She felt comfortable with that. It felt right.
And even if she wasn’t quite ready to send it out into the world just yet, that was the moment she knew she was really going to do it. Sat at her laptop, with her notebook in her hand, and memories of early motherhood drifting in and out of her mind.
But first, dinner.
‘You ready, honey?’ Chris asked, loosening his tie as he walked into the lounge.
‘Yep, let me just grab my lipstick,’ Jessica replied. ‘Where’s Mum gone?’
‘Chatting to your dad on the phone in a very loud whisper, but all quiet from Bella Boo. We can escape as soon as you’re ready.’
Jessica smiled at her husband, as he pulled off the tie and undid his top button. She didn’t often stop to look at him any more – really look at him – but standing in front of her now, he was very definitely still the man she fell in love with that first night in the bar. She, on the other hand, looked vastly different. As she smiled at him, her hand subconsciously skimmed her stomach.
‘You look beautiful,’ Chris said, reading her mind. ‘Is it a new dress?’
‘Oh this? No, I’ve had it for years,’ Jessica replied, looking down at the black shift dress that fell past her knees. ‘But thanks, birthday boy!’
She walked towards him and kissed him on the lips, before unhooking her handbag from the banister at the bottom of the stairs to find her lipstick (that pre-baby handbag was so rarely used these days, it was always a packed nappy bag that she dragged around with her).
Standing in front of the mirror in the hallway, she painted the cherry red hue carefully onto her lips, pursed them, and applied another layer. After checking her teeth, she stood back and admired her reflection.
‘Right, I’ll just say goodnight to Mum. Is the cab outside?’ she asked, making her way to the kitchen.
‘Yes, just arrived,’ Chris replied.
And two minutes later, they were pulling the door quietly behind them and making their way outside.
Jessica had made Chris promise he wouldn’t be late home from work on his birthday, and although she’d been hoping he’d make it back in time to kiss Bella goodnight, she was thankful they wouldn’t miss their 8 p.m. dinner reservation. She’d bathed Bella, got her to sleep, and managed to escape back downstairs ahead of schedule. And, just as she finished typing the letter, which she’d started during Bella’s naptime that afternoon, Chris had walked through the door. Her mum had arrived minutes later to babysit. Everything was set for their date.
It was a treat to be heading out on a Monday evening, especially as Chris had chosen their favourite Argentinian restaurant in Blackheath. It would be just like old times when they used to stroll to the restaurant hand-in-hand, feeling like two lovestruck teenagers – except this time, they’d be bleary-eyed from a broken night of Bella standing up in her cot and screaming at the injustice of being behind bars.
It wasn’t until their starter arrived that Jessica decided to bring up the blog. ‘So I typed up the first letter…’ she said, pushing her chilli prawns around the plate with her fork.
‘Really?’ Chris replied, taking a sip from a wine glass nearly as big as his head. ‘So you’re going to do it?’
‘I think so. Even if nobody else reads them, the letters will be safe for Bella when she’s older. And I get to keep my notebook…’ Jessica winked.
Chris smiled. ‘I’m pleased, honey. I think it’s going to be a big success.’
‘I’m not sure about it being a success, but I’m going to enjoy sitting down when Bella is asleep and typing them up – and it gives me an incentive to keep going when I finally catch up,’ Jessica continued.
Chris nodded. ‘You’ve always wanted to write, and you’re bloody good at it!’
‘I used to think that being a writer was all about working in a busy newspaper or magazine, but there are so many bloggers doing it from their sofas now,’ Jessica replied. ‘I should’ve started years ago.’
‘Well, you know I’m behind you,’ he said. ‘You’re always glued to your phone reading those blogs, but I know you can do a better job than any of them…’
‘Well, I don’t know about that’ Jessica cut in. ‘Some of them have hundreds of thousands of followers. And I will probably have a loyal following of, well, just you!’
Chris raised his eyebrows in shock, as he took a bite of his toast. ‘Hundreds of thousands?’ he asked as he chewed. ‘Wow.’
‘Part of me is a bit embarrassed to put myself out there,’ Jessica continued. ‘It scares me that strangers might start to read the letters – but on the other hand, it scares me that they won’t… What if nobody cares? What if I press “publish” and nobody reads it?’
‘I don’t think you have to worry about that, honey. You need to stop worrying about everything,’ Chris replied, before pausing and looking around the room. ‘Where’s our waitress gone? Do you want another glass of wine?’
‘Well, that was dismissive,’ Jessica said, rolling her eyes.
‘What was?’ Chris asked.
‘You don’t seem hugely interested,’ Jessica snapped back, refusing to make eye contact.
‘In the blog?’ Chris asked. ‘I’m totally behind you, honey. I’m just trying to order a glass of wine and eat my bloody starter.’
Jessica sighed. For a while, the two of them ate in silence. Jessica, spearing each chilli prawn with her fork before popping it into her mouth, accompanied by sips of Sauvignon Blanc and the sound of Chris crunching his toast, all to a background hum of other diners chatting away at their tables.
After ordering another glass of wine for them both, Chris looked across at Jessica and smiled. ‘Do you remember when we used to come here on Friday nights after work?’ he asked.
Forcing herself out of her mood, Jessica nodded and said: ‘You’d come and meet me and the rest of the team in Cecilia’s Wine Bar and we’d try to escape without anyone noticing…’
Chris nodded, swirling the wine in his glass. ‘Now we need a babysitter scheduled for at least a month before we can head out to dinner!’
Jessica laughed. ‘God, do you remember how easy it was? We didn’t have to think about anybody but ourselves! We used to lie there on a Saturday afternoon for hours reading papers and sipping mug after mug of coffee – and we’d only get up when we needed a wee or wanted to raid the fridge!’
‘And the funniest thing is that I remember thinking life would always be that way,’ Chris replied, laughing. ‘Imagine if we tried it now… Bella would be climbing all over us!’
‘Or raiding the cupboards in the kitchen in an attempt to fend for herself,’ Jessica said.
‘She has to do that anyway!’ Chris said with a wink.
‘Oi!’ Jessica squealed, kicking him under the table. ‘Don’t be so bloody rude!’
‘But seriously, honey,’ Chris continued, ‘I don’t say this enough, but you are a brilliant mother. I know you’ve found things harder than you imagined and that we’ve argued more than we did before. It’s been bloody exhausting, to say the least, but our daughter is a credit to you. She’s happy, and clever, and gorgeous, and on the whole, well-behaved…’
‘Except when I’m trying to get her to sleep…’ Jessica cut in.
‘Well, there is that… but I’m proud of you and I know you’re going to do just as good a job with your blog. You didn’t belong at Dellware Insurance. Writing is your passion and you’re going to show the world what an amazing writer you are!’
Jessica smiled, pausing as the table was cleared around them.
‘Let’s have a toast!’ Jessica said, lifting her wine glass as the waitress walked away. ‘Happy birthday to my dashing, brilliant, and really quite ancient husband!’
‘I’ll toast to that!’ Chris laughed, clinking his wine glass against hers. ‘Cheers!’
‘Cheers!’ Jessica replied, feeling like the luckiest girl in the world as she leant across the table to kiss him on the lips.
He was right; it
had been a difficult fourteen months. Tougher than she’d ever imagined. She had thought long and hard about returning to the familiarity of her desk, alongside the same colleagues she’d worked with for years, having the same conversations in the kitchen every Monday as she waited for the kettle to boil. And in the early days, she’d fully intended to go back there, imagining herself heading to Blackheath every morning, ordering her coffee in her favourite café (black, two sugars), and then climbing the stairs to her desk alongside a window that overlooked the heath.
But life moved on, and with a tribe of new friends by her side, each armed with a toddler the same age as Bella, she stumbled blindly but happily into a new routine. And soon, she couldn’t imagine life any other way. Her agreed maternity leave was quickly coming to an end, but suddenly she knew she couldn’t go back to that job. She just couldn’t. She had a discussion one evening with Chris, which resulted in them sitting together tapping numbers into a calculator and chatting about how it would all work – by midnight, the result was a mutual decision for Jessica to stay with Bella at home (for the time being, at least).
‘You know, I can’t imagine going back to work now,’ Jessica said, as they walked hand-in-hand out of the restaurant. As they strolled towards their waiting taxi, she glanced up at her office window across the street. She’d sat next to that window for years, struggling to envisage a life beyond it. She’d watched mothers walking children to school, pushing strollers with tiny babies inside, and taking children to classes in judo outfits and powder pink tutus. But as her bump grew, she still struggled to imagine a life beyond that window.
‘No regrets then?’ Chris asked as they climbed into the car.
‘I don’t think so,’ Jessica replied, squeezing his hand across the back seat. ‘No.’
*
Thirty minutes later, with Jessica’s mother on the road towards home, they huddled around her laptop on the dining room table. Jessica clicked, and scrolled, and watched as her first blog post flashed onto the screen.
With the help of her university friend Becca, now a web designer at a cool advertising firm, the WordPress blog was stylish in design. The words ‘LETTERS TO MY DAUGHTER’ ran across the top in large pink letters, with a banner of images flashing slowly through photographs of Jessica, Chris and Bella underneath. In the first photo, a heavily pregnant Jessica beamed at the camera. In the next, Chris was sitting on a hospital chair, cuddling a tiny Bella on the day she was born. A family selfie followed, taken in the early days in their garden. Then there was a picture of Bella crawling, smiling up at the camera as she reached out to grab it. And finally a photo taken on Bella’s first birthday, with crumbs of rainbow cake dotted around her mouth.
‘I’ll leave you to read it,’ she said, making her way towards the kitchen. She wanted Chris to read it before she published it. No, she needed Chris to read it before she published it. His support and approval meant everything to her – but still, she felt embarrassed and vulnerable to know that the words she’d written to Bella were now playing in his mind.
Flicking on the tap at the kitchen sink, she shook her head and laughed quietly. You can’t be embarrassed about him reading it, she thought to herself, as the water ran noisily into the wine glass in her hand. You’ll never make a blogger. Deep in thought, she squirted washing up liquid into the glass and used a sponge to work it around the rim, watching the bubbles fly back into the sink as the sponge squeaked.
So when Chris walked up behind her and kissed her on the shoulder, she jumped in shock.
‘Fucking hell! You scared me!’
Chris laughed. ‘Well, as expected Mrs Holmes, that was bloody brilliant,’ he said
‘Really?’ Jessica asked.
‘It’s great. And I know I’m biased, but my eyes may have started watering towards the end. And you know me honey, I’m not a crier.’
‘So you think I should publish it?’ she asked, placing the wine glass on the draining board and turning off the tap.
‘Yes definitely. And there is no time like the present…’
‘Well, I guess I could do it now,’ Jessica said. ‘The wine at dinner has probably given me a bit of confidence I won’t have tomorrow…’
So once the second glass was washed up and left to dry on the draining board, Jessica made her way back to her laptop and took a deep breath.
‘You’re definitely OK with me using pictures of Bella, aren’t you, babe?’ she asked Chris, as she pulled over a chair and sat next to him.
Chris shrugged. ‘I don’t think there’s any harm in it. Maybe if your blog suddenly got really popular, we’d have to reassess, but I don’t think we should be worried about the odd picture for now…’
‘I agree…’ Jessica replied. ‘Let’s see how it goes.’
She took a deep breath and hovered her finger over ‘PUBLISH POST’ on the screen.
This was it.
‘Oh, fuck it!’ she said out loud. ‘I’m doing this. I’m going to be a blogger.’
And with that, her finger clicked, and she snapped the laptop shut.
2
Followers – 81
Dear Bella,
It was 10.34 a.m. on the 6th August 2016 that I found out you existed.
It was my wedding day – and after heaving over the toilet bowl for an entire week beforehand, it suddenly occurred to me that my period was late. I had quickly added a pregnancy test to my online shopping order, which had arrived with bottles of prosecco, slices of smoked salmon, and half a dozen bagels the day before. I whipped the test away before anyone could see it (up the sleeve of my jumper, just in case) and stashed it in the bathroom in a carrier bag, behind a pyramid of toilet rolls. I tried to forget about it the next morning, as I danced around in my white velour robe, swigging glasses of fizz, and sobbing happy tears when I read the card Daddy had left propped up for me in the kitchen.
But with a fresh wave of nausea later that morning, I couldn’t wait any longer. I made my excuses and dashed upstairs to the bathroom, my stomach flipping with nerves as I ripped the box open, tore the foil inside, and pulled out the plastic stick. As I sat down on the toilet and peed clumsily over the end (and all over my hands, as it happened) I could hear my mum (your granny) and my bridesmaids (your Auntie Fran, my school friend Callie, and my cousins Leyla and Emily) singing along badly to Beyoncé downstairs. And then I stood up, placed the cap back over the end of the test, kind of revolted by the sight and smell of my own urine, and paced the room for two minutes, trying not to look down. My heart was beating so fast inside my chest that I could hear it as the seconds ticked on – and as soon as two minutes passed, I leant down and snatched up the test.
And there you were.
Two bright blue lines staring back at me.
I didn’t tell Daddy that day. I just couldn’t. I knew you were there, hidden deep underneath the lace of my wedding dress – but selfishly, I didn’t want his memories of that day to be about anything but the two of us. At the time, I envied him that – because every time I felt waves of happiness that day, my mind immediately turned back to those blue lines and I felt sick all over again. I wished I could forget it had happened at all; for one day at least. Just for one day.
It was the next morning, lying in our super king bed in the most amazing bridal suite that I finally plucked up the courage to tell him. I don’t know what I expected your daddy to say but I expected some kind of hesitation, a few doubts at least. I didn’t get it though. As I uttered the words, ‘I’ve got something to tell you…’, he interrupted to say: ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’ It turned out that he’d suspected it all along, hearing me heave in the bathroom for days beforehand, as I tried my best to stifle the noise. He pulled me into a kiss and told me everything was going to be wonderful – and from that very moment, I believed him Bella. I really did.
I didn’t find pregnancy easy and if I’m honest, sometimes I was angry that I didn’t get to enjoy the first weeks and months of married life without the pr
esence of nausea, heartburn, and haemorrhoids. Pregnancy isn’t glamorous – at least mine certainly wasn’t. We found out that you were a little girl at our twenty-week scan and I sobbed with happiness. I would have been just as happy if you were a boy, but finding out who you were suddenly made it all very real to me. After the scan, we walked straight into Greenwich for a celebratory decaf coffee (for me) and pint of beer (for your daddy). I wandered around a local baby boutique afterwards, choosing the softest powder pink blanket as a memento of the day we found out we would be getting a daughter. You still sleep under that blanket now, and when I look at it, I remember exactly how I felt that day. The excitement. The happiness. The promise.
It seems a long time ago Bella – but I only have to unzip the bag covering my wedding dress and you are the first thing to come flooding into my mind. We didn’t come face-to-face for another seven months, but that was the moment we first met. Right there in the bathroom, to a soundtrack of Beyoncé and my heart jumping into my mouth.
And I will never forget it.
Love from Mummy x
*
‘Fucking hell!’ Jessica exclaimed loudly, as she rolled over in bed to show Chris her phone. ‘Look at this!’
Chris pulled his attention away from Sky News, which was playing quietly on the TV in the corner of the bedroom, and took her phone. He was quiet for a few seconds as he panned down the page. ‘81 social media followers? How did you do that, Jess?’ he replied, with a big smile on his face.
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence!’ she laughed. ‘I shared the blog to my personal page before we went to bed last night and it seems everyone has followed it. Shit Chris! What do I do now?’
‘It’s not surprising, honey. Your friends and family know it’s going to be good!’
‘I think they’re probably just being kind, babe, but even so, I wasn’t expecting so many people to take an interest…’ As she spoke, she clicked through the likes on her phone, recognising the faces of friends and family as she scrolled.
From Mum With Love Page 2
