Month One, Day Twelve

Having failed my ovulation test, and having not achieved some deep spiritual awareness about a newly-created life inside me, I decided this morning that I definitely wasn't pregnant so spent the day on the beach getting sloshed.

This, I confess, is one of my favourite ways to pass the time. I do it often. Not shamefully often, but often enough. I consider my inability to stop drinking after one glass of wine an inherited trait, much like being short. Asking me to give it up would be like expecting me to acquire supermodel levels of tallness when I am already fully grown.

So this thought brought me, inevitably, to some more. Like, for instance, all the precious things I will have to give up when I do eventually find myself with child:

1. Drinking
2. Sleep
3. Time
4. Privacy
5. Sanity

Each one of these alone strikes me as being a sensible reason not to go ahead with this barmy plan to populate the world with more victims of my genetic heritage.

I am also, at this stage in my life, quite ignorant of pain. The worst pain I have ever encountered was the red wine hangover after my twenty-first birthday. To be fair, it did spread from my head to my eyes and half-way down my face, causing some paralysis on the left-hand side, but I accept that this does not enter levels of excruciation that real people with real illnesses have experienced.

And then I muse upon the issue of birth.

It is not something I want to do, and I wish there could be a way round it. In my twenties, I used to tell myself that advances in medical science over the next decade would probably enable me to grow my children in a terracotta pot on the patio. But this has not happened. Relieving the pain of childbirth with anything other than a giant needle in the spine is not a priority in medical science. (*Brief injection of feminist anger* I am certain this would not be the case if childbirth were done by men.) So we have to just scream and bear it, and see it as some kind of necessary rite-of-passage into motherhood. Birth is just the beginning. It's afterwards that the real pain, the real self-sacrifice starts.

'A woman's capacity for sorrow is becomes immense when she has her first child,' I once read.

I can see this. I can this with terrifying clarity (though I do not limit it to mothers). All of a sudden, you have a baby and your entire well-being becomes dependent on a being that is nothing but a helpless set of emotion arranged round a gut.

In my day job, I look after a baby. He will be one next week. I've looked after him for two or three days a week since he was five months old, and he has become a major and important part of my life in ways I hadn't predicted when I took the job to earn some cash to supplement the grant the Arts Council gave me.

This is him.





He is the best. He's one of my favourite people. On the days that I look after him, I cease to matter. He is the only thing that is important. I find this liberating. It gives me someone to take my mind off me and my egomaniacal desires. Thank God for that.

I think everyone should have someone in their lives more important than they are. When my second novel was in the hands of publishers earlier this year; when they were having their long-drawn-out acquisitions meeting because editors wanted to buy it; and when they finally came back with a reluctant and apologetic no, all I needed to do was pick up the baby, throw him into the air above my head, and see him laugh. That put the book firmly in its place. It didn't matter anymore. All that mattered was that the baby was still laughing, still trusting me to catch him.

'It's a huge responsibility, looking after someone else's baby,' Jack said recently.

It's not a burden. It's a pleasure. But after he'd said that, I started having dreams where I lost the baby, or dropped the baby, or did something else that meant the baby was no longer here. I would wake up devastated and for the rest of the day, I'd have to make serious, concerted efforts not to remember how bad that dream felt.

The well-being of at least ten adults relies on this baby always being ok. I am one of them. Sometimes I say to my mum, 'If I feel like this, imagine how his parents feel.'

She looks at me as though I am talking about something very mundane, very obvious. 'Well, yes,' she says.

Being a parent is painful, it's extreme. I don't think I am ready for it.