Confessions of a Bad Mother (4 page)

‘Or perhaps you’d prefer the DIY experience? We send you the
instructions and some components, and you put the whole thing together in your
very own garage! You might rip some of your skin off with the wrench, but
it’s character forming!’

‘I don’t want to be pathetic, I just—’

‘You’re not pathetic. Look: imagine you’re choosing a
holiday. Camp on primitive site with basic facilities, or recline in five-star
hotel?’

He knows I hate camping.

‘Do you feel that without the feel of the ground next to your
skin, the queue for the showers – you won’t really have
travelled
?’

‘It’s not the same thing at all.’

‘Yes, it is. You’re prepared to spend more in the interests
of comfort, right? You’d rather have a Jaguar than a Vectra.’

‘Sure. If I’m going to crash, I like to do it on leather
seats.’

I feel that, as we both love talking about cars, we have rather got away
from the point.

He gestures at an article about elective Caesareans, at which the paper
just happens to have fallen open.

‘So there you go.’

‘Where?’

‘Queen Thingy’s.’

It’s true. I have been reading about an obstetrician at Queen
Charlotte’s Hospital who is quoted as being Pro-Choice.

‘So ring him up.’

‘What would I say? I’m not sure—’

‘Start with: “How much?”’

So I do.

A helpful nurse answers and says:

‘Well, with the surgeon … anaesthetist … and
depending on, let’s say, five nights’ stay: four thousand
pounds.’

‘Right …’

‘That’s without any extras, of course,
like—’

‘Bandages.’

‘Ha-ha! No – meals.’

I get off the phone.

‘You’re right. It is like buying a car.’

After a few fruitless discussions about how we might obtain
£4,000, Peter says, ‘Why don’t you talk to that doctor you
like? See if she’s got any ideas?’

‘What, like: “
If you’re so phobic, try not getting
pregnant in the first place
”?’

‘Negativity: that always helps.’

I go back to the Margaret Pyke Centre to see Doctor Green. She has a
slow, laconic delivery and slightly spacey smile, a bit like the Mona Lisa on
Valium. But the content varies considerably from the presentation. She is
shockingly candid, with that brutal humour you look for in a medic. Her idea of
small talk is to chat about large-scale outbreaks of death. We open with that
day’s headlines: the women who have recently been found to have cervical
cancer, despite getting negative smear test results. She says: ‘Well,
it’s very boring reading cytology slides all day long. One’s bound
to make mistakes.’ She admits she may also have said this to
Breakfast
News
.

‘Christ! You didn’t, did you?’

‘It was very early in the morning.’

‘I need to ask you about, um, having a baby,’ I say.

‘Ah!’ she says, the smile widening. ‘You want to get
pregnant?’

‘I already am,’ I say. ‘It only took five
weeks.’

‘Goodness! So much for the polycystic ovaries!’

‘So much indeed. They told me here I probably couldn’t get
pregnant.’

‘Oh, what do they know? Well, you know you can’t come and
see me any more? I’m only Family Planning.’

‘And I’ve Planned. But I need your help. What do you do
…’ I say, ‘if you sort of do want to have a baby – but
are too scared to actually have one?’

‘Well …’

‘I’m
petrified
. What am I going to do?!’

‘Do you want to know,’ she says soothingly, ‘who all
my doctor friends go to?’

Do I ?

‘Mr Silverstone. Like the racetrack. He’s The
One.’

‘Is it – is he – you know, really
expensive?’

‘NHS. Get your GP to refer you. You won’t get a free
Caesarean out of him, though.’

‘Never mind. I’ll save up. Thank you! How many children do
you have, by the way? I’ve never asked.’

‘Oh, I don’t have children,’ she says. ‘I have
cats.’ And she does that smile again.

To celebrate our last few months of Freedom, we book a holiday in
Tobago. While I’m combing through my wardrobe for something to pose in on
the beach, Peter is doing research amongst his female acquaintance.

‘Hey, look, I’ve finally got a reason not to wear a bikini.
I’ve always had a wobbly tummy and now it’s OK!’

‘Excellent. Definitely worth getting pregnant for.’

‘Yeah! Isn’t it great? Look at this.’ I try to swan
across the room, but tie my sarong too tight, so that I walk like a bad
imitation of a penguin.

‘Marie says we have to get a Nuchal Fold Scan.’ Marie is his
deputy at work, mother of two girls.

‘What is
that
?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Very useful.’

‘Hang on, I’ve got something else here, from
Julia.’

Julia, one of his old school friends, is about to have baby number four.
She combines immense efficiency with a kind of vague breeziness, a cross
between Joyce Grenfell and Annie Hall.

‘She says go to Kypros Nicolaides.’

‘And that would be where?’

‘I dunno. Wait, yes I do.’ He fiddles around with his yellow
stickies. ‘The Fetal Medicine Centre.’

From being completely in the dark – the obstetric equivalent of a
remote tribe who’ve never seen a camera – we suddenly become
experts.

The Nuchal Fold Scan is £80. Apparently there are two types of
test: the scary, needle-in-the tummy kind which include CVS and amniocentesis,
and the easy-peasy, blood test plus ultrasound scan, which this one is. The
blood tests have funny names: the Double Test, The Barts, the Leeds, the
Triple. And they offer odds: 1 in 1000; 1 in 200; 1 in 10.

‘They sound like horse races,’ says Peter. ‘What does
it all mean?’

‘It means your risk factor of having a Down’s syndrome
baby,’ explains the rational but friendly female doctor at the Centre.
‘We measure the fold of skin at the back of the baby’s neck;
it’s the best indicator we’ve yet found for
Down’s.’

‘But it’s not an absolute Yes or No?’

‘No, but the blood test is very accurate, and we don’t do
one without the other. You’ll know a lot more than with the NHS tests,
and far sooner.’

‘So we could be out of the woods, as it were, by—’

‘Thirteen weeks.’

‘What, no amnio? No potentially bad news at twenty
weeks?’

‘Hopefully not. If you
do
get a high risk factor, we can
offer you the CVS, or Chorionic Villus Sampling which, unlike the amnio, tests
the actual cells in the placenta, as opposed to the fluid.’

‘So if you
do
terminate—’

‘It’s much earlier.’

‘And therefore much less horrible. So why don’t all the
hospitals offer this?’

‘It’s quite specialized. You can’t just bung in a
machine and let them get on with it.’

‘And when can we do this?’

‘Eleven weeks. Obviously, we discuss it with you at all
stages.’

‘Eighty quid for peace of mind?’ says Peter. ‘A
bargain.’

At ten weeks we go and see my GP, who says he’s never heard of the
CVS and anyway there’s no point asking him anything because the real
expert is the community midwife. Can we book an ultrasound scan? No. Would he
like to take my blood pressure? No. Shall we – play Scrabble? His lack of
interest is slightly embarrassing, as if this is a car showroom and not a
surgery at all. But we have to be friends with him because we need the
referral.

At eleven weeks the community midwife waves away questions about such
trivia as the baby to concentrate on something really important: geography.
Apparently we live on a fault line between catchment areas so I have to change
midwife teams after the birth.

‘You live in Islington South, but after the birth you’d have
to be cared for by a team from Islington
North
.’ Clearly this is a
Big Deal. Are Islington North and South at war? I’ve been so preoccupied,
there’s probably a lot I don’t know. We try to drag the
conversation back to the pregnancy.

‘I really want to arrange a scan. I am thirty-six, after all, and
well – I really want to see the baby. It could be a hysterical pregnancy
– or wind!’ I’m sending up my own anxiety here: give me a
break! She doesn’t smile.

‘OK, what about this CVS?’ says Peter. ‘Should we be
thinking about that?’

‘Oh, you’re too late for that.’ (This is
not
true
.)

Eventually – with forceps – we extract a leaflet from her
about tests for Down’s syndrome and other conditions.

‘Can we at least
arrange
the scan? We’re going on
holiday at the end of the week.’

‘Plenty of time. You’ll get a hospital appointment in
– ooh, two or three weeks.’

In other words, when it’s too late. We are dealing with parallel
universes. We don’t have strong views about NHS or private; we just want
them to recognize that to us, this banal little event is
important
.

‘It’ll be fine,’ says Peter, deploying the phrase that
over the coming months, will make me want to hit him with a pan.

In Tobago we watch families playing in the sea together, and crocodiles
of beautifully turned out schoolchildren who say, ‘Good morning!’
to the ladies who sit outside their shops.

‘Look! Look!’ I say. ‘Listen!’

‘You sound like an Early Reading Book.’

‘I like the school uniform.’

‘Yeah. Just one thing. We don’t actually live
here.’

‘Be nice, though.’

‘Yeah … everyone’s so polite.’

‘Can we have polite children in blue pinafores?’

‘Don’t they still use the cane? Isn’t that why
they’re so well behaved?’

‘Well, they look good anyway.’

On the second night, the hotel has ‘2 for 1’ at the bar.

‘I think you can have
one
,’ he says.

‘Oh, thanks! Is it going to be like this from now on?’

‘Like what? You’re pregnant, for God’s
sake.’

‘One pina colada, please.’

The bar lady puts down two foamy white glasses.

‘Oh thanks, but I only wanted
one
.’

‘Ah, but it’s 2 for 1, you see?’

It goes down amazingly fast.

‘Actually, they’re not that strong, are they? Mostly
pineapple and coconut.’

‘Well, bars always do that, water them down. They’re hardly
going to use double measures of rum in a promotion.’

We have four each.

In the night I wake up and remember that just before Christmas, I went
out with two girls from work and had a
lot
of wine. And of course I was
already pregnant by about three or four weeks. So the damage is done anyway,
but it’s not my fault because I didn’t know. This is a huge relief,
and I go back to sleep.

At thirteen weeks we’re back. I ring the hospital to check that
the GP has done the referral, and they’ve never heard of me.

‘What are we going to do? I’m supposed to be in the
system!’

Peter says: ‘It’ll be fine.’

‘But they said I don’t exist!’

‘It’ll be fine.’

‘Go away before I hurt you.’

Meanwhile we go to the Fetal Medicine Centre for the Nuchal Fold Scan.
As on the phone, we pepper the doctor with questions, and again she stands up
to the pressure rather well.

She puts the cold jelly on my stomach and turns the monitor to show us a
grainy black and white film. It reminds me a bit of when I was eight, and we
stayed up to watch man’s first step on the moon.

‘That bean-shaped thing, floating there in space
…’

‘Is your baby inside you, yes.’

My God: it’s really there.

‘It just seems so – unlikely!’

I so wasn’t going to have children that for a moment I wonder if
this is a video they keep for fantasists. I’m glad Peter is in the room;
people won’t be able to say I’ve imagined it – except they
won’t say that anyway, because to everyone else this is
completely
normal
, whereas for me it’s like Galileo telling the Vatican that the
earth went round the sun.
Are you saying there is a Live Person
inside my Body? Whom I haven’t even met?
It must be
witchcraft.

We take our scan photo, and go for coffee.

‘There’s a person inside your tummy,’ says Peter.

‘Oh my God!’ I say. ‘Bloody Hell!!!’

‘Give it a nice shot of caffeine, there you go. Help it bounce
around a bit more. And have a cake. You’re eating for two now.’

I have an éclair, and some toast, and finish his strudel as
well.

‘I said eating for two, not six.’

I kiss him goodbye and go for a swim. When I get there, it’s
Special Needs Day, and everyone in the changing room has Down’s syndrome.
What are the odds on
that
?

Afterwards I get back on the phone to University College Hospital. Have
they got my referral from the surgery?

‘No. Sorry,’ says the woman.

‘What can I do?’

‘Well … we don’t normally tell people this, but you
can self-refer.’ Bastards! I knew they were concealing something.

I get the surgery to fax the letter they should have sent in the first
place, and I’m in.

The receptionist in the UCH antenatal department is a glamorous black
girl who looks as though she should be processing nightclub tickets, not
patient notes. Her stylishness lifts the ambience of the whole place. She
memorizes my name on this first occasion, and remembers it ever afterwards. How
do people do that? Probably by not drinking four pina coladas.

After all the questions about family illnesses, and taking my blood
pressure, and after I’ve weed all over one of those tiny little pots, the
midwife asks me how much alcohol I drink. People always lie about this, I bet.
I’ll be really honest, that’ll impress her.

‘Ooh, about … twenty-eight units a week. Three to four
glasses a day.’

‘Let’s just put down one glass of wine a day, shall
we?’

She looks at me as if to say: ‘
I’m doing you a big
favour,
you alcoholic old tart.
’ Why don’t you just come
out with it? ‘
Poisons fetus with entire contents of
Oddbins
.’ Put that on your bloody form. I decide not to mention the 2
for 1 pina coladas.