Benevolent (adj.) – Showing kindness or goodwill
Wiping my mouth clean, I staggered to my feet, quickly sent Marie a text explaining I’d call her later and flopped on the unmade bed. I went online and typed in ‘unexpected pregnancy’. A whole host of mummy blogs, health websites, medical sites and abortion clinics pinged up on my screen. One site had a handy chart explaining what size your offspring was each week, apparently thought up by some bored greengrocer. Week seven, your baby is the size of a blueberry. Week nine, it is the size of a grape. Week fifteen, you have an avocado growing in your nether regions.
After clicking an online forum called ‘Welcome to the club’, I felt the room tilt as I read what these women had shared about their birth stories. Ripping and tearing, pooing during labour and basically describing what it was like to be tortured. Each of these harrowing tales ended with ‘but it was all worth it’. I felt as though I was reading information meant for someone else. I mean, I’d thought I had a fairly decent understanding of babies and pregnancy from helping Marie through hers, but this was like reading a foreign language.
Marie had kept repeating that it was normal to feel scared about all of this. I didn’t feel fear – well, it was fear mixed with confusion, mixed with awe, mixed with grief, mixed with a hint of excitement. Was it selfish that my immediate reaction was to run through all the things I was going to lose and give up? All the things I currently took for granted, like taking a hot bath in peace, flinging things into a backpack and roaming around India or Chile at a moment’s notice, living without care and doing exciting, adrenaline-pumping activities such as sand boarding or scuba diving – basically, just being me. My mum’s voice rang in my cluttered mind: ‘No matter how much adventure you have, it never seems enough.’ I loved my life and had worked so bloody hard to get to where I was, but now I was going to dismantle it piece by piece. I closed my eyes and pushed my phone away. I’d already shown how incompetent I was at this whole motherly instinct from the chaos of looking after Marie’s children.
I decided that the sooner I faced the music with Ben, the better. I needed to know if I was going to raise this child as a single mother, or if he might have had a change of heart and be on board with being a dad once faced with the news. I decided that it would probably be better to tell him that he was going to be a daddy in a public place. I was hoping that he would scoop me up, tell me I was wonderful and that everything would be all right. I sent him a quick text asking him to meet me on the steps of the Opera House in two hours.
Luckily, Ben was keen to meet up as long as there was coffee. A strong one. I decided to reserve my hotel room for another night; tonight Ben could stay with me and we could actually have a nice evening just the two of us, talking things over and getting our heads around the news. If he was on board with it. If Shelley didn’t want or need my help any more, then I would actually get to enjoy some time in Australia with my man. I kept going to type her a message, but I couldn’t find the right words. I was hurt that she had said those things to me and kicked me out of her big day, but I had a much bigger issue to sort out first.
I still felt terrible; I swear the cup of tea I’d made with the small hotel room kettle and fiddly cartons of milk almost came back up in the toilet bowl as I took a shower, dried my hair and did my make-up whilst still feeling dizzy. I applied a ton of foundation to my face, which was decidedly greyish in colour, and went to leave. Thankfully, as I breathed in the fresh air and hit the streets, I instantly felt a lot better.
Sydney has this energy about it; everyone looks so happy and those endorphins seem to travel through the air like pollen in the summer time. I swear every person I passed was fit, both in the sporty and good-looking sense, or smiling from being in one of the most incredible cities in the world. Women in tight yoga pants walking tiny dogs on leads and holding Starbucks cups seemed to breeze past, joggers with their phones in holders strapped to their muscular upper arms skipped around me, and couples pushing sleeping babies cocooned in their three-wheeled pushchairs sauntered along, stopping occasionally to glance in shop windows. Seeing their child wrapped up against the autumn breeze, I felt my chest tighten. I picked up my pace, wanting to hurry and meet Ben.
I didn’t feel how I imagined I would after finding out that I was pregnant. In those daydreams I’d had before, I was living in a stunning house that I owned with my husband, having reached all my career and personal life goals before actively trying for a child together. I self-consciously rubbed my stomach. According to the pregnancy app I’d hurriedly downloaded, I was carrying something the size of a kidney bean. Do you know how minute those things are! Of course I wasn’t showing yet, my stomach was just bloated from the carb overload, but it felt different placing my hand there. Psychological maybe, but things had changed big time.
I’d got a little lost as I wandered around and soon found myself cutting through the Botanic Gardens to get to the Opera House. The vast, lush green space was filled with every type of exotic plant, flower and stunning water feature you could imagine. I followed a gravel path that wound through a small children’s playground. I hurried up my pace past the families playing on the funky-coloured equipment, not wanting to be late for Ben but also not wanting to be surrounded by my future just yet. But finding out my news on an empty stomach and rushing in the clammy heat meant I was struck with a wave of nausea and dizziness. I quickly spotted a bench and forced myself to get my breath back before moving on.
‘Mummy!’ a little girl called as she ungracefully climbed to the top of the steps of a small slide. ‘Look at meeeeeee!’ she sang, then pushed herself off on her bum down the metal to land in a heap at the bottom, giggling to herself. I glanced up to see her mum on her phone, oblivious to her daughter now with wood chips in her frilly white socks.
There were so many mummies in this world but only one of me: Georgia Green. I had to prepare myself for losing my identity and just being another ‘mum’ in a sea of other mums. The mums with their years of knowledge and know-how. The ones who said they were born to do this job, whose lives had been enriched by having sex and keeping the by-product. I bet they never lost their shit when they found out they were pregnant. I bet the instant they saw the pee stick turn pink they wept with joy that their true purpose for being on this earth had finally been realised. I knew how to be Georgia – I’d been her for three decades – but I didn’t know how to be a mum.
‘You all right, love? You’ve gone a little pale?’ the woman who’d previously been engrossed in her phone, turned around to ask me.
‘I’ve just found out I’m pregnant,’ I admitted without meaning to.
‘Ah, a “surprise” one eh?’ She made quotation marks with her fingers and gave a knowing nod. ‘That’s what you call them nowadays, not a mistake or an accident, they’re surprises.’ She smiled at me. ‘I’m Christie, mum of Bella over there.’ She nodded at the little girl who was heaving herself through a bright red tunnel.
‘Georgia.’ I pointed to my chest.
‘Well, Georgia, have some of this.’ She pulled out a bottle of water from her bag, which was chock-full of small coloured plastic pots, soft toys, nappies and God knows what else. ‘I’m afraid I just finished off the gin from the hip flask earlier.’ I gawped at her. ‘Joking.’ She placed her hands in the air defensively and laughed, then pressed one against her mouth. ‘Well, I did use to have a hip flask, but that was for emergencies only. You can’t go around saying that to strangers, and not to other mums unless you know them, if you know what I mean?’
I just stared at her and took a tentative sip of the water she’d offered me.
‘So, I’m guessing this is your first?’
I nodded.
‘I was exactly like you when I found out about Bella. I wore the same pale and shocked look on my face that you have now for days, trying to get my head around it and working out what it would mean in terms of my current life.’ I self-consciously pressed a hand against my cheeks. ‘You’ll mourn the days you spent hungover, napping on the sofa on Sundays, flicking through your favourite TV soaps, as they’ll become a long-lost dream. You think you will stay the same.’ She cast a look at the small handbag resting on my knees. ‘But you don’t. I mean, you can’t. Everything has changed.’
This was the thing. The phrase that freaked me out the most. Everything is going to change. Everything. I didn’t want everything to change, I loved my life how it was now; how happy Ben and I were, how well my career was going, how I’d come to peace with my body, how we were on the cusp of starting a new life in London.
‘You don’t think you can keep your identity?’
She thought for a moment and cast a look at her daughter, playing with another toddler who had a string of snot so long it almost touched the collar of his t-shirt. ‘Yeah, you can still be you, but it’s a totally different you.’ She looked at me to see whether that made any sense at all. ‘I really don’t want to put you off as there are so many positives; if I listed them to you now you’d think I was making them up. I used to feel the same before Bella, when new parents would give me advice. That’s another thing: everyone will want to share some piece of advice with you, and all of it will be contradictory.’
‘The way I feel now, I think I need to hear the good bits, as all my brain is computing are the negatives, the things I’m about to lose.’
‘The good bits are things like when they smile at you for the first time, when they do or say something super cute and your heart just melts, when they make you appreciate the smallest things that pass you by, like staring at butterflies or aeroplanes with complete wonderment. You’ll become more patient, compassionate, understanding and, although you won’t stress less because your reasons for worrying just increased tenfold, the things that you used to freak out about will seem so insignificant. You discover things about yourself you never knew possible.’
I cast my mind back to how I had felt going backpacking, how travel had shown me the person I never thought I could be, the one who bartered for tuk-tuks or stood her ground when being offered a bad deal, the Georgia who had more patience than she thought she was capable of when waiting for cancelled flights.
‘But,’ Christie sighed, ‘kids can be a bit boring, especially as toddlers, when everything is on a repetitive loop; you can feel like you’re losing your mind some days. Bella, come and have a drink.’ Her daughter ignored her and continued to whizz down the battered slide. Christie turned to me. ‘Do you work?’
I nodded. ‘I actually own my own business.’
Her eyes widened in a look of respect before she made some strange sound through her teeth. ‘Eeesh, then this is going to be even harder. I worked in advertising, you see; wanted to be Don Draper with a vagina. Thought I could handle anything – I mean, once you’ve been in the boardroom with thirteen men all competing in a willie-waving competition over budgets and bonuses, then you think you’ve dealt with enough immature toddlers, but that’s until you actually have a toddler. One that throws things at your head, tells you they hate you because you make them put on shoes to go to the park, one that loves apple juice until one day when she decides she hates apple juice for no reason other than you gave it to her in a different cup.’ She sighed and pushed back her hair. Glancing at her daughter Bella, I couldn’t imagine this was the same child she was describing.
‘And then you get the health workers, or any busybody, who constantly refers to you as Mum – “How’s Mum doing? Is Mum getting enough sleep? And Baby, is Baby feeling okay? When did Baby last get a feed?” She rolled her eyes. ‘By Mum, you mean Christie and by Baby, you mean Bella; both Christie and Bella are doing amazingly, thank you.’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘Seriously, Georgia, you’ll begin to feel like you’ve swapped lives with someone else, someone who you barely recognise when you look in the mirror, especially during the newborn stage when you turn into a giant milk machine.’ She pulled herself together, taking a look at my gawping expression. ‘Oh, God. I’ve just realised that you’re a total stranger, just found out you’re pregnant and here I am spouting off about everything that’s soon to be coming your way.’ She gingerly patted my hand.
‘It’s fine!’ I breathed.
‘I’m sorry for ranting a little.’ Christie glanced up to see if the other mums on the opposite bench, who seemed to be responsible for the kid with the long, stringy snot, were listening to any of this conversation. ‘People will think you have post-natal depression if you discuss the negatives of it all, which I know I haven’t. I just think it’s important to stress that it’s not all baking fairy cakes and cuddles. Sometimes when reality hits, it does get really monotonous, boring and mundane. That’s not to mean you’re depressed, but more that you’re adjusting to this new world that you’ve found yourself in.’ Christie sighed. ‘You do what you can but then there’s always this guilt that you’re not doing enough. That being at work means you’re neglecting your child and being with your child means you’re neglecting yourself and your own dreams and ambitions, something I certainly promised myself I wouldn’t lose when I became a mum.’
‘So, how did you do it?’ I asked. She wasn’t lost in some magical world of motherhood bleating that everything was perfect. It was actually really refreshing, if a little terrifying, to hear.
‘Well.’ She smiled kindly. ‘I have a great husband and supportive parents who help me out. I also realised that the Christie before had spent thirty years being selfish. I am still fiercely protective about the time when I do my own things. I take an evening gym class once a week, come hell or high water. I just think of it this way: the child will benefit more from having such a strong mother with passions and hobbies and projects and plans that aren’t only related to “mummy” things. You don’t want to be someone who says they can’t remember life before their darling child was born: that’s like erasing the past, and why would you want to do that?’
I nodded along.
‘I love Bella with all of my heart and would die for her.’ Christie looked me straight in the eye. ‘But having her doesn’t mean I lose me. Where the only conversations you have are about sleep cycles, nappy changes or Peppa bloody Pig. If I could give you any advice, it would be to make sure you don’t lose your identity. Don’t let the baby always come before everything and don’t feel pressured to do everything the books tell you. It’s hard. The hardest job you’ll ever do, but you will do it and you will love it.’
I nodded along, thinking about this dose of reality being served to me by this plain-talking stranger.
‘Right, we’d better be off. Nice talking to you, Georgia, and good luck.’ Christie got to her feet and smiled at me.
‘Thanks, I think I’ll need it.’