The Year that Changed Everything Read online

  The spare bedroom was turned into a nursery decorated in a riot of yellows and white and Ted, whose father had a lathe, had slaved over a handmade cot.

  She wriggled her feet into her slippers after the bathroom. It was a long time since she’d been able to see her feet, much less bend down to pull on shoes.

  ‘You try and snooze,’ she said, kissing Ted on the head as he rearranged the pillows.

  She went into their tiny kitchen to make toast with honey – she could eat it for the Olympics. Also ice cream. Gallons of it.

  Being pregnant had made her ravenous. Nobody had mentioned that, although she’d been told of women who’d licked coal or consumed Marmite by the bucket.

  She had no idea how she was going to get the baby weight off, but from the size of her rear end, which was admittedly hard to see in their wardrobe mirror, Sam was pretty sure it wasn’t all baby.

  When she’d confided this to Joanne, her sister had laughed and said, ‘It’ll come off: sleep deprivation does that to you.’

  ‘I hope you’re joking,’ said Sam, because she knew how shattered Joanne had been when she’d had three children one after the other.

  ‘I am not joking, not remotely.’

  Joanne smiled with the Mona-Lisa-like smile which implied that, for once, the younger sister knew something the older one didn’t.

  Sam looked into the back garden to see if Dixie and Horace, the two small, bitsa-everything rescue dogs on whom she and Ted lavished their affection, had finished their morning run around the garden where they barked at birds, gave worms the evil eye and peed liberally in order to remind all other creatures that this was their territory.

  But the dogs were busy and, knowing their lap of investigation could take some time, and because her lower back ached strangely, Sam sat down on a kitchen chair.

  She hoped the dogs would be fine with the baby and they’d been playing crying baby noises whenever they fed them, as per internet advice, so the dogs would associate the baby with the loveliness of dinner, which was one of the highlights of Dixie and Horace’s day. Pavlov’s bell version of getting the dogs ready for the new arrival.

  ‘Do you think it will work?’ Sam had asked anxiously.

  ‘Course. The worst crime they’ll commit is to try to slobber kisses on the baby or clamber onto your lap for breastfeeding,’ Ted teased. ‘They’ll adjust.’

  He’d been raised with dogs and was relaxed around them. In contrast, Sam’s mother had an allergy, or so she said, and no animal had ever graced Sam’s childhood home.

  On the hard kitchen chair, Sam moved to try to find a comfortable position.

  The ache was getting weirdly lower and deeper. Was this a sign that the baby was moving into the birth canal? she wondered.

  Some women said pregnancy made them feel at one with their body: Sam, who had spent years having her hormones artificially manipulated in order to stimulate a pregnancy that never came, no longer felt as if she had a clue what was going on with hers. Which worried her, although she hadn’t breathed a word of this to anyone. The baby fear, that something would go wrong to stop her having this child because her body had failed before, was too ridiculous to voice out loud.

  And there was another fear, one that loomed bigger each day: in all those years of trying to get pregnant, she’d barely allowed herself to imagine becoming an actual parent.

  Now she wondered how on earth she could be a proper mother. Because she had no experience of how a warm, kind motherly figure behaved.

  ‘Happy birthday, Sam!’

  Ted appeared in his T-shirt and boxers, his body marathon-lean and tanned from sunny evenings spent in the garden sanding and painting the crib.

  He’d been in a vintage Rolling Stones T-shirt and jeans at the college party where they’d met, a night when Ted said he was walking her home to keep her safe.

  ‘I can keep myself safe, thank you very much,’ snapped Sam.

  Ted had grinned and walked her home anyway.

  ‘You were like an angry pixie, those eyes flashing at me and I just couldn’t keep away,’ he’d said later, when they were inseparable, Sam’s prickly defences long since lowered.

  ‘Honey.’ He leaned down and kissed her. ‘I couldn’t sleep and it’s not fair that you’re up alone on your birthday.’ With a flourish, he put a small box on the table in front of her and stood back proudly. ‘It’s a really small gift,’ he explained. ‘Tiny so I can get you a proper something when the baby is born or you can enjoy going out shopping with me, because forty is a special birthday. You should have diamonds and—’

  Sam opened the box, gasped suddenly and stared at the interior blankly.

  Ted squinted at her. ‘You don’t like? They’re gold-plated earrings. The gold will rub off, it always does, and I can return them if you’d like, but I know you like purple stones and—’

  ‘Ted!’

  ‘You really hate them?’ Ted picked up the box and looked at the contents critically. ‘I thought you’d hate it more if I spent money buying any proper jewellery without you—’

  ‘My waters have just broken,’ hissed Sam, as she felt the surge of liquid move from a trickle to a flood. ‘I love the present, Ted, but we need to go to the hospital. I can’t have the baby on the kitchen floor – it’s not clean enough with the dogs, and the baby will get kennel cough or dog flu or something . . .’

  ‘Your waters have broken?’ repeated Ted, not sounding like someone with a PhD in data analytics.

  He sat down beside her, then immediately got up again as if someone had switched his brain off and then back on, and all the circuits were recalibrating.

  ‘Right. OK. Will I time your contractions or . . .?’

  Her reliable, steadfast husband stared at her as if all rational thought had been sucked out of him and he wanted her to tell him what to do.

  ‘Get me to the hospital,’ she whispered.

  Stopping only to ring the doorbell next door so they could tell their neighbour, Cynthia, that Operation Baby was ON and would she go in and take the dogs, as agreed, Ted helped Sam into the car.

  Despite several strong buzzes on her doorbell, Cynthia didn’t appear.

  ‘She’s in the shower,’ said Shazz, Cynthia’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, coming out onto the shared driveway still in her skimpy denim cut-offs and a leather-look bra top worn with a net top, her short pale pink hair fluffed up into a halo round her head. Definitely just in from the night before.

  ‘Good luck, Sam, it’ll be fine,’ said Shazz, draping her beautiful, fake-tanned self over the car door and flattening Sam with the scents of fags, booze, club and not-been-to-bedness.

  ‘How do you know it’ll be fine?’ demanded Sam, her politeness filter entirely knocked out by the knowledge that Baby Bean wanted out and there were no medical professionals around to help.

  ‘I’ve seen it on the soaps,’ said Shazz thoughtfully. ‘It’ll work out. Babies are, er . . . you know – natural.’

  ‘The soaps aren’t real!’ Sam yelled. ‘And it’s scary. Imagine giving birth right now. Big baby.’ She lowered her voice and pointed downwards. ‘Small exit.’

  ‘Yeuch.’ Shazz took a step back, thinking about it. ‘That’s going to mess it all up down there, right? In the lady garden palace.’ She shuddered.

  For a brief moment, Sam thought about her own lady garden palace and getting the baby out of it. She’d watched lots of Discovery TV birthing shows and right now, she was scared.

  Ted got into the car.

  ‘Hospital bag!’ Sam reminded him.

  He got the bag.

  Looking right and left like a racing driver, Ted whizzed through every red light on the way to the maternity hospital. Beside him, Sam panted and screeched with a combination of nerves and pain.

  Another wave hit her. This was not what she’d anticipated, not
this searing pain that felt as if it would rip her in two. Plus, she might kill Ted before they got to the hospital. He kept going over speed bumps too fast.

  That was the problem, she decided grimly as the pain receded. She was having a baby with an idiot. An idiot who loved his computer, thought the sun shone out of the Tipperary hurling team’s collective backsides and had no idea what women had to go through in life. Any of it.

  Women understood pain. Or women were pain . . .? Something like that. She’d read it on Pinterest.

  Another pain bloomed inside her.

  ‘Drive faster!’ she hissed.

  Ted broke all the speed limits and, at last, they slid to a halt in front of the Rotunda Hospital in the ambulance bay.

  As she was put into a wheelchair at the hospital door, she was half sobbing. ‘My waters broke an hour ago and the baby’s coming,’ she said.

  A nurse shooed Ted off to park properly because he wasn’t allowed to abandon the car in the ambulance bay.

  ‘I am going to have this baby here and now!’ went on Sam, watching with dismay as her husband left. She loved him. She’d been so horrible to him . . . he couldn’t go—

  ‘You probably won’t give birth this quickly on your first,’ soothed the nurse. ‘Let’s see how you’re doing.’

  ‘No, it’s a week overdue, it’s coming very soon, I can feel it,’ said Sam, who was not feeling remotely soothed.

  ‘Everyone thinks that, but it’s a first baby and they take time.’

  ‘No, I do know,’ said Sam wildly. ‘I’m giving birth now, here and now! Get me into the delivery room!’

  ‘All right, pet, let’s check out how dilated you are.’

  Somehow, assisted by two nurses, and a midwife with an even more soothing voice, Sam got onto a bed.

  ‘It’s coming!’ she shrieked as another pain hit her.

  ‘It’s not,’ said the midwife calmly as she emerged from between Sam’s legs. ‘You’re only three centimetres dilated.’

  ‘Three!’

  Three centimetres would not let a Barbie doll emerge. Barbie’s insanely perky bosoms would get stuck.

  ‘Yes, only three, I’m sorry, Sam,’ said the midwife with the awareness of a professional who’d delivered enough babies to know that smugness in delivery rooms did not help anyone.

  Three was nothing, Sam knew. Nothing. How could she be in this pain with no sign of a child appearing? What was next? Red-hot pokers of pain?

  Ted came back from parking the car as another contraction ripped through Sam.

  ‘Darling,’ he said, taking her hand.

  ‘Don’t darling me!’ she yelled, fear coming out as rage. ‘If you ever think you are coming near me again with that . . . that thing, you have another thing coming!’

  ‘But . . . but . . . we want this baby,’ muttered Ted, who had read all the baby books with mentions of fury bouncing off the walls in the delivery suite. But not his Sam, surely?

  After this long journey of IVF, he was going to help, hold Sam’s hand, man the phone.

  Not get screamed at.

  ‘Relax, dear,’ whispered the midwife to Ted. ‘They all say things like that. In fact, that’s mild. No sex forever or having their bits chopped off is what some partners hear in these rooms, but afterwards, it’s OK, you wait and see.’

  ‘It’s her birthday,’ Ted said, desperately trying to shift the conversation on from parts of his anatomy he did not want to discuss with strange women. ‘She’s forty.’

  ‘We know, she’s an elderly primigravida.’

  ‘I am not elderly!’ said Sam, who had nothing wrong with her hearing even if it felt as if a giant wriggling emu with a bowling ball for a head was trying to emerge from her body, sideways. This could not be normal. There must be something wrong.

  ‘Not old, just old to have your first one,’ soothed the midwife. ‘Once you’re thirty-five or older, they call you elderly.’

  ‘I’m forty today,’ Sam said, tearfully. ‘That’s not elderly. Life begins at forty: everyone says it.’

  ‘Happy birthday!’ said the midwife, who was thirty-nine, and hoped so too.

  Four hours later, two more centimetres dilated and a lot of screaming at Ted, interspersed with sobbing and saying sorry because she loved him, Sam thought she might just be going mad with pain. Nobody told her it would be like this or that it would take this long.

  When people said ‘I was in labour for sixteen hours’, she’d thought it was exaggeration, not reality. Like saying ‘I didn’t sleep a wink last night’, or ‘I lost all that weight without doing anything’.

  A whopping big baby-birthing fib.

  But in this case, it seemed as if it was true.

  Doing his best to be helpful, Ted extracted Sam’s birth plan from the hospital bag.

  The birth plan was full of ideas for the perfect birth and involved soft music – they’d done a track list and it was on both of their phones – no drugs in case they affected the baby and, if possible, Ted to cut the cord.

  The birth plan was a paean to glorious natural childbirth.

  The woman in the prenatal class had praised their approach, telling them how it was better for Baby to be shoved, drug-free, into the world.

  So Ted innocently handed the sheaf of paper to Sam, who sent it flying as another contraction hit her.

  ‘Jesus, the pain!’ she roared.

  ‘Breathe,’ said Ted, watching as the birth plan scattered all over the floor.

  ‘I can’t,’ gasped Sam as she felt as if her insides were being torn apart. ‘I must have been mad with all that breathing crap. Screw breathing. Where’s the anaesthetist?’

  ‘The one on call is in theatre with an emergency caesarean,’ said the midwife.

  Sam stopped grabbing the bed bars long enough to grab Ted.

  ‘Find him,’ she hissed, in a voice uncannily like that of the little girl from The Exorcist, ‘and bring him to me.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Ted, shocked at seeing his wife behaving like someone possessed.

  ‘Dr Lennox will be along soon.’

  ‘I need him now.’

  ‘Dr Lennox is a she.’

  ‘Does she have kids?’ growled Sam.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then beg her, she knows what this is like.’

  ‘She had twins first time.’

  ‘I don’t care if she gave birth to two fully grown hippos without medical intervention, I need her and her bag of drugs. Please.’

  ‘But your birth plan,’ went on Ted, thinking that perhaps it was his job to make Sam stick with the plan she’d wanted for so long. ‘You know we don’t want drugs for this delivery and I have your music ready to go—’

  He ignored the warning looks on the midwife’s and nurses’ faces who had seen all of this played out many times before.

  ‘Babies don’t read the birth plan,’ began the younger nurse, who was used to shattered husbands, men who came in all gung-ho and went home, bruised and traumatised wrecks. ‘You never really know how a delivery is going to progress.’

  Sam launched into Ted: ‘If you are having this baby, you can do it without drugs, but I am having it, I am trying to pass a bowling ball from an orifice that has never had a bowling ball emerge from it before, and I want everything! ALL the drugs! Everything in the hospital.’

  There was nothing close for Sam to throw but Ted ducked just in case.

  This was nothing like the Sam he knew and loved.

  Two more hours elapsed with just pain and the anticipation of it in Sam’s landscape.

  ‘I love you,’ Ted kept saying.

  ‘I know,’ she said when she wasn’t in actual pain.

  She was tearful and sweaty, and in her saner moments, wondered how people appeared in celebrity magazines at the hospital door a day after giving b
irth, all groomed and perfect.

  She had seen herself in the bathroom mirror when she’d been trying the ‘keep walking and let gravity help’ method. She was puce in the face, sweating and her hair was a greaseball. A month left alone in Sephora with a crack team of beauticians would not make her look good ever again.

  ‘I keep thinking the baby’s going to come, but it doesn’t,’ she said weepily to Ted, who was half hugging her, half holding her up. ‘I know they say long first labours are normal, but this can’t be normal? They’re not telling us something.’

  She began to cry again.

  ‘We don’t know what normal is here,’ Ted said manfully. He was being ultra-careful in case he upset the balance between possessed wife and crying wife, the latter being upsetting but easier to handle.

  The young nurse arrived back in the room to check the foetal heart rate and Sam’s cervix.

  ‘You’re fully dilated!’ she said, peeping up from between Sam’s legs.

  ‘You see, nobody knows when a baby wants to make an entrance.’

  ‘My baby’s coming?’ said Sam, almost shocked.

  ‘Your baby is coming,’ smiled the nurse.

  Within minutes, it was all action and still no anaesthetist.

  Ted was, to his delight, up the head end of the bed because he wasn’t sure he could cope with the whole baby emerging from the birth canal end, no matter how much he and Sam had discussed how this was important for both of them.

  Instead, he remembered his friend, Lorcan, who’d said: ‘It does something to you, mate, seeing her producing a baby out of down there. Can take a while to get over it, uh, sexually.’

  Sam screamed, pushed, and nearly ripped a hole in Ted’s hand as she pushed their baby into the world.

  ‘Push,’ said the midwife at the right times.

  Sam pushed, feeling every tendon straining, every bit of her body ripping.

  Despite the noise of machines and other women giving birth, screaming too, there were moments when she felt suspended in time – lost between pain, joy and anxiety and, above all, that wild primal desire to birth her baby safely.