Did My Love Life Shrink in the Wash?
An absolutely laugh-out-loud and feel-good page-turner
Kristen Bailey
Books by Kristen Bailey
Did My Love Life Shrink in the Wash?
Can I Give My Husband Back?
Has Anyone Seen My Sex Life?
Available in audio
Can I Give My Husband Back? (available in the UK and the US)
Has Anyone Seen My Sex Life? (available in the UK and the US)
Contents
Prologue
Track One
Track Two
Track Three
Track Four
Track Five
Track Six
Track Seven
Track Eight
Track Nine
Track Ten
Track Eleven
Track Twelve
Track Thirteen
Track Fourteen
Track Fifteen
Track Sixteen
Track Seventeen
Track Eighteen
Track Nineteen
Track Twenty
Track Twenty-One
BONUS TRACK
Track Twenty-Two
Track Twenty-Three
Track Twenty-Four
Track Twenty-Five
Epilogue – Six months later
Has Anyone Seen My Sex Life?
Hear More from Kristen
A Letter from Kristen
Books by Kristen Bailey
Can I Give My Husband Back?
Acknowledgements
*
This book is for my babies.
And for Joe. I finally named a character after you.
Prologue
‘Babies’ – Pulp (1992)
The first time I had sex, all I could think about was getting pregnant. There I was lying quite naked under the duvet of one Christian Riley (seventeen years old, blue eyes, loved The Cure, now fixes fridges) and the only thing that went through my head was how scared I was of bringing this boy’s kid into the world and becoming a teenage single mother. All I could see were the ruddy faces of middle-aged biology teachers, the righteous tones of my mother echoing in my ears. I don’t want to be a mother. I can’t be a mother.
Needless to say, the sex was a bit of a non-event. I spent most of the time asking him if the condom was on, never came and watched in bewilderment as his bulging eyeballs informed me that he had. Any momentary joy was only experienced some fifteen days later, after my period made her appearance and I squealed with delight in a toilet cubicle, so loudly that a rumour started that someone was masturbating in the college loos.
My sexual adventures soon progressed at university where, admittedly, I thought less about the possibility of babies, and more about personal fulfilment, exploring the potential joys of a penis around my person. There were episodes of morning-after shocks, morning-after pills, sex in cars, great sex, stoned sex, stranger sex, bad sex, your best mate’s crush sex, on a countertop fridge to get revenge on Paul who dumped me the night before my first-year exams sex. A fair bit of sex. As university should be, I was party to an educational experience that enhanced my interpersonal relations and allowed me to build a credible and applicable skills base.
Then I left university, and I started having real-world sex which is like university sex except the rent is higher. On a teaching placement, I shagged the head of PE (decent cock; made hamster noises throughout). I went out a lot and hooked up with postgrads who ran marathons but lived in house shares with bad Wi-Fi and rotting bathrooms. One time I half had sex with my sister’s brother-in-law (non-penetrative dry humping in the back of a black cab; they bring that story up to shame me at most family meals). I had a couple of flings that never really went the distance, a couple of relationships that ended in heartbreak (I’m talking to you, Tom Edwards; he who shagged his ex-girlfriend the night he broke up with me).
Until along came a young man called Will Cooper and with him, sex in a long-term relationship. Being on the pill gave me licence to envisage babies as part of our sketchy, future life plan of suburbs, family motors and possible rings on fingers. For now, there was just spontaneous sex, condom-less sex, comfortable sex, know-how-to-make-me-come sex, unshaven legs sex, make-up sex, sex in the shower, sex on an IKEA coffee table that couldn’t take our collective weight (ending with plywood splinters in my arse cheeks). Sex because we loved each other.
Then one birthday weekend in October, we ended up at one of those electronic music festivals in a London park where we consumed far too much alcohol, painted our faces dayglo and had drunk sofa sex when we got home. I awoke the next morning worse for wear and forgot to take my pill. Or I may have thrown it up. That bit I don’t remember. And now, I’m lying in a hospital bed, having trouble looking over my bump as a midwife called Maggie wears me like a hand puppet.
And believe it or not, as I lie here, it’s young Christian Riley who jumps into my head: scuffling about in his bedside drawer, pretending that those weren’t the first condoms he’d ever bought in his life. I think back to that atypically responsible teenager who understood the biological realities of the situation. I lie here revelling in the irony that I have become such a rubbish adult. For as soon as I had pushed babies out of mind, into some realm of contraceptive impossibility… well, here I am. I seriously think that Maggie has her whole hand in there.
It’s a Wednesday night. I’m fourteen days overdue so I’m being induced, having just experienced another sweep, though I might need to get Trading Standards in on that debacle. A ‘sweep’ is a light, feathery motion favoured by orchestral conductors and autumnal leaves. I would have defined what I just experienced as a looter’s ransacking of my undercarriage. In the neighbouring bed, another pregnant woman called Kate is giving explicit instructions to her husband, Rob, as to the whereabouts of her forgotten paper knickers. According to my sister I won’t need those. ‘Imagine knickers made from kitchen roll,’ she tells me. I don’t suppose to tell Kate. She has brought the baby car seat along and everything. Ours is in the boot of the Suzuki Swift. I hope.
Will’s holding one of my hands, looking though a names website on his phone. ‘What about Rex?’
‘Like the dinosaur? The musical band? Or Harrison?’
‘Who’s Rex Harrison?’ he enquires.
Lordy, you think you know people. I’m about to have his child.
Maggie the Midwife interrupts. ‘Looks like you’re only one centimetre dilated, my dear.’
Maybe she’s joking.
‘He’s just too happy in there.’
She’s not. She continues to lecture us with some authority about drips and possible two-day labours while my eyes glaze over. Maybe I’ll be like an elephant and gestate for three years and they’ll make a Channel 4 documentary about me. ‘The baby was “too happy” in there so grew and emerged as a feral toddler beast with long mullet hair, suckling until he was ten. The mother grew to the size of a house and survived the gestational period in a series of kaftans made of old curtains.’
Maggie looks unamused by me, like I won’t provide any good midwifing excitement for a couple of days, so she gathers her gloves and giant tube of lube, abandoning us. Will still mumbles about baby names like Ace and Gandalf. I think it’s to hide the fact that he’s nervous as balls about what’s going to happen in the next day or so. That’s if this baby ever comes out. I huff with boredom and realise the only way to better my disappointment is with babies of
the jelly variety.
‘Why don’t you eat the green ones?’ asks Will, his fingers raking through the sweets.
‘They look like bogeys?’
He doesn’t question it. We’re strangely silent. He then directs an impromptu jelly baby play on the bed sheets. I am red and he is green. It starts innocently enough – the jelly babies slow dance for a while to a porno soundtrack which makes me giggle. However, they end up quite quickly in a 69 position.
‘Why is my jelly baby so easy?’ I ask.
He pops them in his mouth. ‘She wore red, the hussy. What did the midwife put inside you?’
‘Some sort of hormone gel.’
‘How does it feel?’
‘Like my vagina just ate an oyster.’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you too.’
A kiss. He always kisses me on the forehead. I like to think of it as a tender gesture of love but he often jokes it’s because I talk a lot. I tend to ramble, so he can never get near enough to my lips. A smooch on the forehead allows him to display love but also calm me down like an off switch.
‘How about Spike?’ he asks.
‘Dog’s name.’
‘Ted?’
‘Bundy.’
‘Noah?’
‘Too biblical.’
‘Henry?’
‘Too… royal.’
Will puts his head on my pillow and looks up at me like a forlorn cat.
‘Adolf?’
‘Wanker.’
‘That’s a terrible name. You can’t call a baby Wanker.’
I laugh. He puts his hands in mine and pulls me up in the same way you see whales being released back into the sea.
‘C’mon. Midwife’s orders. Let’s go for a shuffle.’
I decided to have this baby in a hospital because I just wanted to go down the easiest route possible. At my NCT groups, there was a mix of women who touted around birthing pools, home births and hypnobirthing but I always took a more practical approach: I don’t want fuss, I don’t want a baby in a bath, if I ask for drugs then give them to me, let’s get this baby out. Zero expectation would mean that no one would end up disappointed if it all went wrong. My sisters birthed babies in a variety of ways: Meg had the emergency C-section as her little Eve was upside down, Emma had her girls in posh hospitals with birthing centres where they gave away free pyjamas. I opted for my local hospital that provide extras like birthing exercise balls, free hot drinks and dimmer switches but you have to bring your own slippers and snacks. I bought said slippers from Primark. As for the snacks, Emma told me to bring glucose tablets for energy in case I have one of those eight-hour inductions but I haven’t eaten those since I did cross-country running when I was eleven.
I look down now and the slippers are the wrong size. My feet look like bricks they’re so swollen. I toddle along next to Will, who looks like he’s taken his pregnant girlfriend on a walk. The walk is supposed to push things in the right direction, downwards I suppose, so we’re doing as we’ve been told. I spy a rainbow of vending machines and stop. Ice cream. It’s been nine long months of Will getting to know and understand how pregnant ladies must be fed so he rustles around in his pockets.
‘Are there any fancy ones?’ I ask. Now is not the time to fob me off with a crappy fruit-based lolly.
He looks at me, bemused. ‘They’ve got Magnums: white, normal or nuts?’
‘Nuts. Get three. One for the baby.’
‘The baby might like white chocolate.’
‘I know the baby likes nuts.’
‘Do we get a sense of which football team he might support?’ he asks.
I smile. ‘He’s a Gunner. I feel it. Can we call him Thierry? Bergkamp? Tony? A combination of all the Arsenal legends, perhaps.’
‘It’s like you want me to leave you to birth on your own.’
We find a window bay to perch ourselves on. It’s silent, bar the crack of chocolate, mainly due to nerves about all that unknown territory we are throwing ourselves into. When they say a baby isn’t planned then you start to realise what that really means. It means the sketchy blueprint that was once life is being totally rewritten, with all control and free will lost. When I got pregnant it was scary as crap, but all Will and I knew was that we liked each other enough to bring a baby into the world. I drop a bit of chocolate on my bump and am grateful it’s there to catch it. See how useful the baby is already? I retrieve the chocolate and pop it in my mouth. Will looks over and laughs. I wasn’t going to waste that. He then hugs me, the only way you can hug a pregnant woman: with your body arched out to the side.
Wait. I think Will may have squeezed so hard a little bit of pee came out. I pause for a moment. Something definitely just happened. Like someone’s fired a water pistol up me. Have my waters broken? I stare at my feet. Not the tsunami I expected but I clutch Will’s hand and he instinctively knows it’s time; there’s a look in his eyes like a rollercoaster is just setting off. We’re having a baby.
‘It’s just a show, my dear. You’ve got a while to go yet. Any pain and you can have a paracetamol.’
I glare at Maggie the Midwife. Surely stuff leaking out of you is a warning that the baby is on his way? The curtain closes. I was told that the drugs would be stronger, like stuff I wouldn’t be able to get in Boots. A period-like pain stabs at me and I bend over the bed.
Will gets his phone out and sets it to timer mode. ‘What exactly am I timing?’
Neither of us know. Will abandons the phone and starts massaging my back. I inspect my knickers again. Blood.
‘Is that supposed to be there?’ Will asks. I’m not entirely certain myself. Surely all that’s supposed to emerge from there is water and babies? Will roots around in my bag and finds my marrow-sized sanitary towels. Whatever boundaries we may have had between us are gone as he sees me attach it to my knickers and lunge to adjust how it sits in my gusset. I don’t need to say anything; he can read that emotion in my eyes. What the hell are we doing? We press our call button and I fall into a squat position. Pain. Bad period pains. Will’s massage turns into a baker’s kneading.
‘Siri, WhatsApp call Emma Callaghan,’ I hear Will instruct his phone.
I look over my shoulder curiously as he puts the phone on speaker, calling my sister, the doctor.
‘Hello, Will? Has she popped yet? I’m adding in the other sisters. Put her on.’
I shake my head. Now is not the time for a phone conference. The screen splits into five different views and all of their faces appear: Meg, Emma, Grace and Lucy. The first two are mothers, the others are not. They all strain their necks, trying to work out if there’s a baby in the room.
‘We didn’t do this for Meg, or you, Ems?’ I inform them.
‘That was because the technology wasn’t available. What’s happening? Are we in a position to livestream?’ Meg says, laughing.
‘I DON’T WANT TO SEE UP HER VAG!’ Lucy shrieks. Will turns the volume down.
‘Can we get the midwife to GoPro it?’ Grace adds, her screen going fuzzy, in and out of focus. I wave at her. I miss my Grace. What time is it in Japan? Is she in a karaoke room? They all talk amongst each other, someone commenting on the weather and someone asking why Lucy is sitting just in her pants. Hello? Woman in labour here, you bitches. They’re all laughing at my discomfort. None of them are getting birthday presents.
‘Ems, the midwife thinks I had a show. Am I supposed to be bleeding?’
‘How bad? Give it to me in egg cups,’ she replies.
‘Who measures blood in egg cups? I feel like I’ve got my period.’
‘Standard. How many pads have you filled? Waters?’
Ems is like this, efficient. I imagine she coaxed her babies out with an encouraging tone at the precise time of her choosing. The sisters all listen in, Lucy’s face a tight grimace.
‘I think they’re still there,’ I reply.
‘You think? Mine burst like the banks of the Seine,’ Meg tells me. ‘All over the k
itchen floor. The dog licked them up.’ Will retches off screen.
Emma studies my face. ‘If you were in real labour then you wouldn’t be able to talk, let alone stand.’
‘It hurts though.’
‘Squat, open up the passages.’ Meg had her third five months ago. In her front room. I think they literally walk out of her now.
‘Should my back hurt?’ I ask.
‘Didn’t you read those books I gave you?’ Emma replied.
I didn’t. I read magazines and I binge watched Friends. I thought if I saw Rachel and Phoebe give birth enough times then I’d just absorb the knowhow through the screen. The two younger sisters look ashen but also know when they’re out of their depth.
‘Ems,’ Grace pipes in. ‘Go easy on her, we love you, B.’
‘Yeah, can we go? I don’t need to see the pushing and fluids bit. I just want to see the little baby,’ admits Lucy. The elder sisters relieve them but then switch their glares in my direction. Guess it could be worse. Our mother could be here. Beth, we’re Callaghan women, we birth things. In the olden days, I am sure we birthed them in fields and went back to work within hours. Pull yourself together. I wince out loud at another stabbing pain in my back. Meg jumps into action.
‘Will, get her to breathe. Long exhalations.’ I hand the phone back to my boyfriend and hear the group talk amongst themselves. He nods, his face white, as the two sisters give him instructions. Is she telling him how to check my dilation?
Did My Love Life Shrink in the Wash?: An absolutely laugh-out-loud and feel-good page-turner Page 1
