The Baby Group

As Poppy and I drive in silence to the childminder’s house, I think about Ed, now on his own in the car to work. It’s only a thirty-minute drive away but he needs to be in early today. He looked distracted this morning, like he often looks distracted these days, and I wonder if it’s work or something else. I frown.

He needs order, Ed. Not chaos and lost jackets and Weetabix on the floor and lateness.

I have a pang of regret that I can’t provide that for him but another pang of regret that he doesn’t play a role in making that happen in our house himself.

Because in my enthusiasm for meeting a respectable, handsome man with a proper job and a close family – a man who also looked at me like I was the hottest woman he had ever seen, and the feeling has always been mutual – I overlooked the fact that he is Radio 4 traditional and I am … not.

The differences weren’t so noticeable when we rented in a city and ate Deliveroo for tea but now we own a house in the countryside and have a child? They’re sticking their head above the parapet, about chores, about parenting, about work, and sometimes it’s like I’m a Trotskyist in a coalition with the far right. But still, I think, we love each other. We don’t have to agree on everything.

A few minutes later I pull up outside the childminder’s up the road. Ed hadn’t offered to do it but I wouldn’t have let him anyway. This was my multitasking horror show; no one else’s. I wanted to settle her in. I wanted to mourn the end of maternity leave. I wanted to write lists and pack seventeen bags last night like a ritual and huff about it. Parental gatekeeping, I think the books call it.

Apt for a gatekeeper, I make Poppy hold on to the gate of Ronnie’s house with her tiny Peppa Pig backpack on and snap her from behind so I can use the picture for a back-to-work post on my parenting blog later.

‘Is it okay?’ Ed asked, concerned at first when I launched Cheshire Mama. ‘Privacy wise, to show off our home and our daughter?’

But I swept away his concerns.

‘Oh, everyone does it, Ed,’ I said dismissively. ‘It’s the twenty-first century. Life’s online. I’ll keep an eye on it, make sure there’s nothing weird posted on there.’

Ed didn’t raise it again. He trusted me. I worked in digital marketing, did a lot of social media. This was my world. Plus we saw kids’ films for free in the best seats when they first came out and a fancy coffee machine arrived by courier. I told him that potentially, this blog and my Instagram could start to make us money. That was enough to stem any objection.

It gathered pace, the numbers rolling in.

‘We’d get more followers if we showed the whole family off,’ I told him, with a grin. ‘You, topless at the coffee machine should do it.’

I raised an eyebrow, questioning.

Based on the number of women who stared at him on the street though, I knew a lot of women would enjoy staring at him in the privacy of their own homes. And funnily enough, when I did start to include him, it boomed fast.

‘You do that all the time,’ my half-sister Josephine tells me whenever I give that verdict about the brand’s success. ‘Give Ed all the credit; don’t give yourself any. Cheshire Mama is successful because it’s a good blog. You have the eye, you’re funny, you know your stuff on social. The whole leaving the city and being new to the countryside is relatable.’

I drop my phone into my bag. ‘Okay, Pop, got it!’ I say. She’s used to posing for my iPhone by now.

I take her hand and we walk in.

Ronnie was recommended to me by Emma, whose son Seth goes to her too. I’ve met Ronnie twice. She seems lovely. She also obviously has, you know, paperwork and things.

But I am leaving my child with her all day. Is this insanity? Is it legal?

‘Good morning, Poppy!’ singsongs Ronnie in her gentle Brummie accent as we walk in, heaving four bags and a suitcase-load of anxiety. ‘And good morning, Scarlett.’

She looks at me with pragmatic empathy. It’s a very specific expression.

‘Big day today, I know,’ she says. ‘But we’re going to have fun, aren’t we Poppy?’

I fend off tears by speaking fast, with no let-up.

‘She doesn’t have a dummy except for her nap, which will be at eleven, eleven thirty but definitely not after three because otherwise sleep is a nightmare later,’ I ramble.

I realise why I am shattered all the time despite Poppy, finally, sleeping well. It is the level of detail in my head. The tiny things I know about my daughter’s needs and her day and that I am tick, tick, ticking and checking and balancing all day long.

The parenting stuff is often left to me. It’s my head that’s crammed full of its mundanities.

Ronnie smiles.

‘Got it,’ she says. ‘We do naps straight after lunch anyway. All tickety-boo.’

Serene. Experienced, both at childminding and looking calm in front of irritant mums, I suspect. Meanwhile it is me versus the sweat again.

‘Milk, water, snacks in the Peppa rucksack,’ I say as Poppy crawls to the doll she can see in the living room.

‘Change of clothes, nappies, Doggy Dog – that’s what she calls it, it doesn’t have a name – all in this one.’

I gesture wildly at one of the eighty-five zip compartments in my changing bag.

I look up at Ronnie. Still serene.

I point at bag three.

‘This one is toys.’

Then I look at Poppy, yanking the doll round the room by its hair in one hand as she crawls, and my face goes red.

Ronnie smiles.

‘I know you have toys. But in case she wants her toys.’

Bag four.

‘Stickers, books, crafts … I guess this bag is the calmer stuff. For when she needs to relax. Perhaps around three thirty?’

‘Perfect,’ says Ronnie kindly, gently, like she is trying to deflect a toddler from a tantrum. ‘We’ll do some of that later.’

I’ve overdone it. Even I know it. But if you pack enough bags, the feelings of guilt can perhaps be squashed under their weight. If you buy enough stuff, perhaps what you can’t purchase – time with your daughter, sanity, a mind that isn’t running away with thoughts about the right time to get out Doggy Dog – isn’t as obvious.

Serene, serene, serene. I can’t hear any other children; we must be the first. This is early. Poppy will spend so many hours here. Oh God.

I stare at Ronnie. On the surface: maternal, cosy. Her hair is short in a way that says practical and efficient. Her clothes would be able to go in the boil wash that her job probably requires. She’s about to turn fifty, has children of her own who are in their teens now and has been a childminder, I know from the chats we had at Poppy’s settling-in days, for upwards of sixty kids. Seth has survived; thrived, Emma says.

Everything seems right.

But I panic.

Does Ronnie’s mask slip when the others arrive and then she loses her shit, desperate for everyone to shut up? Would she ever lose it with Poppy?

Me versus sweat, me versus sweat.

But then I remember my pièce de résistance.

My document.

This document that will make everything okay and keep everyone happy.

Mostly me.

But also everyone else.

Okay really, just me.

‘This is a schedule of Poppy’s whole day,’ I say slowly, unrolling the document like I am presenting a degree, so that Ronnie gives this masterpiece the gravitas it deserves.

In my head, I am already having a conversation with Asha in which she is congratulating me on multitasking to such a level that I have documentation on my daughter’s oatie bar consumption.

‘You. Are. A. Machine,’ she will say. ‘How you have time to do your job, keep on top of house stuff AND write a schedule of Poppy’s day is beyond me. It’s beyond all of us. It’s beyond womankind as a whole.’

But, bursting my bubble, Ronnie is kind of … ushering me out of the door.

‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ she says. ‘It’s going to be smooth sailing here.’

I glance down. My document is bunched up in her hand. I have a deep-seated suspicion that Ronnie will never read it.

And meanwhile the one who matters doesn’t care about the document either.

Instead, Poppy is sitting next to Ronnie’s foot, poking her moccasin slipper and pulling at the bottom of her leggings. I bend down to say goodbye and Poppy’s rosebud lip wobbles.

My insides feel as though they have a hand roaming around in them, jiggling things about, perhaps performing some sort of surgery that involves the removal of an organ. I feel emotions that I can’t name, tormented at the idea of walking away from her.

I have heard so many people talk about this feeling when you leave your child but I’m sure mine is worse. The worst.

I push past Ronnie and gather Poppy up, stroking that short fuzzy brown hair and smothering her in I love yous. She’s come dressed for fun: leggings and a T-shirt, ready to play, make mess, do all the things that Poppy likes doing. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.

I take a deep breath.

‘Right, chicken, you have the best day,’ I say but she doesn’t look convinced. She knows something’s unusual. And she’s suspicious of Ronnie.

Gulping back a sob, I plaster on a pretend smile.

‘Mummy’s going to work for a while now but I’ll be back later to get you,’ I say.

She doesn’t quite cry.

‘She’ll be fine,’ says Ronnie, softly. ‘And so will you. Hey, by the way are you the one who does the Cheshire Mama blog?’

I nod, distracted by Poppy. Not now, Ronnie. Do I look like I can hold a conversation?

‘I love that blog!’ She smiles. ‘About time we got something local to us. Well done.’

I say thank you, then kiss Poppy ten, twenty, possibly thirty more times before I drag myself out of the door. If I don’t leave now I will be late and then I will be officially bad at parenting and work, which is really everything, so I will be officially bad at everything.

I cry so hard on the drive to the station though that the windscreen has the visibility of mid-thunderstorm. On the train, I had planned to do the back-to-work post on my blog and reply to a backlog of messages and comments on my Instagram.

The numbers have been growing so fast that I’m starting to make a tiny bit of money from it with affiliate links but that means there’s more pressure to keep up. And days like today, I don’t have it in me to be visible. If I post, I have to be ready to do the follow-ups, replying and responding. Being on.

Instead, I turn off and go insular, blasting house music into my ears as loud as it will go and carrying on with my sobbing.

I wait for it to ease but the further away I get from Poppy, the worse I feel. I calculate how long it will take me to get back to her if she needs me, all the routes and ways I could get there. I google taxi companies at each town we get to, to see if that will get me there faster than the train back to my car.

Further away, further.

The ache is deep in my insides, around the same place Poppy used to live in utero before I brought her into the world then abandoned her to a stranger.

Further away, further.

How am I going to do this?

Every day.

And further.

I look out of the window at suburban Cheshire stations with commuters clutching coffee in flasks brought from home. It is May, with its telltale juxtaposition of boots and sandals, parkas and bare arms. T-shirts hang out with roll-necks, newly waxed legs and thick socks stand side by side on the platform. It is too early to know what the day will bring so everybody is guessing, balancing weather apps with the chill they still feel and the comfort they need when they’re craving two more hours’ sleep.

I stare at them. That one, who thinks everyone wants to listen to his TV show out loud. That one, falling asleep standing up. I wonder, whether they have bare legs or jumpers or boots or visible toenails, if anyone is feeling close to how I feel this morning.

Slowly, the tiny stations make way for the edge of the city. The flasks are replaced with branded coffee cups and the platforms are crammed full, the people younger, cooler, edgier. Like my colleagues at New Social, one of the city’s biggest digital marketing agencies. I glance at my trainers, doubtful now about the brand.

Everyone moves more urgently here. My heart starts racing watching it all and I have the edge of a headache. I used to be comfortable at the heart of this picture; pushing past, boots stomping at pace, latte aloft, tut tut tutting if you strayed into my path. Now I feel distant from it all. Maternity leave days have required me to get to one place at 10.30 a.m. and make small talk while singing nursery rhymes. We spoke slowly, the other mums and I, trying to drag out our coffees because otherwise what would we do for the rest of the day? We had tried to kill – stake out and murder – time so that it could be the evening, when husbands would be home and wine would be poured and we would feel, for that tiny window, like the old us.

‘That was my shoulder,’ hisses the woman next to me at a man who had passed by in the aisle. She could have been me, I think. Not so long ago. ‘City wankers.’

She looks at me in solidarity but I feel nervous of her wrath and also like a fraud. This doesn’t feel like my world any longer. Doesn’t she know that I am normally still in my pyjamas around now, singing ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’ or hanging up row after row of tiny socks while a child sleeps? I’m not a real commuter, I think. If only you knew.

A surge of anxiety pulses as I think about how in an hour or so, I will be expected to do my job as Digital Marketing Manager. To be current in a sea of twenty-somethings. To run meetings. To dash out of the office to eat pancakes for brunch with a client.

I will be expected to be the straight-to-the-point ‘this creative isn’t working for me, we need another option for first thing tomorrow’ version of me that I am not sure hasn’t been written over with toddler songs and baby babble. With photographing my turmeric latte for Cheshire Mama’s Instagram and calling that ‘work’.

I feel a sensation in my stomach akin to a bad hangover.

Oh, Poppy. My best mate for the last year. I’ve never spent as much time with anyone as I do with her, with those long walks in her pram, us dancing round the room to our songs.

Just then my phone beeps and I leap on it because, almost definitely, it’s a message telling me that Poppy had escaped out of Ronnie’s back garden or is in an ambulance with a life-threatening condition, probably brought on by the trauma of being left behind by her mum.

But it’s just Emma.

She checked in last night too, even as she dashed from putting her son to bed to her weekly Slimming World meeting. I was what she had done with her spare thirty seconds and I felt touched. And guilty, because sometimes I think I don’t make enough effort with Emma. But I want to speed her up, and tell her to speak up. She gets lost, even in our small crowd.

Gd luck today S, her message says. You’re going to smash it!!!

I smile, picturing Emma bursting in to baby music class – where I’m normally headed on Monday mornings too – muttering apologies for her tardiness. Emma is ten minutes late for whatever she does.

I smile at the thought of them all, my mum friends.

Emma is thirty-five, only a few months older than me, and sometimes I forget that she has a husband. He doesn’t come up often but when he does he sounds uninvolved and removed from her and her baby’s life.

Our virtually teenage (fine, twenty-nine-year-old) friend Asha messaged this morning at 5 a.m., up early to call her sister in Melbourne. Asha is tiny, less than five foot. She likes to question things and research them and come back to you when she has firmed up her arguments. She would never fight a cause unless she was an encyclopaedia on the subject. Even after wine.

And finally there was Cora, communicating as always via a list of her favourite emojis, sent while I was at Ronnie’s. Cora, unlike Emma, likes to do everything fast, but especially talking, which she does tripping over her own thoughts, flitting to a different point, pulling a compact out of her bag to check her eyelashes but still speaking, then asking you quickly if her hair looks okay while also sending a text. Cora is a whirlwind; the kind of WAG I thought I might run a mile from when I first saw her stomp in in giant heels and faux fur to our antenatal class.

The four of us met last year, when our babies protruded from our middles. When we sat in a room feeling increasingly panicked about things we hadn’t bought, learned or read, and to plan for a birth that could never be planned for.

Emma and Cora sat together on the parents’ evening-style chairs, hands on bumps, already friends. While Ed and I came together, they massaged each other’s backs with tennis balls instead. ‘My other half’s at work,’ Cora said. Then she tipped her head in Emma’s direction. ‘Hers just isn’t into this whole thing.’ Then she’d rolled her eyes, while Emma’s cheeks reddened.

‘You know each other already?’ I asked, in week one.

Everybody round Sowerton – where I had lived for less than a year – seemed to know each other.

My heart sank. I had been hopeful for a fellow ex-city dweller to find some things in common with.

But Cora nodded.

‘Em was in South Wales when she was a kid but after that, we both grew up round here, hon,’ Cora told me, leaning into Emma. ‘Same school, the lot. We’ve been mates for years.’

Even at first impressions they were a wonky juxtaposition. I looked at Emma, the pretty blonde with chubby cheeks who blushed when I spoke to her and couldn’t meet eye contact. And then at Cora, who’d told me that her wedding cost £60,000 and she has a nanny ‘just to help out’ about ten minutes after meeting me.

I suspect it worked for Cora like those types of uneven friendships always do. She dominated and talked; Emma listened. Emma’s stories would never compete with her tales of Hunter, her WAG past. Like having a therapist, for free. And for Emma perhaps Cora made her life easier, found the baby groups they should go to, made the friends on her behalf, formed her life then sent her out an invite for it.

‘You’ve not been in Sowerton long, I take it?’ asked Cora.

I nodded. ‘I’m from Manchester really. Chorlton. I work in town.’

It seemed important that they knew. That they didn’t think I was just … you know, Sowerton.

But Cora was nonplussed, checking her lipstick in a mirror, nodding vaguely.

‘Is it just us three?’ I asked our teacher, Cath, and she looked at her notes.

‘One more starting next week but that’s it,’ she confirmed. ‘We don’t get big classes round here. Not like in your cities.’

She nodded at me.

And I sat back and hoped that mystery mum number four brought some balance. Or wasn’t already mates with everyone else, at least.

Then in week two, as I swigged Gaviscon from a bottle and Emma got out an emergency KitKat, Asha arrived, little and serious and dressed for the gym with a notebook. Her husband Aidan held her hand.

‘Sorry we missed last week,’ she said. ‘We were visiting family.’

I heard her London accent.

It wasn’t Manchester nostalgia, but it would do. I’d cling to a city transplant like a life raft.

‘Aidan grew up round here,’ Asha said when she introduced herself to the group, nodding towards her husband and I was glad to see another man too, for Ed. I smiled at Aidan. ‘Got me with the house prices, obviously. It’s been about a year now.’

Cora wasn’t listening.

‘Let’s add your number to the group chat,’ she said, brusque; there was no option. But Asha nodded happily, squeezing her husband’s hand. This is what we’d all come for, after all. We could learn to change a nappy from Google; it was the mates we were paying for.

So we swapped numbers and arranged, after our babies were born like painful dominoes, one after the other in the space of one week, to meet up.

And we did. We had the same desire to pour the caffeine we hadn’t been allowed for months and now needed ferociously into our veins and so it became a regular thing, easy, us all heading for lattes, meet-ups, soft play as the babies got older. New baby lives curated by Cora, who shoved cards for her cupcake business into our hands, friended us on Facebook, asked questions, made sure our friendship gathered pace. And checking in too, after jabs, if our babies were sick, when we went back to work.

I lean back against the train seat and sigh.

My NCT friends haven’t been around long but they get it. They understand how my insides feel today. This isn’t theoretical to them, it’s close. Some have been there, some will be there, some just know how it would feel to be there because they feel a version of it when they lose sight of their child for a second at soft play, or drive away as they wave at the window at grandparents’.

A full set of messages from my mum crew but absolutely nothing, I realise, from Ed. To ask how Poppy settled in, or how I’m coping.

He’s so busy at work today, I reason. Give him a break.

Instead I reply to my mum group chat.

I can’t stop sobbing, I type. I feel awful. I hate this.

It’s much more exposed than I usually am. Usually, I prefer to put on a together front. I’m told with that resting bitch face it can seem a bit cold, a bit superior. But at least people don’t think I’m weak. At least people don’t pity me. I am struggling to react normally to anything today though.

Typing quickly as I’m at BMT, writes Emma. Baby music time. Everything has an acronym when you’re a parent. There’s no time for full words.

Don’t do that! I reply. I feel terrible, distracting her from one of her days off with Seth.

It’s fine, whole class is car crash, she replies. Everyone’s on phone. But P will be having the time of her life! Ronnie is great. In a week this will feel normal. It’s just today that’s weird. Firsts are always weird.

Thank you, I reply. Emma’s emotional intelligence on messages is special. I must make more effort to chat to her as much in person.

The train pulls into the station and I shove my phone in my bag, take a deep breath and join the throng to step off.

Thanks to Emma, I am feeling ten per cent less likely to sprint back to the countryside to sling Poppy over my shoulder and leave work forever.

And somewhere under the rubbish tip of anxiety, I realise, there is a tiny bag of something approaching excitement. I will drink a mint tea today at my desk, slowly instead of chucking coffee down my throat like a pill. I will go into a meeting where people will respect me and somebody junior will be a tiny bit intimidated by me and ask me questions to which I will – hopefully – know the answers. I will reapply lipstick in the bathroom because I will always have thirty seconds to spare and hands that have no other responsibilities to tend to.

I will eat real food, not a child’s cold leftover sticky pasta shoved in as I stack an overfilled dishwasher. I will go to shops on my lunch break and make small talk that isn’t about weaning but about a date somebody went on and the film they saw, or the risotto one of the social media managers ate on a much-Instagrammed break in Puglia.

There were pluses, weren’t there. I needed to hold on to them tightly today.

I make a mental note to message the NCT girls too and tell them what a difference their support made this morning. But the message never gets sent; the sentiment never gets shared. Because it’s less than an hour later that something blasts into my world that ruins my relationships, my life and my mind and which I am not sure I can ever find a way back from.

2

Scarlett