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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Tales of a slutty dad...

 

When my sister found out I was about to become a dad, she exclaimed: “I’ve always known you’d be a dad. You are cut for it. You’ll be great”. God knows where she got that from. I for one certainly never thought it would happen. In fact, from an outsider’s perspective, I’d be the last person you’d expect to have offspring. You see, I’m gay, and despite some dabbling with the female of the species during my university years, I never really warmed up to the idea of sleeping with them. Give me a woman to talk to, go travelling with, work with and drink with into the wee hours of the night any time. But sexual intercourse? Yuk. No thanks. Really not my cup of tea.

Men, on the other hand... personally I find most of them a bit of a waste of space. They tend to be either violent, aggressive, bullish, egotistical and thick, or scheming, vicious, hyper-ambitious, greedy and dangerously smart. Sometimes a mix of both. Either way, they are best kept under constant surveillance, and occasionally locked up. But when it comes to sex, men is what I like. I mean, REALLY like. I've slept with loads, chasing them in many unsavoury locations: public toilets, backrooms, saunas, darkrooms, libraries, bedrooms, gyms, cars, parks and cinemas. I have no idea how many men I’ve had sex with in my life, but trust me, you need many, many hands with many, many fingers to count them all.

I am, basically, a feminist and a slut, without the seething anger of the former or the bad reputation of the latter.

So what’s this baby stuff that has suddenly cropped up in my life? Despite what my sister might think, the idea of becoming a dad never really crossed my mind. Being gay meant for most of my life that the whole reproduction thing was pretty much off the radar. And to be frank, I am actually still against the idea of gay couples raising children altogether. Yeah, yeah, I know the arguments and I have read the statistics: children of gay parents are more likely to be happier, more accomplished human beings and if the parents are lesbian women they even perform better at school. Whatever. It’s just wrong. You need a mum and a dad to grow up well. Full stop. This is what I’ve always thought and argued vehemently, putting up a vaguely Daily Mail-reader, Tory-voter attitude, which clashes with pretty much all my lefty principles and beliefs.

Maybe it’s because I am Italian, and I was brought up in a conservative Catholic family (although, was it REALLY conservative and Catholic? Bollocks. More on that later...). Maybe it’s because I spent my entire life trying to dismantle and get rid of all the principles that were hammered in my tiny infant brain by those vicious priests that ran my religious school, although some things are just too ingrained to get rid of, and I simply have to live with them. Or maybe it’s because my dad died when I was 8 years old, and I was left without a father figure to relate to all my life (yes, I know, Freud and all that crap, even if I am textbook case this does not mean he is right). Bottom line: I think growing up with both a mum and a dad is GOOD.

Well then, how do I explain the fact that there’s a small baby boy about to burst out of Lady V’s vagina, and that he’s got my DNA firmly carved onto each and every one of his tiny baby cells? No, we weren’t drunk. In fact, the conception process was so long and excruciating, that anyone without the determination we had to make this happen would have given up trying long ago. The truth is: I asked Lady V if she would bear my offspring. I asked her to move in with me and raise them with me. It was, from a certain point of view, a declaration of love and a marriage proposal all wrapped into one. And minutes before I declared my idea I had no idea I was going to do it. It just came rushing out of my sober mouth (it was late morning, we hadn’t plunged into the local Morellino wine yet) like water out of a burst dyke (!).

I’ve gone back with my mind to that moment many times in the last few years. Why did I say that? Did I really believe it? Yes. Maybe. Or maybe not. Does ANY man believe what he’s saying when he tells a woman “I love you, will you marry me?” or “I love you, I want to have your babies?” Probably not. Most of the times they are saying this because they want to make a woman happy, because making this woman happy has suddenly become the most important thing in their lives, and because by making this woman happy they too will become fulfilled and their lives will gain meaning and depth. And of course, they are saying this because they know that if they don’t, they won’t get laid any longer, because when the biological clock is ticking women will not be persuaded to wait. Now this last point is not exactly my case (the getting laid bit), but pretty much everything else is.

So this is how we should rephrase the questions: did I want to have babies before I met Lady V? Absolutely not. Did I want to have her babies after realising that she was the most extraordinary woman on Earth, and that my purpose in life was to make her happier, and by doing so to secure my own happiness by her side for many years to come? Absolutely yes.

Basically, like so many other males, I was trapped by the female of the species and in due course discovered the true meaning of life and the unspoken secret of human reproduction. Not bad for a lazy August morning on a Tuscany hilltop.

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.