ said Papà A, with a certain amount of satisfaction.

I gave a small whimper of my own and tried to turn my attention to the screen. As the screams grew louder, Papà A took the baby monitor and turned off the sound, so all I could see was the red flash of the light, which means full on screams. A flood of maternal instinct began to wash over me.

‘I’ll go.’

‘No, I’ll go.’

‘No, really.’ I set off up the stairs before he could stop me.

I opened the nursery door to see a small, frenzied child beating his head against the bars of his cot, screaming loud enough to break the sound barrier. As I walked towards him he raised his arms towards me to be lifted up. ‘Shh,’ I said, ineffectually, and stroked his forehead. There was a moment of silence, probably from shock, then he started again, louder than before. It’s hard to count to a minute when a baby’s screaming like that, but those are the rules. As I stood up and walked out of the door, my breasts began to leak as if they were crying in sympathy.

I came downstairs shaking.

‘Do you think, maybe, we could…?’

‘No! I knew you would crack if you went up there.’

Papà A and I have never had a row before, however there followed a few minutes that I shall not describe, since I suspect they would make neither of us look very good. Suffice to say that words were spoken through gritted teeth and I soon made my excuses and retired to bed.

The next morning when I went into the Boy Child’s room to start the day there were none of his usual smiles: he turned his head away. As the day went on, and he continued to ignore me, I began to panic. I started to imagine the therapist’s couch in years to come, the Boy Child now a suicidal adult, muttering that ‘of course, my mother never really loved me, she used to leave me to cry myself to sleep EVERY NIGHT.’

There were tears before bedtime that day, and not just from the Boy Child.

Most babies are, to use Papà A’s phrase, ‘broken’ after a couple of nights of this. Perhaps it is a tribute to the Boy Child’s staying power that it took him a week. Slowly, but surely, he began to get the message, and Papà A would come downstairs looking marginally better rested, and utter the longed-for words ‘he only woke up once.’

And finally, joyfully, the Boy Child started sleeping through the night. I have stopped dreading going to bed. I can walk up the stairs without feeling like I’m going to pass out. I have participated in a conversation where someone used the term ‘ideology’ more than once and I understood what was going on. In short, I am a new woman.

Even better, from DJ S’s point of view, is the change in underwear. One of the worst parts of pregnancy and childbirth, according to her, was the vile and enormous lingerie that it required. Underwires not being recommended as they can damage milk ducts, and flip down cups necessary for feeding, I have been forced to contain the Lady V bosom in bras that can only be described as serviceable. Still, installed in the front window of our kitchen, I would unhook said serviceable items and expose myself to passers by like a whore in Amsterdam’s red light district. I found breastfeeding an odd experience, involving bodily exposure in the most unlikely of places, from the middle of an Ikea showroom to an audience of giggling schoolchildren at a literary festival in the French Alps. Some women find it the zenith of feminine nurture. For me it was a bit uncomfortable, slightly embarrassing and somewhat damp.

But now, thank god, it’s over. And so, to celebrate my newfound freedom to sleep, and the return of my body to other pursuits, I shall be taking a trip to Rigby and Peller, purveyor of lingerie to the Queen. I shall be reporting back, forthwith.

Carry on Palazzo!

It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I packed my bags for the Boy Child’s first trip to The Fatherland.  Papà A and I may not be your average couple but there are certain traditions that must nevertheless be upheld, including, of course, meeting the in-laws.

I’ve met Papà A’s mother, F, many times over the years. Luckily, we have a certain amount in common- namely a liking for drowning our sorrows in booze, reminiscing about the good old days and the oeuvre of various 1970s chansonnistes. And because I’m not really her daughter-in-law, there’s none of that inconvenient Freudian jealousy about having sex with her son.

So it wasn’t her that was occupying my mind. It was meeting the rest of the extended family. Papà A’s father had 8 siblings, all of whom still live in the family palazzo, which F refers to as ‘The Concentration Camp.’ Ever since A stood up last December at the end of Christmas dinner to announce the imminent arrival of the Boy Child, the family has been desperate to meet the Englishwoman who has stolen his heart, their appetite whetted by the fact that he has never been known to bring a girl home.

On our arrival at F’s other house, where Papà A was brought up, she immediately whisks us into the bar for a military briefing, this being the room deemed most appropriate as it has high ceilings and is therefore suitable for chain-smoking in the presence of babies.  Over gin and tonics for the boys and for F, a mini-can of Heineken, her beverage of choice, she instructs us on how to behave the next day, when we are expected at Aunt I.’s drawing room for coffee.

Apart from F, Papà A’s sister and a trusted cousin, no-one in the family is aware of The Situation, as F likes to call it. She herself made A agree years ago not to come out in Italy until she is no longer alive.  The strategy she has adopted is not to tell any outright lies, but to let us meet, and for them to draw their own conclusions. I am referred to as The Mother of Papà A.’s Child. There is the added complication of T’s presence but we agree that everyone will be so dazzled by the beauty of the Boy Child that they probably won’t notice that he’s there. F’s only other stipulation is that I shouldn’t be seen to breastfeed in the presence of Aunt I., in order not to offend her delicate sensibilities.

‘Of course, the last time she visited us here, the Princess of xxx saw fit to feed her child, and if it’s good enough for her, it’s good enough for anyone. Still, I think it would be best if you did it elsewhere. We shall have a special sign, so I know when to escort you out.’

I agree, having no desire to whip out my bosoms in front of the whole extended family. It’s bad enough deciding what to wear. My post-partum physique not being quite what I’d like it to be, my wardrobe currently consists of washed out maternity clothes that don’t quite fit, bagging in various places and covered in patches of baby sick. I know this won’t do. I need something demure enough to please the elder aunts but not so much that I look like a frumpy mummy to the younger cousins. And it has to allow me to breastfeed. I bet the Princess of xxx didn’t suffer from this kind of fashion dilemma. She was probably back in her Prada the week after giving birth. Cursing my stumpy peasant ancestors, I decide on a plainish but suitable frock, which is a bit tight, but ok if I cover it with a flowing cardigan.

The next morning the Boy Child, after a strategic feed and change is presented to his grandmother while she has her morning coffee in bed.  After a stern word from Papà A, she has made the concession of not smoking while she holds him. This is a good thing, as the baby, after less than 24 hours in Italy, is beginning to small of fags. Duly presented, he behaves angelically, beaming up at F and thus ensuring that his university education will be paid for.

After lunch in town, during which Papà A, T and I down several glasses of prosecco for Dutch courage, we proceed in stately fashion to Aunt I.’s apartment. This being a special occasion, she has opened the front stairs. As we walk up the enormous stone staircase, looking up at the frescoes on the vaulted ceiling, I experience a moment of mild panic but it’s too late to turn back and so I dutifully follow F to the top where we are met by the lady herself - beautifully coiffed and dressed, jewels discreetly glittering on her elegant fingers.  Aunt I. has the manners and demeanour of another age.  She leads me over polished parquet floors to a salon where, perched on a set of Louis Quinze chairs, is the rest of the family, all agog to meet the latest addition to the family – and of course, me.

I hand over the Boy Child to a posse of aunts and sit straight-backed on a chair next to Aunt I., where we begin to politely converse. She leads the conversation, and I follow, answering questions about whether I come to Italy often, smiling modestly when she compliments me on my Italian, and listening intently to a long, drawn-out story about the Second World War.

‘I’m 86, you know,’ she says, ‘now, do you come to Italy often?’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘with Papà A, and now with our baby.’

‘Baby?’ she says vaguely.

It is at this point that the extent of her Alzheimers becomes evident. As we sit, having the same conversation over and over again, I feel a growing sense of sadness at the demise of this tiny, beautiful woman who was clearly once a great hostess.

The next time she asks about the baby, her daughters interrupt.

‘You know who this is, Mum, it’s Papà A’s. Now don’t monopolise Lady V. We need to get to know her too.’

There follows a rapid interrogation. I smile nicely and answer, and smile again, while Papà A lurks behind the sofa. I begin to sweat a little under the rapid–fire questions of the aunts, whose curiosity knows no bounds. They look at us expectantly, as if they are waiting for us to verify our union by shagging on the coffee table like performing seals.

To divert attention, I make the special sign to F, who nods to Papà A. We escape, through a series of shadowy, silent rooms, to the sanctuary of the kitchen where I kick off my shoes and feed the Boy Child.

Papà A grins. ‘Top marks, Lady V. You’re doing marvellously.’

Resisting the temptation to stay in the kitchen and agreeing that we need to rescue T, who is also perched on a chair, ignored by everyone, we return to the drawing room, where another discussion is underway about whether or not to invite another aunt, whom no-one likes, because she’s an enormous gossip, but who lives in another wing, and should really, for form’s sake be included. Papà A decides to put his foot down.

‘This is my child, and I’ll decide whom he should meet.’

The aunts tell him not to be ridiculous and telephone her immediately.

‘What’s her name?’  I ask Papà A.

‘We call her Popeye,’ he whispers. ‘Look at her mouth when she gets here.’

Popeye arrives 5 minutes later, eager for the latest information. Her mouth is drawn to the side, in a little pout of suspicion. The name is cruel but hilariously accurate.

More polite conversation ensues, coffee cups are drained, the little lacquer bowl of chocolates passed around again. I look at the walls, from which the faces of ancestors stare down from paintings, as if they, too, are assessing me and the Boy Child. After a while, F stands up and announces that we are leaving. The aunts rise in unison, and we spend the next half an hour saying our goodbyes.

As we descend the staircase, I look back at Aunt I. She waves vaguely, then turns.

‘Who’s that baby?’ I hear her ask again.

Happy now?

Ever since the Boy Child has arrived, it is almost as if everyone I know - alongside a good deal of people I don’t know - has been given a secret instruction to do one of two peculiar things. They either reveal their true identity of worldwide child-raising experts, an identity so far concealed to me, and give me military, punctilious and contradictory instructions on how to narrowly prevent the Boy Child from dying and/or turning into the next Adolf Hitler (due to my obviously bad parenting skills). Or they start mumbling confusedly, clutching at my hands, sometimes even touching my face like I was some sort of thaumaturgic saint, and insist on me conjuring up my full emotional spectrum to explain in excruciating detail why becoming a dad was the HAPPIEST EXPERIENCE in my life. It is easy to deal with the former, all they want is undivided attention and a generous ‘thank you, I’ll bear that in mind next time I change his nappy’. But it is impossible to handle the latter, because they are seeking some form of confirmation, without which it seems their life will become meaningless. Their quest will not stop until I give them what they need to make sense of this bizarre thing we call existence.

The other night, for example, I found myself - in a fairly drunken state - sitting on the pavement with an equally-inebriated pretty young woman whom I barely knew through work, and who insisted on me telling her what exactly had gone through my head the first time I held the Boy Child in my hands. Until then, I had always played by the rules, replying conventionally that I had felt, of course, utter happiness. But since I had had no dinner, and my head was light due to a mixture of bad wine, an unseasonable heatwave and an emotional surge in the wake of my first trip back to Italy since fatherhood, I decided I would tell her the truth: that I did not rank that moment as the happiest in my life. She took it with a mixture of revulsion and pity, like I was suffering from some deadly and contagious disease.

    “But how, frankly, can you say that? Surely this MUST have been the greatest joy of your life!” she insisted.
    “Not really.”
    “But... but... fine, if not the greatest, AT LEAST the second greatest!”

No one in my life had ever asked me “when were you most happy?”, and if they had, I - like most people - would have had no idea what to answer. The first time I had sex? It was pretty boring for all involved. The first time I fell in love? I thought I had indigestion. The day I graduated? I was too hangover to feel anything but a throbbing buzz in my head. Happy? What the hell does happy mean, anyway?

The assumption that the arrival in my lap of the Boy Child should automatically be ranked first amongst the numerous happiness-depicting paintings lined up in some corridor-shaped recess of my brain strikes me as both phenomenally odd and somewhat delusional. If I had a ranking of happy moments, I would probably be a psychopath. Only a psychopath could adopt such a surgical approach to life and emotions. Therefore, I can only conclude that anyone asking me if the Boy Child’s birth was the greatest moment of happiness in my life can only be, by deduction, a psychopath. This realisation about many of my friends has made my social life slightly awkward.

So, what did I really feel when the Boy Child was plonked into my hands? The first thing I felt was a slight weight. 3.2 kg to be precise, with a few extra grams for the nappy and towel he was wrapped in. This was of course the most striking element: he was there, weighing, existing. The physicality of his body brought a sense of reality to what was an experience probably far closer to those I have had under the influence of potent psychedelic drugs. Think about it. My brain had been building up to this moment for months, so when it actually came it was almost like seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time, a weird mixture of extremely familiar and totally foreign. My brain had also been awake (cannot say “active”, but for the most part it was active too) since 7 am the previous day. It was now 12:14 pm, so some 29 hours later. No sleep, hardly any food, 1 G&T. Over the course of 29 hours I had:

- found out the waters had broken and giggled profusely about it with Lady V in a supermarket,
- set up the garden room to be as romantic and welcoming as possible (the birthing pool was in there and for some reason I was sure it would be a water-birth),
- accompanied step by step the accelerating contractions, amazed each time not only at Lady V’s capacity to endure them, but at my own capacity not to faint,
- seen Lady V descend from a state of pained elation to one of agonising terror,
- ridden in the back of a midwife’s dusty Chevrolet to a dawn-wrapped hospital,
- seen Lady V be poked, injected, inspected, interrogated and probed some 245 times
- seen Lady V’s pussy in its full glory, which itself would have been shocking enough, but in these circumstances was utterly terrifying.

This is the factual backdrop of the hours preceding the Boy Child’s birth. What is one supposed to FEEL at this point? There is only one answer to this question, and that is: exhaustion. Complete and utter exhaustion. Were WW1 soldiers scared when they went into battle (not that I am comparing)? Of course not. They were exhausted. That’s it. Exhaustion is an all-consuming feeling, it’s a void, it sucks up every other emotion in its proximity. And that is, in all sincerity, the main memory I have of those first moments.

Then, of course, elation. But it was more about the whole ordeal ending, than about the Boy Child’s arrival. Well, of course, I was elated and in wonder for that too, it goes without saying, but having seen Lady V carved up like a turkey, I was simply overjoyed that she could still talk and somewhat smile (mainly inanely at the Boy Child, who in return gazed at me with the expression of someone wondering if he’s met you before).

And then there was that other, strange feeling, a mixture of the other two, which usually happens after 3 days at Glastonbury under the influence of a lot of different drugs that at this point have created a potent cocktail in your blood stream and sets you a few feet apart from everything that’s happening, like an invisible observer of the world that unfolds beneath your gaze. I felt - pretty much like Lady V had a few hours earlier - like I was high. And yet, I had taken nothing at all. It was a strange, stoned feeling of being elsewhere and seeing things unfold on a screen in front of me. A feeling of detachment and yet engagement.

Yes. It was totally weird. And frankly, do you think the word ‘happy’ could summarise all this? ‘Happy’ like in ‘Happy-meal’? Oh please. The next time someone comes up to me and asks if the Boy Child’s birth was the happiest moment of my life, I think I’ll simply answer ‘no’, and walk away leaving them shacking and wondering whether they should step in front of a bus and put an end to it all.

Scenes from family life

Ten days after The Boy Child’s birth, when the visitors have finally left, A and I have dinner at home: a large steak and roast potatoes washed down with red wine. My vegetarianism has relaxed somewhat since I had the excuse of needing iron during pregnancy.

A: You know, this is the first time we’ve ever had dinner in the house together alone.

V: Wow.

Brief pause while we digest this fact.

V (weepily): You know, I feel very attached to you and The Boy Child these days.

A: (dreamily): I keep having fantasies that you both die in a terrible accident. And then I’m free.

V: ?!?!

A: It's ok, my book on fatherhood said I’d feel like this.

V: Oh, well, that’s alright then.

Silence.

---------------------------------------------------

Dirty Uncle F comes back from a conference in Brussels. No-one really knows what he does for a living, but it seems to involve lots of first class travel to various parts of Europe wearing brightly coloured ties.

He is in an excellent mood, laden with chocolates and little jars of foie gras, his favourite food, especially in front of vegetarians.

F (smirking): I was talking to the ex-president of the Basque region at a function. I told him about our situation. Our family. I was asked if I was in a relationship with A. And you, Mummy. A ménage a trois.

V: And what did you say?

F (through a mouthful of foie gras): I told him everyone should live with lesbians! They are wonderful! The highest form of evolution!

DJ S: ?!?!

F (swilling down a glass of wine): They are excellent! They do womanly things like you, Mummy, like reproduce, and fixing things around the house, like you, Boyfriend. They are like normal women but much better. They are self-sufficient! Everyone should adopt one!

V: Normal women?

F (ignoring her): And gay men are the least evolved. They combine the worst of straight men with the homosexual bits. They are predatory and, they are vain. Quite useless.

A: Even you, Uncle F?

F: Especially me.

He pulls out a sheaf of magazines from his briefcase.

F: These are for you Mummy. I got them on the train.

I look at the selection.

V: Brides Magazine? The Lady?

F (shrugging): What? You need to prepare. You should be married. Either to Boyfriend or to Papà A. You are a mother now, after all. You should be respectable.

V (sternly): And The Lady?

F: What is it? I just picked up magazines for females. I don’t know what they mean.

V: The Lady is for upper class women from the Home Counties. It has articles on the best gardening gloves to buy and what to bake for village fetes.  It’s where you advertise for nannies and maids.

F: Perfect! We need staff!  And you should be like this, looking after all of us.

V: I will never become that sort of woman. Never.

Two days later, while feeding The Boy Child, I pick up the copy of The Lady. By the time he’s finished eating, I realise that I am engrossed in an article on herbaceous borders…

---------------------------------------------------

Sunday morning. A and I are trying to fill in the Census.

A: Oh god, we have to explain everyone’s relationship to each other.

V: Let’s start with the The Boy Child. He’s easiest.

We fill in his section, marking me as mother and A as father.

A: And we can do you and DJ S.  Partners.

V: And Uncle F?

A: Mark him as other. Oh, and when you’re filling in nationality, don’t put him as Italian. He’ll want to be European.

V: OK.

Pause.

V: So what about us?

We go through the options.

A: Well we’re not married, so not that one.

V: And not civil partners.

A: We’re sort of partners where The Boy Child’s concerned. But you’re already down as DJ S’s partner, so we can’t put that.

V: Hmm. And ‘no relation’ doesn’t quite work either.

We stare at the form. There is no box that describes what we are. In the end we just put Other. We post off the form, wondering what the statisticians will make of it.

Labour intensive

When I was pregnant, Papà A bought me a book by American midwifery expert Ina May Gaskin, who specialises in natural childbirth. It was full of stories from women who’d given birth at home on Ina May’s farm commune in Tennessee with no medical intervention, and from what I could make out, practically no pain.

I hate hospitals. It’s partly the smell, reminiscent of hateful school biology lessons, partly the temperature, which brings me out in a sweat, but mostly it’s because I’m a control freak. I can’t bear the thought of being trapped, subject to an external timetable, with no end in sight, the only choice available to me the daily dinner menu. And this whole baby thing had been so medicalised, from even before the moment of conception, from the ritual humiliation of speculum examinations, to inseminations, to nightly injections in my belly, to a week’s stay in the hospital when I overreacted to the drugs, and worst of all, the horror of the delightfully named ERPC or Evacuation of Retained Products of Conception, when they scraped out what was left after a miscarriage while I was still conscious, biting down on A’s arm to numb the pain.

So we decided on a home birth. We would be control of music, lighting and drug use - a little private party for me, Papà A, and DJ S, with a couple of midwives to help us through it. I had visions of giving birth in front of the fire, then me looking exhausted but earthily glamorous, holding our baby in a cashmere blanket with Papà A and DJ S misty-eyed in the background.

Reactions were mixed. My mother, British as ever, kept a stiff upper lip but went passive-aggressively silent. The Italians were outraged and said so, whether they were asked for their opinions or not. The other members of our National Childbirth Trust group, all about to give birth around the same time, just stared at us as if we were crazy hippies. But the midwives we spoke to were enthusiastic, telling us that, statistically, home births were safer, meant less intervention, and that we could always go to the hospital if we really needed to.

What really made my mind up was when one of them looked at me thoughtfully and said, ‘you know, one of the best ways to relax at the beginning of labour is to have a gin and tonic. If you want one, go for it. You can do that at home, but you can’t in hospital.’

I love gin and tonic. Giving up those delicious little glasses of joy was one of the hardest parts of being pregnant. I’d been dying for one for about a year. The midwife giving me permission to have one – or indeed, practically ordering me to have one, meant there was no choice. We were having a home birth, and that was that.

Papà A and I settled down to one of our favourite activities – making lists.

1. Birth pool: Having found one on Freecycle, we went to pick it up from a rather wild-eyed woman wearing a dressing gown and clutching a 2-year-old child. ‘I wanted to have a water birth,’ she said. ‘But there were complications.’ We backed away without asking what they were.
2. Waterproof sheeting: The midwife had told us to buy some shower curtains from Ikea to cover the sofa. Our lovely friend Monty stepped in to provide some black rubber sheets from an erotic emporium in Old Street, helpfully explaining that they were fully machine washable and so could be used again as required.
3. TENS machine: This marvellous little gadget works on the principle of displacing pain, the theory being if you have a series of electric shocks going up your spine, you might be distracted enough not to notice contractions. This should have served as a warning.
4. The English Patient DVD: Absolutely vital. As I explained to Papà A, not only is this one of our all time favourite films, the sight of Kristen Scott Thomas wrapped in a parachute and dying in a cave would surely be enough to put my own pain in perspective.
5. Heroin: Well, a derivative. Diamorphine, to be precise. Took as much effort to get hold of as it did to conceive the baby, with various cloak and dagger procedures involving lengthy telephone calls between doctors and pharmacists, registering at the chemists, feeling the need to explain ‘I’m having a baby,’ just to make clear that I wasn’t an addict, and promising faithfully to bring it back if I didn’t use it during labour.

Fully prepared, like the good little Boy Scouts we are, when the contractions began, at 3pm on 2nd March we danced about the room, singing ‘we’re going to have a baaa-by.’ We’d spent the morning in our favourite posh supermarket with my waters breaking and me telling Papà A not to make me laugh because it made them gush. The midwife came over at 5 and confirmed that yes, I was in labour, and we went for a walk with DJ S and T around the next door square, me breaking off every ten minutes or so to hold onto railings and try to breathe through the contractions.

I’d tried to find out what a contraction felt like, but no-one seemed to be able to tell me. ‘You’ll just know,’ they all said. They were right, you do. They hurt. They really, really hurt. When you’re in the middle of one you can’t think about anything else, apart from hoping for the moment when it’ll end. It’s pure, unadulterated pain. When they’re coming every 10 minutes they’re just about bearable. When it’s every 3, you start to go a bit crazy. I couldn’t even face the gin and tonic. Luckily, just as it was getting too much to handle, the midwives arrived with my pregnancy drug of choice – gas and air. I don’t really know what it is, but soon as the pain begins you start inhaling as hard as you can, and although it doesn’t take the pain away, you start to feel so stoned that you don’t care.

‘You’ve taken to it really well,’ said the midwife.

‘She’s done this sort of thing before,’ said Papà A, smirking.

Labour reached a new level. Before the drugs we’d been watching The English Patient, nibbling on little pieces of cake from the deli on the corner, breaking only for me to kneel behind the sofa and pant like a dog with each contraction. Now, I was completely off my head, going off into my own little fantasies. I started laughing and telling DJ S and Papà A that it was like being in Glastonbury. They looked at me as my grandmother might have done if I tried to explain what being at a festival is like.

‘I knew you’d be the perfect birth partner,’ I told Papà A, lovingly. ‘You were so good at looking after me when I was tripping during Shirley Bassey.’

DJ S giggled, and rubbed my back.

Before labour, I’d been worried about Papà A seeing me naked during birth. I’d had words with him about staying away from the business end of things and ignoring my stretch marks. DJ S had been told equally firmly that she should try to minimise the trauma and do what seemed right at the time. But at least she’d seen me naked before.

‘But you’re always running around topless in Italy,’ Papà A said.

‘This is a different situation,’ I said, sternly.

People had told me that once in labour I wouldn’t care and they were right. Throwing caution to the wind, I stripped off and got into the birth pool, which DJ S and Papà A had finally managed to fill with kettles after our dodgy hot water system had given up on us. Here, in our candle-lit garden room, in the warm water, drugs to hand, I finally felt as if we would have the home birth we’d been waiting for. Papà A put on some Bach and I burst into tears.

‘That’s so beautiful,’ I howled. ‘That’s why I’m having a baby with you.’

‘God, it is like being at Glastonbury,’ he said, and went off upstairs for a sandwich.

Ten hours later, after two more trips to the hospital by the midwife to replace said gas and air, which I had started to guzzle like a Louisiana crack whore, things were getting bad. I began to alternate between hanging from the kitchen door frame, trying to shake the baby out, to lying curled up on the bed, moaning in agony. The midwives told me I was dilated only to 7cms and stuck there, with the baby turned round the wrong way. I didn’t take the news well. Back in the birth pool, I started to cry again, and uttered the words I never thought would pass my lips.

‘I want an epidural.’

Having an epidural is supposed to make it all better, to make you dead from the waist down. What they don’t tell you is that first you have to wait for the ambulance to arrive, then you get to the labour ward and then you wait for the anaesthetist to arrive. Then it takes half an hour to set up. And then of course, it didn’t really work. I was still attached to the gas and air when they stuck the needle into my back, when they attached the catheter to my bladder, when they strapped the foetal heart monitor around my belly. If I’d had any strength left, I would have been furious at having ended up exactly where I hadn’t wanted, flat on my back in the labour ward, but by that point I didn’t care about anything. I just lay there for six hours waiting to be told to push.

In the end it never happened.

‘You’ve got a lip on your cervix that’s making it hard for the baby to get out,’ the obstetrician said, plunging a hand inside me. Drawing out his hand he frowned. ‘The baby’s pooed inside you,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to do an emergency caesarean.’

And so it was that 40 minutes later, I found myself lying on an operating table surrounded by people in green scrubs but not really seeing any of them because Papà A was holding up our son to my face so I could kiss him. I was shaking with shock, and in awe, and not really believing any of it, and not knowing quite what had happened but just that it had, and that here, at last, after 4 years of trying, was the Boy Child.

For whom the bell tolls

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Merchant Ivory manqué

Oh, I do love the contradictions in the father of my child. The way that he can effortlessly segue from listing the unsavoury locations of his sexual conquests to a bit of old-fashioned tutting about family values and the need for children to have both a mum and a dad.

But then, I’m not averse to a few contradictions myself. And like him, I’m still trying to figure out how all this baby business came about.

I too had a religious childhood, raised by parents who at various times embraced evangelical Christianity, the composition of rock gospels, faith healing and even – in my father’s case – the clergy itself. Oh, and with a bit of French Catholicism popped in there for good measure. But it wasn’t really what you’d call conservative.

My parents got married aged 21. Not so very radical. Around the same time my mother’s French pen-friend married her cousin. A bit odd in the 1970s North, but still, not that strange. Then the two couples bought a bankrupt sheep farm in the Lake District and moved in together. That was pretty scandalous. The valley pursed its lips, muttered about wife swapping and hippies and waited for them to fall out and move on. But they didn’t, living together until my aunt’s death years later, after all 5 of us children had left home.

Perfect preparation for communal living, you might have thought. Not so. Each of my siblings/cousins ended up respectably married, living happily ever after in their nuclear families. I embraced the anonymity of London, loving the solitude of the British Library, where, after a few false starts, I began to write books, blocking out any last vestiges of noise with industrial strength ear plugs. For years, I lived on my own and liked it, with a radio tuned to Radio 4 in every room to keep me company.  Family was something I visited at birthdays and Christmas, but kept at arms’ length.

As for men, I pretty much shared Papà A's opinion of them. At around age 16, heavily influenced by 70s polemic, I declared myself a radical feminist, of the old school all-men-are-potential-rapists variety. By the time I’d left university I’d refined my opinions a bit, realising that most of my close friends were in fact, male. But by then I’d come out as a lesbian, and my thoughts had turned to women.

When I hit 30, and my biological clock began to tick, I still didn’t imagine myself as part of a family, or at least not one that included a man. I don’t share Papà A's views on gay parenting. If I were to have a baby, I thought, I would be a single mother of a girl, whom I would raise to be an independent little creature whilst somehow managing to build a career as a bestselling novelist . Or it would be with a girlfriend, a cosy threesome with a donor for a daddy, tall and dark to breed out the Lady V sturdy but stumpy Northern figure. 

So how did I end up here, 9 months pregnant, living in a houseful of men and waiting for another one, a baby boy to - as Papà A so delightfully puts it - burst out of my vagina?

Well, I suppose the answer is, he asked. When Papà A popped the question on that sunny Tuscan morning, I didn’t hesitate for a moment. I might have wondered if I was selling out, if I was somehow becoming straight, if I was condemning myself to a family life that I had never imagined for myself, a life with a man, bringing up our children together. But I didn’t. None of that crossed my mind at all. Someone I loved, with whom I had the best times, who made me happy and whom I wanted to make happy too was asking me to have children with him and bring them up together. It made strange but perfect and absolute sense.  And so I looked at him, and smiled, and yes I said yes I will yes.