Mamma Mia!
I look like I’ve eaten a basketball.
I look pregnant – at last!!
Sam stood sideways in the mirror of her bedroom – not something she had ever spent much time doing before she got pregnant because she was tall and annoyingly slim, as her little sis, Joanne, liked to say – and examined the bump protruding from her body.
She hadn’t thought she was showing too much for the first six months, but now she’d hit the eight-month mark it was a whole other story. She, the woman who couldn’t conceive, looked hugely pregnant and it had happened almost overnight.
Showing was one of the secret pregnancy words. Carrying was another. Joanne had explained it to her and this blissfully arcane pregnancy language had come in handy during the early months.
‘You’re carrying to the front,’ the woman in the corner shop had said out of the blue when she was fifteen weeks. ‘Definitely a boy.’
Sam had nearly dropped the milk and the emergency chocolate biscuits she’d gone into QuikShop for in the first place.
‘Do I look pregnant?’ she asked the woman eagerly, as she put her stuff on the small counter.
‘Ah, love, when you’re my age, I can almost spot the pregnancies five minutes after they’ve had sex.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘Any other kids?’
‘Er, no, this is my first,’ said Sam, then waited for the Sage of QuikShop to sigh and mutter about women leaving it too late to have babies because they were obsessed with their careers.
Half the planet appeared to think nearly forty was old to get pregnant.
But the woman on the QuikShop counter had said no such thing. ‘Good plan to wait till you have a decent job, love,’ she said shrewdly. ‘Fellas don’t tend to hang around. Better to have a job so when he legs it, you’ve got a few quid coming in.’
‘There is that,’ agreed Sam with a grin, thinking that Ted better not have any plan to leg it or she would nail his kneecaps to the floor. They’d waited so long for this miracle.
In front of the mirror now, Sam twisted a bit and combed her fingers through her dark hair – long, glossy, blow-dried straight in Speed Salon twice a week – and fixed by herself today. Day two of the salon-dried hair used to last perfectly.
But not now the baby was kicking like a soccer superstar and Sam tossed and turned in bed at night, so her dark hair went from a sleek long bob to Little Orphan Annie fright wig overnight. Now, every morning, she had to drag herself out of bed half an hour earlier to wash her hair and get the straightening irons out.
And she was so tired. Growing a human being was so much more tiring than she had imagined possible. How had the human race survived this long?
As for the breastfeeding lark . . . she was terrified of it. Other mothers-to-be might decide easily to bottle-feed but Sam had the weight of years of trying for a baby behind her. Breast, as every advert reminded her, was best, and she was scared of messing that up too.
She asked her sister for an opinion:
‘I breastfed for six months with all three girls, but that was just me. There’s enough pressure on women to get everything right. Do what feels right to you,’ said Joanne firmly.
Sam couldn’t explain that the person pressurising her to get everything right was herself.
Their mother, who could certainly spell the word maternal – possibly in Ancient Greek as well – had never worried about such a thing. She’d gone back to work as soon as she possibly could.
Ted stirred in the bed and Sam looked up from the mirror.
In sleep, he looked even more handsome: a cross between a Southern-talkin’ Matthew McConaughey and that guy who did the aftershave ads for Dolce and had an eight-pack. Once, Sam would have been tempted to sinuously insert herself into bed with her husband and indulge in some hot, speedy sex.
Ha! Who was that woman and where had she gone?
Instead of any sex-related activities, she wriggled into insanely expensive black maternity leggings. Who knew that a roundy bit added on in the belly department could increase the price of leggings by 250 per cent?
She added wedge boots and a floaty charcoal shirt that swung around her body. Businesslike and pregnant: result. Her face was still slim, with its firm chin, almond-shaped dark eyes like her father’s, and a mouth that allowed her to wear power red lipsticks when she wore power business suits.
It was nearly seven. She was running late. Sam liked to be in the office by eight.
Ted moaned a little and rolled over, happily.
Sam grinned evilly and contemplated kicking him. It was his baby too. He was not getting fat, sweaty and up four times a night to pee. His hair didn’t look like he’d been electrocuted in the night.
Strange women in QuikShop who had never before spoken to him did not suddenly strike up conversations with him. Pregnancy had not turned him into a commercial property.
No, his friends thumped him triumphantly on the back as if Sam being pregnant was a sign of wild virility and a willy fit for a porn movie.
‘Dat’s my boy!’
‘Whadda man!’
Sam wished she’d gone in for baseball in school so she’d have a bat with which to whack them all over the head.
Sam looked at her reflection in the mirror. She could handle being a mother. Women had been doing it for years, after all. She had to stop worrying – that would be bad for the baby.
For most of her working life, Sam had worked in banking, where she got to use her master’s in economics. She’d worked in a major bank for the past ten years until finally, worn out by fertility treatment and office politics, she’d decided to restructure her life.
She did a part-time philanthropic course and, over a year, decided that she’d like to work in the charity sector.
Ted backed her totally, as did her father.
‘You’ve got to follow your heart, love,’ said Ted as they talked about it endlessly and what it might mean for them financially.
‘Yes, but what about the money? Following my heart won’t pay the mortgage, will it?’
He held her close and kissed her on her temple, which was somehow one of the most comforting gestures she’d ever felt. ‘We’ll manage. We can take in lodgers. I vote for good-looking young women from cold countries who can’t cope with Dublin’s wild heat and have to strip off as soon as they get home from work.’
‘No, young men from cold countries,’ said Sam, snuggling closer. ‘Ones who do extreme gym time and are spectacularly handsome but have no idea of how gorgeous they are, and spend all their time having showers and walking round afterwards with towels hanging off their hips, showing off . . . what’s that bit of muscle just below the abs, the deep V if someone works out a lot?’
‘Maybe no lodgers, then . . .?’
Sam laughed, delighted with her teasing. ‘Deal. But really, money . . .?’
‘We’ll manage. If you hate charity work, you can always prostrate yourself on the altar of big banking again. You are eminently employable. Plus, you have the iPhone footage of your boss at the Christmas party three years ago, right?’ he joked.
Sam laughed again. She loved this man. ‘Blackmail my boss if I hate charity work? Me likee. Now that’s a working plan.’
They had savings and a financial portfolio that Sam managed herself. Their only big spending over the past few years had been fertility treatments and Sam would never allow herself to see it as wasted money. Trying for a beloved child had been their dream: to belittle the money spent on it would be to belittle that lovely, but failed dream.
Sam’s search for a new life led to her discreetly checking out which charities were hiring.
Then she heard about Cineáltas. A forty-five-year-old charity set up to help sufferers with dementia, Cineáltas meant kindness in the Irish language and had been established by Edward Beveldon, a wealthy Anglo-Irish man whose beloved wife, Maud, had been ravaged by the disease. Edward had long gone and his son, Maurice, now past seventy, ran the charity himself.
By all accounts, Maurice’s father had been a fabulous man – able to persuade rich people to put vast sums into the charity. But under Maurice’s aegis, the organisation had fallen apart. Until the hugely successful but highly reclusive businessman, Andrew Doyle, had come along.
Joanne had pushed her to apply for the top job.
‘I’m a newbie at this. Presumably he’s hiring more than a chief executive,’ Sam said.
‘Sure he is, but you should aim high,’ Joanne said. ‘Go for the big job. Get your power red lipstick out and go in all guns blazing.’
In her interview, Sam had found herself almost talking herself out of a job.
‘What I want to know,’ she said, facing down Andrew, who was the entire interview panel, ‘is why you don’t try to merge Cineáltas with the Alzheimer’s Society of Ireland. That makes more sense.’
Andrew gave her the cool look she had already read about in many business magazines, a look that was supposed to send executives scurrying away with fear.
‘It’s because I want to set up an entirely new sort of charity,’ he said. ‘I want to focus on serious corporate fundraising for research as well as offering the sort of support that my parents got in the final days. I want to link up with research teams all over the world so we can make a difference worldwide.’
‘That’s a big challenge, but I’m ready for a challenge now,’ said Sam thoughtfully, speaking as she would to an equal, a fact which she subsequently decided had secured her the job.
‘I liked you,’ said Andrew later when he offered her the job. ‘You were straight up, didn’t talk any bullshit. I like that in a person.’
Sam had heard those words before. Various bosses over the years had said they liked her straightforwardness and then it would turn out that they hadn’t liked her straightforwardness. In men, yes. In women – no, no, no.
Men who were straightforward were strong and leadership material. Women were just bitches.
But Andrew bucked the trend. It transpired that he genuinely liked her ideas and her directness.
She’d only been in the job two months when she learned she was pregnant, and had instantly rung Andrew to tell him.
‘You’re not fired – it’s not legal, anyway,’ he said, in the blunt way she was becoming accustomed to. It made a lot of sense to her that Andrew was not married.
‘I know the law, Andrew,’ she said patiently. ‘But I have waited a long time for this baby and I don’t want to sully my pregnancy or my work here with stress or any question that I’ve conned you by coming in and immediately getting pregnant.’
‘You were the best person for the job,’ he said simply. ‘We’ll work it out, you’re good at this. You’ll need a deputy for when you’re off. Organise it. Bye.’
Which was as good as a balloon-filled Congratulations On Getting Pregnant! baby shower from anyone else.
Since then, she’d been doing her very best to turn around the rather archaic ship that was Cineáltas and transform it into something entirely new.
There was so much Sam wanted to do, because the more she worked there, the more she saw the potential for greatness: fundraising in the corporate world to put dementia on an emotional par with searching for a cure for cancer.
‘Because people of all ages get cancer,’ she’d said to Ted earnestly. ‘They put their hands in their pockets to pay for research for cancer, but dementia . . . it’s something that happens in the distance. People don’t like to think about it. They might think about their parents maybe or their grandparents getting it. They honestly don’t think about themselves getting it. To use marketing-speak, which sounds hideous in this context, it’s not “sexy”. But imagine if research we’d helped to fund finally managed to do something to reverse dementia, a philanthropic cure – that would be spectacular.’
She only had a few days left of work before her maternity leave kicked in. She’d found a wonderful guy, a former Red Cross guy called Dave, to take over when she was off, but she still had so much work to do before she left.
The offices of Cineáltas were deserted at eight when she got there, so she flicked on the lights, went into her office and surveyed her perfectly tidy desk.
Sam’s mother had taught her the value of neatness in the office.
‘I hate mess,’ her mother used to say.
When Sam had been a teenager and had, unhappily and inevitably, been a pupil in the school of which her mother was headmistress, she had been into the head’s office many times, never in trouble, though. She knew better than that.
‘I expect the absolute best from you, Samantha,’ her mother liked to say, an uncoded warning.
‘Should we get that chiselled on a piece of stone for her gift?’ Joanne joked one Christmas.
‘No point,’ Sam had replied. ‘Mother would fail to see the irony and hang it up in her office.’
‘No, at home,’ Joanne said gleefully. ‘It could be the family motto.’
On those trips into her mother’s office, everything had been just so. No photos of her family because her mother did not believe in displaying personal photographs.
‘Family pictures in an office are unprofessional,’ she’d say and briefly mention a time when women were second-class citizens in the field of work and how no chance should be given to naysayers to accuse them of sentimentality.
Sam reflected now, as she looked at her perfect desk, that she owed her sense of organisation to her mother.
Today, she was interviewing for a digital marketing manager.
By quarter to nine, Rosalind, the grey-haired ladylike assistant she shared with Maurice, was in.
‘Can I make you a cup of tea? One must mind baby,’ Rosaline said.
‘One of my herbal ones, perhaps,’ Sam said, grimacing at the thought of more herbal tea.
‘Shall I bring you some biscuits?’
‘That would be lovely, Rosalind, thank you.’
Sam was grateful that at least her assistant was not one of the many who felt that they alone knew all the information about babies – from feeding them when they were in the womb to feeding them when they were out of the womb. If Sam got one more email from someone recommending a book about baby food/sleep/toilet training/good schools to apply to, she’d scream.
Biscuits and herbal tea arrived and Sam prepared herself for the first interview.
By the third one, Sam was wondering had the recruitment agency had a bit of a breakdown. All of these people were spectacularly qualified as digital marketing managers, but she didn’t see a hint of charitable nature in any of them.
Not that you had to want to live in an organically grown yurt on the side of a windswept hill and wear hair shirts to work in a charity, but it helped if you had a desire to make the world a better place.
The charity was paying a reasonable salary, but possibly people could get more in other sectors, so this would have to be a job for somebody who wanted to give something back. That was certainly why Sam had done it.
That and the desire to step off the treadmill of all those years in the higher echelons of banking, where life was something to be measured out in hours and slivers of weekends.
No wonder, she sometimes thought darkly, it had taken leaving her old job to get pregnant. Mother Nature had clearly decided that anyone who worked quite as hard as she did would not have the energy or the heart to conceive a baby. She knew plenty of female executives who were wishing they could work part-time because the exhaustion of parenting, work and housework was draining them as successfully as vampires did in horror movies.
‘The slow disintegration of the “doing it all” generation,’ one banking friend had called it. ‘Which won’t end until guys have the babies.’
‘The last candidate is waiting,’ announced Rosalind formally.
‘Thank you,’ said Sam.
‘Shall I tell him you have been a bit delayed, and you could possibly lie down for a minute?’ Rosalind pinked up at this blurring of professional lines. ‘You do look a little peaky.’
‘No, I’m fine, but could I have . . .’ Blast it, she needed some sugar and caffeine, despite her plans to have no coffee at all during her pregnancy. ‘A small decaffeinated coffee, if you wouldn’t mind: just half a spoon with a little bit of milk and half a sugar.’
‘Of course,’ said Rosalind, who had never married nor had children and thus had not been brainwashed by the litany of things pregnant women should or shouldn’t do.
The coffee helped enormously and felt like a double espresso to her out-of-caffeine-touch system, and so too did the next candidate. He was young, younger than the other two candidates, and full of energy. His CV was impressive, his ideas amazing and even more, he mentioned the elephant in the room.
‘I know this isn’t the most amazingly paid job in the world,’ he said. ‘I mean, I could get better money somewhere else, but at this point in my life that’s not what I’m looking for.’
Sam sighed somewhere deep inside herself.
His name was Gareth and he was saving for a deposit on a house. ‘I know this isn’t the job where I’m going to become rich, but something is calling out to me in the charity sector.’
He had a round face, a thatch of blond hair and an engaging smile.
Sam felt that tingle inside her, the tingle that her sister was always talking about: trust your instincts, Joanne used to say; it was how they had both fallen in love. Sam had fallen for Ted instinctively. Joanne certainly hadn’t got the motto from their mother, Jean, who did more of a ‘what would the parents/board of governors/neighbours think’ sort of thing.
‘I’ll tell you what, said Sam now, smiling at Gareth, ‘you’re a wonderful candidate. I think a second interview would be a very good plan.’
‘Really?’ said Gareth. ‘Oh wow, that’s just amazing, I can’t believe it, I think I’ll phone my mum.’
Sam hoped he wasn’t making this adorableness up, because he was just perfect.
At that precise moment, she realised that if she had heard good news she wouldn’t have wanted to phone her mum, she’d have phoned Ted, Joanne or her dad. What if the same thing happened with her and this beloved baby? What if she was a hopeless mother and turned into a clone of her own mother: cold and unmaternal? Sam shivered: please no, anything but that.
But instead of letting any of that doubt show on her face, she beamed a confident smile at Gareth. Fake it till you make it, that was her motto.
At half seven on a bright summer’s morning the next day, Sam and Ted sat in the consultant’s waiting room along with lots of other pregnant women and their partners.
Despite the early hour, Sam’s dad had texted at six: Good luck to you both. Phone me when you’re out, love Dad.
From her mother, who knew about the last-minute scan in case the baby was breech as Sam’s own doctor now suspected, there had been no communication.
From Ted’s mother, Vera, who had three grandchildren already and operated on a lovely non-hassle mother-in-law style of relationship, there had been a speedy phone call the night before.
‘I’m saying a novena,’ she’d told Sam.
Vera had a novena or a special prayer for everything. ‘I know you don’t believe in that sort of thing, lovie, but I’m doing it. Father McIntyre has said a Mass for you. I’ve another cardigan knitted, too. Cream this time with a hint of yellow.’
Sam had teared up.
‘Vera, you’re so good.’
She got so weepy these days and now, with the scan, she felt extra teary. She was an old mother: things went wrong. She was half expecting billboards out every time she appeared near the hospital – Elderly mother en route. Should geriatrics have babies? Public debate later.
Who knew what this scan would bring.
But Vera kept repeating the magic words: ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be fine, Sam. You’re strong and healthy. You’ll be fine.’
To keep her mind off potential problems, she thought about a daft conversation she and Joanne had had about hair, of all things. Sam said she’d have to get up extra early when she went back to work after Baby Bean was born in order to get her hair blow-dried.
‘You are so not going to do that,’ said Joanne, when she heard about that plan. ‘Getting up earlier than is absolutely required will be a nightmare and you are going to be in severe sleep deprivation.’
‘But you know I can’t do my own hair and I can’t go into work looking like I’ve been plugged in,’ said Sam. ‘You have normal hair – I have insane hair. I have spent my whole life battling it.’
‘You’ll stop caring when you have a baby,’ said Joanne, and added ominously: ‘Babies change everything.’
‘Of course, the baby is going to change a huge amount, but you know I’m still going to be me and Ted is going to be Ted. We’re going to have a normal life.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Joanne, straight-faced. ‘You’re going to be the only woman on the planet whose life is not utterly changed by the birth of a baby,’ and she’d laughed.
Joanne was brilliant at rolling with whatever plan came along. Sam had been really good at crisis management when she’d worked in the bank, but baby crises . . .? They were an unknown.
Sam breathed deeply. She had to stop with this negative self-talk. She was going to be able to handle it fine. She and Ted were clever, intelligent people and babies were a normal part of life.
It was going to be fine.
This wisdom was going to be the one bonus to being an older mother.
Finally, the scan was over and when a relieved Sam had emptied her bladder, sitting on the loo till she thought she’d welded herself to it, she and Ted waited again to see her obstetrician.
Dr Laurence looked the way she always did at first: glasses on, eyes focused on notes as if she was about to diagnose something dreadful.
‘Yes,’ said the doctor finally. ‘Baby’s doing well. Might have been in the breech position but has shifted back. I know you’re worried about your age.’
Sam nodded.
Ted squeezed her hand.
‘We’ve gone through so much fertility-wise over the past few years and it makes me terribly nervous to hear about the risks, even though I do need to know them.’
‘But you and your baby are going to be fine from the looks of this scan,’ said the obstetrician. ‘Baby’s progressing well, in the correct percentile growth-wise, all good.’
‘Yes,’ said Ted, squeezing her hand, again. ‘Fine. That’s wonderful news, thank you.’
As they walked out of the clinic, they both sent joyful text messages: to Sam’s father, to her sister Joanne, to Ted’s mother. They spread the news wherever it needed to go. Seconds later the phone rang.
‘Darling Sam!’ said Joanne. ‘I’m so thrilled! I was worried, I know it’s crazy – I mean, when you have to have extra scans, you worry.’
‘I am patenting worry,’ said Sam. ‘But it’s all perfect. Oh, got to go, darling Dad’s phoning.’
‘My dearest Sam, I am so pleased for you and Ted,’ said her father, delight audible in every part of his voice.
Sam could hear Ted on his phone talking to his mother and she could hear Vera’s voice excitedly saying ‘. . . the relief! Did you find out whether it’s a boy or a girl, because really I’d love to know what colour to knit the cardigans. I’m doing creams, whites and yellows, but it would be lovely to know either way . . .’
Sam grinned. Vera was not a woman for delayed gratification.
‘We didn’t, Ma,’ said Ted.
It was a full ten minutes before they were able to progress any further and they went into a little tea shop to have tea for Sam and a strong coffee for Ted.
They held hands and smiled at each other, not needing to say anything but just happy it was working out. Miracles did happen. The phone buzzed and Sam at first thought of ignoring it. It was only half eight in the morning, she thought, looking at the number and seeing Andrew, her boss’s name on the small screen.
‘Surely he can wait?’ Ted said mildly.
‘I suppose,’ said Sam, ‘I just want to cherish this moment,’ and then normality kicked in. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ll answer.’ Everything was rushing through her head, the wonderful news of the scan and the sense that perhaps, just perhaps, she and Ted would have this glorious Baby Bean. Then her conscience took over – after all, she was going to be on a certain amount of maternity leave after she’d had the baby and when she had taken the job in the first place, she hadn’t been pregnant. Employers were rarely delirious with staff who got pregnant soon into a new job. Even though Andrew had been very accommodating about it, he needn’t have and . . .
She picked up the phone.
‘Hello Andrew, how are you?’ she said cheerfully.
‘Sam, I need you in the office immediately,’ he said.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Sam, slipping instantly into work mode.
‘You know the south-east part of the organisation? The bit we thought had been closed off? Well, it transpires it had a special bank account with a credit card nobody knew about and, finally, the last remaining volunteer from some speck on the map called Ballyglen phoned Rosalind this morning to say she was sorry about the money and she’d pay it all back—’
‘Pay all what back?’
‘The fifty-five thousand euros of donations she’d seen siphoning off over the years.’
‘Fifty-five thousand euros? How many years?’
‘Twenty. It’s every charity’s nightmare. Sam, I’m sorry, I know you’re just about to go on leave, but I need someone with your experience to co-ordinate this. I know you’re doing a very thorough handover with Dave, but he doesn’t have your experience – and we’ll need a media strategy if it gets out.’
It’ll get out, thought Sam, grimly. Bad news always did.
‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
She hung up, thinking. One of the earliest problems she’d encountered with the charity was that it was run in such an archaic fashion. As someone who had come from the banking industry, Sam had been horrified at first to see the logistical set-up for their many, many accounts.
Once Sam’s careful banking strictures were in place, every account was tied up and any back-door money heading off to Ballyglen would have stopped.
The volunteer would have sat with increasing credit card company demands.
She explained it all to Ted and they made their way to the car park, still holding hands.
As she drove into the office, she felt a hint of worry that had nothing to do with missing funds. This sort of scenario – her mother racing off because of some crisis at school – had been part and parcel of her home life. What if Sam was going to be that sort of mother too? One called too strongly by her job and not enough by her child?
Perhaps that’s why she’d found it so hard to get pregnant – divine intervention.
What if the lure of her job made her just like her mother?