Page 80 of So Thrilled For You

‘I . . . You never said.’

‘You never let us get that far. I didn’t even know you wanted kids so badly until you ended it.’

‘I didn’t know I wanted them until I thought about not being able to have them.’

She strokes my puffy face. ‘But you do want them. And you’re about to have one. It’s a good thing. A beautiful thing.’

I snuffle into her shoulder and bury my nose into her neck. If I move my head even slightly, I could kiss her. ‘And not just because of the peony wall?’

She laughs and her breath is added heat on my bare skin. ‘It’s going to be alright.’

We hug too tight and for too long, especially as Charlotte is off crying somewhere. I hear the crunch of a car on some gravel but stay hugging Phoebe. This is the goodbye we didn’t get to have. These are the feelings I didn’t allow myself to feel. They’re not going to change anything. I’m so all-in with Matt now. We’ve created flesh and blood and bone together.

I bury my nose into her skin, inhaling deep breaths of her to commit into memory.

‘Thank you,’ I whisper. ‘For coming today. For being here for me.’

‘There’s no way I’m turning down an invite with biodegradable glitter,’ she replies and we laugh into one another’s necks, still holding on. The moment has stretched out way beyond appropriateness, but I tell myself it’s alright because it’s a goodbye. An honest, well-intentioned, wave backwards to a curious path I’ve chosen never to walk. I hold her and hold her, until a car door slams and we jump.

‘What the actual hell is she doing here?’

I turn and there’s Matt, his face painted with rage.

Lauren

Woody’s been crying for ten minutes now. Ten whole minutes. I’ve got the monitor sound off so I can’t hear it, but I can see his increasing distress. Nobody can hear him above the party. Phoebe hopped up a short while ago – offering to take Nicki out for some air, so I’m alone to stare at the monitor and feel like the worst mother since Norman Bates. Seeing Woody cry, even in silence, is like having the whole world’s fingernails scrape along my nerves. It feels abhorrent and unnatural. I want to rush up and cradle him, and yet the sleep lady told me he needs to learn how to ‘self-settle’.

‘Don’t be too quick to go in there and interfere,’ she’d said, each word she uttered costing about one precious maternity-

leave pound. ‘You’ve got to give him a chance to get himself back down.’

It seems highly unlikely that Woody’s going to go ‘back down’considering he’s literally standing up in the travel cot now, howling like a wolf at the moon. I try to remember how long you’re supposed to leave them to cry if you’re doing the Ferber method. Was it thirteen minutes, or three? I’ll wait five more minutes, I decide. That will hopefully not be so long that Woody turns into a psychopath when he’s older, kills women and wears their skin, and tells everyone on the stand it’s my fault. I sit back in the sofa and look around the bustle of the party to try to enjoy this ‘me time’. If I’m permanently damaging my child, I may as well have fun, right? But the rest of the Little Women have vanished and everyone seems to be clumpingtogether in their relative friendship groups. I want another glass of punch. I want five. I want to drink until I’m floppy, and uninhibited, and I think going dancing until 4am is a brilliant idea. I want to move my body to music I don’t like, feel the smears of sweat from strangers against my skin as I queue at a four-person-deep bar. I want to squat over a gross toilet with no seat so I don’t catch HPV from the rim, and later stagger into a 24-hour McDonald’s, blinking into the neon screen, ordering fries I’ll sick up within half an hour. Then I want to fall onto an unmade bed and lose consciousness immediately – waking thirsty and sick, with vomit on the carpet next to me, and then spend the next day tucked up in bed, watching shit TV on my laptop and messaging people to ask how embarrassing I’d been. I had no idea how free I was before having a child. And I’d wasted it. I was lonely even,lonely.I used to dread Sunday nights before I met Tristan, when I was living in that crap house-share with a bunch of junior doctors who were never in. I’d make desperate plans to have dinner with people I didn’t like just to avoid a few hours before bed of my own company. I would sell a kidney to be alone now. Properly alone. Not justpaying-for-childcarealone. Because that won’t be the same, I know it already. Even those times Tristan takes Woody for a few hours between feeds, I’m not alone because all I think about is Woody. Is he OK? Safe? Having a good time? Missing me? Following his schedule? How much has he eaten? The alone time will now always come with a cost. Either – literally – when he starts nursery. Or, as part of a bargain with Tristan. Both of us in a back-and-forth trade of who gets to do something nice while the other one is stuck solo parenting. Forever in a tit-for-tat land grab for freedom.Nothingwill ever be the same again. Everyone always tells you that going in, but you can’t understand the heavy significance of that, until it’s too late to go back and change your mind, or at the very least enjoy how fucking free you were.

I push tears back into my eyes and stand up. I’m not having enough fun to do this to Woody. I can try again tomorrow. I can pay the sleep consultant for another consultation, and then google everything she’s told me to do, and read how it will damage my baby’s attachment, and then not follow any of her instructions, and wonder why nothing is getting better. It’s a plan at least, if a suitably doomed one. I step past a group of women returning from the kitchen with fresh glasses of punch and glance down at the monitor again.

Just in time to see a pair of hands, that aren’t mine, appear on screen and take my baby out of his cot.

Steffi

‘Shh, shh, it’s OK, it’s OK.’ Woody buries into my armpit and lets out another wail. ‘Mummy’s coming, Mummy’s coming.’ I’m not sure if she is. I’m quite stunned she isn’t here yet when he’s clearly been upset for so long. His hysteria is almost unbearable. I bounce him, shh him, walk around the dark, whispering babyish sweet nothings into his hot, tear-soaked ears.

‘Don’t be sad, Woody. Hey, Woody, you’re so cute, but you can’t be cute when you’re sad, can you?’

I can’t help it. Judgement is seeping out of me at Lauren. His sadness is so acute, his desperation for his mother so strong, and he’s so tiny and helpless.Something must’ve gone wrong with the monitor,I tell myself. There’s no way Lauren would leave him to cry like this. She never leaves anyone to cry. I remember, one night at uni, shortly after all the Matt stuff had happened, I’d got paralytically drunk and had such a dreadful one-night stand, I’d left straight afterwards and walked home barefoot because my shoes were on his side of the bed and I didn’t want to wake him. Lauren heard me weeping in the bathroom at 4am, and sat outside, comforting me through the door, until I eventually let her in. There’s no way that woman would leave Woody on purpose. He screams right into my ear and I scrunch my face as a thousand hearing hairs shrivel and drop out of my ear. He clearly isn’t going to be consoled by me, so I give up and scramble around for the door handle, blinking as I step out into the fuggy brightness of the landing.

Lauren comes running up the stairs towards me, her eyes almost red.

‘Lauren, I. . .’

‘What’s going on?’

Woody’s already out of my arms and curling himself around her like a baby snake. His crying amplifies at having found his mother, and he shrieks as she pushes his hair back, turning to me, her face still poison.

‘He was crying and . . .’

‘You just went in and picked him up? Without asking?’

‘I didn’t know what to do. I just heard him screaming and you didn’t come . . .’

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