I finally got pregnant after living with the old git for eleven years. It had nothing to do with a biological cock up (if you’ll forgive the pun) but the youngest step daughter didn’t want another sibling. She looked at me aged 4 and asked whether she could call me mummy.
‘Certainly not’ I replied.
‘You have a perfectly good mother. I am your Wicked Step Mother’
And so from that day I was called WSM.
Those two step daughters are blessings. So I honoured the youngest one and waited and waited and finally on June 4th 1986 Scotland v Denmark played at Estadio Neza, Nezahualcoyotl for the World Cup Finals. Me and him used the intermission in a creative way, At half time it was a 0-0 draw, but we scored.
Talk about the ending of an era. I’d spent thirty eight years being utterly independent, spending money on designer perfume, food and my career.
When I got pregnant nobody believed me so I went to Harley Street and paid an awful lot of money to have a private quack tell me that it was so early she could almost see the sperm swimming. But yes I was with child.
It was a joyous pregnancy.
At 38 I stopped worrying bout being fat. My hair grew, so much so, I could see the tendrils of my lady garden floating in the bath water. I was considered a primigravida, an old spinster who would give birth to some kind of monstrosity. My daughter is now the same age as I was when I had her.
My doctor threatened to put me into hospital if I didn’t slow dow. So at nearly nine months I stop working. I’d learnt to meditate.
If I wanted a baby I had to be as calm as possible.
On March 1st 1987 we went to see ‘Crocodile Dundee’, my labour started. The only job the ‘oosbind had to do was drive me to the hospital. I’d elected not to have a home birth and on the advice of Dr. Miriam Stoppard I wrote a letter to the hospital telling them I didn’t want any intervention unless the baby was in distress.
Dr Miriam told me to say I wanted the umbilical cord cut later than sooner and to decline all vaccinations for the new born, if I didn’t agree. In the event she was jabbed with vitamin ‘K’. That’s the baby not Dr. Stoppard.
My overnight bag opened in the mud – we were having an extension built onto the kitchen – The car was empty of petrol so the idiot ‘oosbind had to stop to fill up. I was having contractions ever 45 seconds, whimpering and climbing the walls of our old banger. The journey to Tunbridge Wells was a little fraught.
Into the birthing suite. I sent the old git away he smelt of tobacco and bananas. He came back. I sent him away again he smelt of coffee. I ruminated on the presence of my Northern ‘oosbind, preferring if he stood at the mouth of the cave, with a spear, fighting off woolly mammoths. I had been put on a heart monitor on account of being so old, when the midwife told me to stop shouting I clicked into my mantra.
‘Has she died? enquired the flustered midwife.
‘No’ said the old man,’She’s meditating.’
The readings on the foetal heart monitor had levelled out, instead of screaming I silently chanted. Fours hours of labour and transcendental meditation worked
‘Hurry up’ nagged the midwife.
‘I’m knocking off at 7.00’.
At 6.55 am on March 2nd out came a delicious little girl
‘God. She looks just like your mother’ said the new father.
I have photos of her sitting on my mothers knee and it is the same face, hair. the same strong DNA. On the piano I have a framed, crumpled photograph of my great great grandmother, it could be the dawter.
So the half Irish half Ashkenazy creature arrived. We hadn’t got a baby bath, a nursing table, not even a name. All were provided by the next door neighbour. She’d always loved the Welsh name Bethan. We added the ‘Y’.
‘Bethany’ was a name nobody had heard of, until it was used on Coronation Street.
The Northern father added Sioux. She sounded like a country and western singer.
‘Little Bethany Sioux
Little Bethany sioux
Your father is a Catholic and your mother is a Jew.’
Sounds really authentic accompanied by a banjo.
The porters thought I was a film star, on account of being on the small screen a lot, so they put me in a private ward. After seven hours an ambulance drove us down Bunny Lane to the local maternity hospital. Back then we had nurses and beds and maternity hospitals.
I didn’t understand the science of breast feeing so after seven hours of feeding in a private room, I had one extremely large boob and one skinny drained one.
I was in hospital for 9 days, on the advice of my family doctor.
‘Take it easy, sleep and then go home.’
I arrived back to the cottage in the snow. The ‘oosbind had made a new door for the attic, somebody had gifted us a cot, and parenthood began.
On the 15th of October, 1987 the baby was seven months old and there was the famous Great Storm.
Whistling wind and devastation.
The cottage shook as him and her slept through it. Dinah the cat came up into our bedroom for comfort. She was miaowing frantically. I tried to open the window to let her out but the wind was too fierce the window wouldn’t open. The cat shat on the mat.
The wind howled and the wind lashed, tiles flew off the roof and branches hurled through the gardens. The following morning I drove to Tunbridge Wells. A ten minute journey that took two hours. Monkey Puzzle trees were snapped like match sticks. Roads were shut, a forest had been decimated. Seven Oaks became one Oak, whilst my meditative baby slept through it all.
Windy storms happen more regularly now, but in 1987 Mr. Fishes’ forecast of calm weather took the biscuit. Out of the attic window you can see the spire of Rotherfield Church. On that night in October the spire diseappaeaerd.
The outlook had changed.
Life had changed
The end of life as we knew it.
I was now a mother, with a partner who refused to marry, and three daughters. Within twelve months I got sacked for breast feeding the dawter live on air, ran out of money and my breast milk dried up.
Stormy endings indeed.