Fiction Friday (4)

I didn’t have to get up. I certainly didn’t have to get up and leave. But yet, I was sitting on the edge of the bed contemplating doing just that. The unfamiliar bed had made my back hurt but that was the least of my worries right now. I stood up and moved to the desk chair, the sort of dining chair so synonymous with hotel rooms and I looked at the sleeping man in the bed.

Charlie slept the same as he always had. I don’t know why this surprised me but it did and I cocked my head to study him again, one arm was under the pillow and the other against his side, slightly bent, looking as if there should be a teddy bear tucked in there. I’d thought that years ago but never asked and I doubt I’d have ever thought about it again had this moment not presented itself.

I sighed and ran a finger through my hair. It was much shorter than he had remembered it and I had raised my hand in surprise when he had commented on it, it had been this short, and to be honest was feeling too long, for a good couple of years and permed as well, a concept that had me reeling when my hairdresser first suggested it, a sure-fire demise into old age. It was now a godsend, a wash in the morning, a tiny blob of product and I was out the door. Well, my hair was, the three year old and her assorted siblings made me far later most of the time than I needed to be. I shook my head, trying to chase the thought of my children out of my head.

‘You OK?’

His voice startled me and I realised that I must have zoned out and stopped concentrating on him. I nodded, the merest of movements and he smiled at me. I could have caved at that moment, that smile took me back, bought a million memories flooding back, no, not a million, we didn’t have enough time for any more than a handful. I had made sure of that.

‘What time is it?’ he asked, and I could see his eyes glancing around the room, wondering where his phone was. It was on the desk behind me and I picked it up, lobbing it gently onto the duvet. He showed considerable restraint not to grab it immediately and relaxed back onto the pillows. He had a crease across his cheek and I mirrored it by placing my own hand on my own cheek.

‘Just gone six.’

‘Oh god, really?’

Another nod and this time I stood up, glad that I had brought long pajama trousers with me on this trip. I pulled my vest top down a little, placed my hand flat on my stomach and tried to smile. ‘I’m going to shower and go, get a coffee and I need to be at the store for eight.’

‘OK. I’m going to sleep for another hour,’ a pause, then a swipe across the covers to pick up his phone. ‘If that’s OK?’

‘Yes, that’s fine.’

‘When do you leave?’

‘Tomorrow. After the store opens.’

‘So?’

I shook my head, the slight curls around my face bobbing about. I made myself meet his eyes, made myself look at him. He was so familiar to me, not just in the way he looked, it was more than that, it was the way he carried himself, the way he spoke, the inflections, the tone of his voice, his body language. All of it, he was like finding an old pair of jeans that you’d forgotten about in the back of your wardrobe and finding that they still fit. I wondered if that was an awful analogy and while I did, he spoke.

‘Emily?’

I met his eyes, took a deep breath and tried to take him in. As if studying a photograph that I was about to throw away, take in every detail. I shook my head and I watched as his face fell.

‘No,’ I said, my voice firm and hard. ‘This was a mistake.’

No Stories To Tell

My sister sent me a DM on twitter this week. It was a tweet that she’d seen from a literary agent who was accepting submissions on novels and she thought I might be interested. My initial thought was that this was excellent, an agent actually wanting people to submit their work, rather than the usual line on websites that it can take blah blah time and it needs to fit the guidelines exactly or won’t even be looked at, and then I thought: I can’t.

I sent my book off to 43 agents last year. Forty three. That probably isn’t nearly enough but it seemed a lot as the rejections came in. I had one tentative yes, which I think became a no as I never heard from them again. But it seemed never ending. A constant flow of emails that ranged from an automatic response to some kind words about my writing but ultimately saying that my story was not strong enough.

I don’t think I have it in me to do it again.

I think that I need to rewrite the first three chapters, the ones that agents read, I think that the book is too long, I think that I need to put it on forums but that seems big and daunting. I think that I’ve picked the worst possible potential job for someone with no self esteem, no confidence in their ability but it’s the thing that I love the most. It’s the only thing that I imagine myself doing at 40, at 50, forever really.

I have vague ideas about a second book, ideas that come to me in the middle of the night and I’m excited about them and I wake up and get the girls to nursery and I sit down in front of my computer, write two or three paragraphs and dismiss the whole thing. It reads like something I’ve read before, it’s in the style of some author I like or it’s just boring. So I leave it and then we go again. Sometimes twice a week. Lately I’ve not even bothered to start the writing process at all. Why waste my time when I can watch documentaries on Netflix about Queen Victoria.

Maybe it’s the baby, maybe now that it seems so close, there simply isn’t room in my head for anything else. I find, though, that I am struggling to prepare for the baby, she doesn’t have a name, doesn’t have a car seat, I haven’t packed a hospital bag. I still can’t imagine her actually being here, being in our lives, and I’m not being deliberately fatalistic, I just can’t. I look at the girls and I freak out that their lives are about to change and we should be doing more to prepare them, talking to them more about when and how, rather than an abstract thing that they don’t really understand.

I think further ahead and think that I should dust off my CV, update it and prepare for finding a job in October when she is six months old. But the idea of leaving this little one when I was with her sisters for their whole lives seems abhorrent to me. But we can’t continue living with money worries hanging over us, we can’t stay living in this flat, there’s so much we want to do with our children that we simply cannot do.

Anyway, there are no stories at the moment. Just worry and fear and sleepless nights. And a lot of feeling not good, but that’s a pregnancy thing. I need to slow down, I need to breathe in the scent of my little girls’ hair and I need to relax. Everything happens as it should. Even if the path to get there is bumpy.

Other People’s Lives

Yesterday, I had a sad hour or so. We’d had a lovely morning, the girls had stayed at their grandparents for the night, their regular fortnightly Saturday night, and we had decided on a whim to go to Brighton for the morning. It was an almost sunny day, the kind of day we rejoice about as Brits in February and we didn’t want to spend another morning in the town where we live. It was a really nice morning, we didn’t do very much, just walked around, talking about our girls mostly, those parent moments where you can talk to the other person in the world who reveres your children as much as you do. J bought the new baby some little suede pumps and we ended our visit by popping into Mothercare.

Everything for a new baby is so expensive. And it made me immeasurably sad. When we started trying to conceive, and even when we did, we absolutely could afford to have a baby. For reasons, political and otherwise that don’t need going in to, we are struggling. J has a better job, we are on a much better path than we were, but things are harder financially. We also got rid of a lot as the girls were growing up, we just don’t have anywhere to store anything, my parents kindly kept all of the clothes so apart from those, we need everything. Oh, we have a cot. It needs a new mattress but we have a cot.

I don’t want a nursery (ha, like she won’t sleep in an alcove in our bedroom) full of new things. It definitely doesn’t matter if the pram is second hand, it doesn’t matter if 95% of her wardrobe belonged to her sisters first. It doesn’t matter but it makes me feel like a failure. I’d like the option of buying it, I think, the option of buying a new pram, the option of buying new clothes or a bouncer or whatever it might be.

I make the mistake of watching YouTube videos about people, very privileged people, who get a LOT of baby things delivered to them. The latest buggy, a snuzzpod (which I covet but definitely do not need), thing after thing that they can probably afford themselves. It isn’t jealousy, more envy. Yes, I am envious of the things that money can afford but I have no desire for their lives.

In the last few years, since becoming pregnant with the girls, I honestly have not coveted anyone else’s life. I can feel envious, I can be frustrated by the opportunities that some get that we don’t, without wanting to live anyone else’s life but my own. I love my life, I have the family that I have always wanted and I am happy. Sad moments can occur within happiness without altering that overall happiness.

Once the baby is here, looking adorable in clothes that I’m sentimental about because her big sisters wore them, riding in a pram bought off eBay, I won’t care. It won’t matter. But it kind of does at the moment.

It just kind of sucks.

Privacy

Blogging should be a completely honest process. Should be. It should be a place where you can be entirely open and honest, be able to express your true feelings and maybe sort through some things in your head that you maybe haven’t articulated to people that know you in real life. This is fine at the start, when the blog gets absolutely no views and when you aren’t putting any posts on your social media. Then you decide to, because it’s nice for people to read your things and suddenly you have to censor yourself a little bit.

There is a situation that I would love to write about and I probably could as the likelihood is that the people concerned will never read anything about it, but what if they did. I know that feelings would be hurt and perhaps rightfully so, and the very thought of that makes me feel a little bit sick. There are more general things that I’d love to write about but again, these are real people in my life and I have to respect and understand that.

What’s the answer? Password protected posts? I see the attraction but ultimately I don’t see the point. Maybe one day. It’s a bit like private Twitter, something I respect if it’s your thing, but I can’t see myself ever doing it. I like the interaction I have there and on my very favourite Instagram, and it isn’t a medium for me that I want to have private in any way.

In a way, this blog is a bit of a love letter to my family. I was absolutely hopeless with baby books and memory boxes with the girls, I meant to do them, I have them but I couldn’t tell you which one of them cut their first tooth or the exact age they were when they first walked. It matters but doesn’t matter really. I feel awful about it sometimes but mostly it’s just something that happened that I can do nothing about. I like timehop for the little daily updates, it’s lovely to find a little reminder everyday of a particular day or a holiday that you’d forgotten the exact date of. I’d rather write about Isla talking all day long or being a bossy knickers, Grace telling me she’s missed me when she’s been away from me for about a minute, or the way that J and I met, the way that our relationship developed. I’d love them to read about themselves in years to come, see how much they were loved and will continue to be loved.

So I will continue in the vein of telling my own story, my own complicated story of juggling a lot of balls, navigating this part of my life while reminiscing about things that have happened previously. I will talk about my family, J and my girls, the new baby and how that will affect all of our lives. But not, perhaps, anyone else. I don’t want to talk about this blog with anyone I know, it can be read, of course, but I don’t need to know who is reading it and what they are thinking. I will continue to journal but in a way that means I can’t hurt anyone’s feelings.

Is that fair?

(Sorry, this is another stream of consciousness post, I don’t generally read back what I’ve written before I hit publish. Sometimes it shows more than it should!)

Fiction Friday (3)

 

‘No,’ she sighed. ‘It’s not. We can’t stay together, Charlie.’

My stomach bottomed out, ending up somewhere in my socks. I kept my eyes on her as she spoke, somehow willing her to stuff the words back into her mouth so that they simply hadn’t been said. I opened my own mouth then closed it again. I had no idea what to say.

It occurred to me that I had never been the one sat here, the one that was being dumped, it was always me who was doing the dumping or the relationship had simply petered out to nothing and the chat at the end was painless. Or at least that was how I had always imagined it. Now, sitting here, the woman I loved sat in front of me, feet away but a million miles and I felt sick with the pain. A panicky, jittery sick.

‘Charlie, if we were just a bit nearer in age,’ her eyes were wet with tears and I wanted to reach for her but her hands were out of sight and, for the first time, I couldn’t tell if she’d recoil from my touch.

I shook my head, words still failing me.

‘It isn’t that I don’t love you, I just can’t watch you not have kids, not have the life that you should have, with the right person for you. It’s all right now, but think in ten years, you’ll be thirty three, in fifteen, I can’t even think about it. Because you’ll regret it at some point. Regret me.’

I wasn’t someone who cried, never had been, I wasn’t an alpha male type either, but tears weren’t something that came easily to me. I felt like I could cry then, I also felt as if I wanted to leave, just walk for ten minutes, try to clear my head then come back to this. I stood up.

‘Where are you going?’ Emily asked, lifting herself slightly out of the chair. I gestured for her to sit back down and pointed vaguely to the bathroom. Once I got there, I sat on the toilet seat and tried to compose myself. There was surely a way to talk her round, the conversation we had had didn’t need to be the be all and end all. I stood up and opened the door.

Emily was quietly crying in the armchair and I went to her, crouching in front of her. She reached down for me and I stood into her arms, we hugged for a time, it could have been seconds or minutes, I really couldn’t have told you. I felt her shoulders relax and I pulled back slightly. She touched her fingertips to my face.

‘I really wish that I could have met you, back then, when this could have been something amazing.’

‘It was,’ it was the first words that I had managed and they came out almost as a croak. I coughed a little. ‘It was amazing.’

She smiled, a small, intensely sad smile and nodded.

‘Just think about it,’ I was trying to keep the desperation out of my voice, not entirely convinced that I was succeeding. ‘Have a few days, I’ll go and you-‘

‘No, Charlie,’ she leant forward and kissed me very gently on the lips. ‘It’s all I’ve thought about for the last few days. For the last month.’

I touched my fingers to my lips and sat back on the floor, my hands on my knees. Her face was stained with tears, her mascara smudged and her eyes red, but she was beautiful. I felt utterly empty.

 

Enough

We conceived our twins the first time that we ever tried to conceive. We had been together eighteen months, were very happy and went to a birthday party. J had a few drinks and I drove home and said that we had to make a change while we were still young (ish), either travel, you know, leave our jobs for six months and see some of the world or start a family. You can be brave, I find, if you think that the other person is only half listening, or deny it in the morning. Children were, at that point, a theoretical conversation, something we knew the other wanted but there were absolutely no time scales involved.

That night, I whispered to ask him if he was sure and the girls were made.

We didn’t know that there were two until the November, a day that I will remember for the rest of my life, and without doubt, the most life changing day that I will ever have.

The plan was for four, we talked about it a little, we liked the idea of four, a big happy family, with lots of kids and cats and just noise, sports being played at the weekend, films being watched in the evening, that sort of thing. But twins are absolutely exhausting and they were over two, just slightly, before it was even a consideration to have any more. I must admit that I thought that it would be fairly quick, yes, I was over 35, but I had been 33 the first time and I didn’t feel any different, certainly not any older. I read quite a bit on conceiving when you’re older and I felt quite prepared for there to be a wait.

I wasn’t at all prepared. The months stacked up and I felt more and more like a failure. I tracked my cycle and found myself getting more and more cross if we didn’t try enough during my fertile period. I went to the doctors and was told, in no uncertain terms, that any fertility, and I mean any, would have to be funded privately as we had children already. I was told to try until Christmas, that there was no need to panic and to not panic, as panic would make me stressed and that wouldn’t help at all.

J and I talked about it a lot, of course and his biggest question was along the lines of why I felt that the girls weren’t enough for me. I  don’t blame him for this question at all, it seems perfectly sensible to ask, we have two amazing little girls and surely that should be enough. What I couldn’t quite articulate, and probably still can’t, is that it wasn’t about them. If we never had conceived again, then it would have been, in time, just fine. I would have got over not having any more children and they would have been more than enough. But this was about me. Having twins is an entirely medical thing, you have scans and appointments almost all the time, you are reminded constantly as to your high risk pregnancy, you know that the birth itself will be a medical one, no water birth, monitored the whole time, the midwife not leaving the room at any point. And I wanted to experience something more holistic almost. I wanted to just enjoy a pregnancy, a “normal” birth, enjoying just one baby in the hospital afterwards. There is a whole blog post needed for the after birth care in the hospital but suffice to say, it wasn’t the best.

The question is now, will this feel like enough? I have read many blog posts and articles that suggest that you know when it is your last pregnancy, your last baby, a feeling of calm almost that accompanies you throughout the whole thing. That your family feels complete almost as soon as the baby is born. Maybe that will happen, but this hasn’t felt at all as if this will be my last pregnancy. It’s strange, I expected it to, but I still find myself drawn to baby boy clothes, feel myself wanting a neutral pram just in case a little boy has to go in it after our daughter.

If she is our last child, then so be it, I am a huge believer in life turning out as it should. That, generally speaking, things happen as they are meant to. But sitting here now, eight and a half weeks before she is due, I still think that I’ll do this again. She will definitely be enough, just as her big sisters were and my word, three daughters, what a joy, what an absolute honour that would be.

How lucky would we be?

Hearts and Flowers

Unless you have recently landed on the planet, you will know that today is Valentine’s Day. A day that is fairly horrendous if you’re not in a relationship as it is everywhere. Kids make cards at school, it’s in every supermarket, a whole aisle usually dedicated to cards and chocolates and teddy bears, you can’t really avoid it. I am largely ambivalent about it, I am in a relationship obviously but it is not one that needs validation on a certain day. I did get a card, I’ll be honest, and that’s lovely but I would have been absolutely fine if I hadn’t.

Once, a very long time ago, my ex took me to get a takeaway from Chicken Cottage. I can distinctly remember sitting in his car, always his car, in one of those rows of shops found in the middle of housing estates waiting for him to get the food for us to take home. It’s funny, that’s the only Valentine’s that I remember with him and we pissibly had four, maybe five together.

It goes without saying that he wasn’t romantic.

It was Valentine’s Day two weeks before I met J. I was the manager of a well known lingerie shop (UK readers can guess which one!) and it was awful. Single and going on fairly awful blind dates, organised on a dating app, never going anywhere, sometimes from my point of view, sometimes theirs. Customer after customer came in, spending an absolute fortune on gifts and underwear, talking about their relationships, about love, even my staff were telling me about their plans. I wish that I’d known that J was just a few days away, I’d like to tell that sad girl that better things were coming.

The Valentine’s before the girls were born in 2014, we were saving money and J cut out hundreds of pink paper hearts. He distributed them up the stairs to our flat then, down the hall and into the living room, leading to a huge homemade card. It is hands down the most romantic thing that anyone has ever done for me, before or since.

 

Now, in a busy life, I get J something from his girls. And a car. We’ll have a pizza tonight and maybe watch a film. In a week and a half, we are going to London for our anniversary and for a last break before the baby is born. Romance is definitely not dead, but it is just comes in different forms these days. It comes in buying a bag of sweets that you’ll know he’ll like when you go to the shops, it comes in snuggling with your babies watching Paw Patrol while you beam above their heads, it comes in absolutely prioritising your relationship over all others. It comes in your total belief in one another. It comes in planning your lives together.

I love him so very much. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Stalemate

Firstly, is that one word or two?

I’m procrastinating. It’s half term and the girls are not at nursery. This is both wonderful and frustrating, mostly wonderful, it’s lovely that they wake up and ask what we’re doing and it’s soft play or the park or today, their cousin came over. She’s two years older than them, and they have grown up together, my sister used to look after her while my sister, her mum, was at University and so we used to spend days together, the five of us, even when my girls were tiny. She obviously is at school now so we see her less often, but when we do, she always slips back into the old routine with us all. It’s funny, Isla doesn’t leave her side when she is around, talks to her about this and that, asks her questions and tells her over and over that she is her best friend. Grace, on the other hand, gets very over excited, plays hard for a little while then takes herself off for twenty minutes to recharge. She’s like her daddy in many ways.

I digress. Again. I am very aware suddenly that we are in the throes of the final countdown. It feels as if there is a countdown to everything. No more meandering through the year, Christmas and birthdays being the only real events worth bothering about. Now, there is, of course, the baby. Nine weeks tomorrow. That feels insane to me. We’re getting ready for her, I wrote a list last week of what we needed to buy and the drawers that we’ve allocated are now full of clean clothes and muslins and little tiny shoes that the girls like to look at. Emotionally, however, I’m not ready. J is, I think, finally excited and I’m kind of thinking that it was all a terrible idea. I’m reassuring myself that this is entirely normal and the feeling does ebb and flow as time goes on.

The countdown to school seems somehow more significant to me. Maybe because the girls are with me always, that they are two small people in their own right, not a largely theoretical baby that I don’t yet know. I think the thing is that life will never ever be the same again. They will now go to school until they are adults. I mean, seriously?! How on earth can my tiny babies be ready for school? They are ready. They are excited. They can’t wait and they will thrive. Again, it’s me. I’m not ready. At all.

I haven’t written either of my short stories. I haven’t looked at either of the two new books I should be reading and deciding if it’s worth continuing with them. I haven’t edited the first three chapters of my published book to resubmit them in the hope that someone might like them this time round. I do have ideas on how to do that, and on Wednesday, when I do have time, I must make a start.

I am blogging though, and that is something. I have written a huge number of words here since the beginning of January and if word count is anything, it is at least a bit of a confidence boost.

I’m now off to have a bath and go to bed. In case anyone wondered, Grace was up for an hour and a half last night. I’m tired. We’re all tired. She even woke super sleeper Isla up.

Times are weird round here.

Currency

Before I had my twins, I rarely thought about sleep. I just did it, went to bed and went to sleep. I can vividly remember, in the early days with J, waking him to talk in the middle of the night, going for walks at approaching midnight, watching films until the early hours and still managing to wake up and go to work with minimal effort. I probably have distinctly rose coloured goggles on about this, I probably moaned, I definitely bought too many Starbucks but I will allow myself the memory of sleep being an easy thing.

Oh, and the naps. We used to nap. It was fairly rare that I went through an entire day off without a little sleep in the afternoon, waking just before J was due to come home and reapplying the mascara that had smudged all over my face.

Then the girls were born, and oh boy, did things change. Twins are exhausting, sleep depriving demons. There were nights when I watched it become morning without having slept at all, the two of them tag teaming to make sure that as soon as I put one down, fed and changed, the other would fuss. Grace was a low birth weight baby, so she could only be fed every two hours at first as she was so small and this made things harder and harder. Eventually, we worked out a routine, a routine that we intend to do again with this new baby and things improved but there was a time there when sleep seemed entirely absent.

You expect things to improve now that they are nearly four and you would be half right. Isla has always been an amazing sleeper and remains so, asleep at seven every evening and consistently waking at seven the next morning. If she does wake up, she is soothed back to sleep almost immediately and I pray and hope that this baby takes after her biggest sister.

Grace is less good. At the moment, she wakes for an hour to an hour and a half every single night, and then if that isn’t the case, she is up for the day any time from about half five. She is slowly killing me. She is then miserable from about six in the evening, but I’m so scared to let her sleep during the day. I dread going to sleep myself, and that’s hard now with my very own in-utero karate kid and I spend more time thinking about sleep than anything else in my life.

It will get better, or it won’t. Or it will and then the baby will be born and I’ll be trying to keep a baby quiet in a too small flat so that she doesn’t wake everyone up. But that will ebb and flow into a routine of it’s own and I will allow myself, once she’s here, to give myself a break, to maybe sleep when she sleeps, to maybe thinking that playing candy crush for half an hour with a cup of tea is a perfectly acceptable way to spend my time.

It’s what I didn’t expect from parenthood. That and being obsessed with common (and not so common) childhood illnesses. It’s funny, isn’t it, how things evolve, how what you expected from your reading of baby blogs and the odd book didn’t come to pass at all, but the things that people never mentioned did.

I will add that Grace is an example to us all in many ways. She starts every day, EVERY DAY, with a smile on her face, telling me she’s had a beautiful sleep, asking me if I have had a beautiful sleep. I lie. She likes to chat and cuddle and I must do better than being grumpy because I’m exhausted.

*in case sleep stories are your absolute thing, my insta stories are often about sleep, so please follow me there for more fun!*

Worth

Before I had my girls, I could not cook. I could put things in the oven, of course, and I could put together a salad if all the things were pre-prepared but actual cooking was a no go. J would cook as he worked less hours than me and I would wash up, that was the deal. I would do the housework on my day off during the week, but it was easy then, there wasn’t anyone in the house during the day so it never really got dirty. I did the washing and the ironing I did in front of the telly in the evening. There was loads of time then. Eons of time. I really don’t know what I did with it all.

Now, I can cook. I can cook pasta sauces from scratch, make pies, stir fries, I can use spices and recipes don’t phase me, I own a selection of cook books and use them fairly regularly. I can bake and I do, I bake cookies with the girls and bread sometimes. I’ve made fairly elaborate birthday cakes in the past, cakes that have been talked about since. I can even poach an egg.

I have very little time now. Yes, the girls go to nursery fifteen hours a week but that disappears in the cleaning and the organising and in trying to write. The evenings are spent cooking, ironically, and washing up and doing bits and bobs that didn’t get done during the days. The school holidays are hardest obviously, the fifteen hours isn’t there and there’s even more time to fill with the girls. I love the time woth them, of course, but I really do struggle with sitting in the lounge and seeing dust or clutter or things that need doing.

When I worked, my worth was determined by how much money I earned, how my store did, my own performance, and as long as the house was vaguely clean, it was fine. We spent our days off mooching, breakfast out and long walks, naps in the afternoon and lazy evenings watching films. Can you even imagine?!

Now, my worth, and I appreciate this is my own perception, is determined by how I raise my children and how much I contribute. I am a good mother, my children are polite, happy little girls who have so many people in their lives to adore them. They are bright and funny and they love each other to absolute distraction. I cannot count the amount of times a day when they come to me and say ‘I love you Mummy,’ and every single time, I am glad that I took that chance to be with them.

And how much I contribute. Financially, nothing so I try to keep a nice house. This is doing nothing for feminism, I know, and I do believe fervently in feminism and equality but I find myself slipping into a caricature of a fifties housewife with alarming regularity. J will offer to do something in the evening, something entirely reasonable and I’ll shoot him down, telling him to relax, that he’s had a hard day at work. I’m moments away from offering him a glass of brandy sometimes. I even suggested this week that because we are only having one baby, that he needn’t get up in the night with her, that I’d do it all. To his credit, he looked at me aghast and said that he wanted to get up and do his bit, that she was his daughter too.

Sometimes, when I have moments of utter clarity, I realise that I’m ridiculous. My worth is determined by me. Just me. Yes, of course, it matters what people think of me, of course it does, I think people who say that it doesn’t are deluded at best and liars at worst. But maybe that is the crux of it, maybe that is the problem. Maybe I need to just work on that, this interlinked puzzle of worth and self esteem.

And maybe take a nap occasionally.