Lies We Tell Mothers: A True Story
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PRAISE FOR SUZY K QUINN
‘Suzy brings home the trials and tribulations of being a modern-day wife, mother and sister with great humour.’
—Liza Foreman, New York Times
From Suzy’s readers on Amazon:
‘Lovely read – If there was such a thing as comfort food in book form, this would be it.’
‘Amazing, brilliant, funny, a MUST read – Fantastic book, I couldn’t put it down (it’s now 4.50 a.m.).’
‘Well worth five stars – Make yourself feel good about life not being perfect. A smile a minute. Warm and sensitive.’
‘Brilliant . . . Just Brilliant – Please, Suzy, keep writing, I am hooked.’
ALSO BY SUZY K QUINN
The Bad Mother Series
Bad Mother’s Diary
Bad Mother’s Detox
Bad Mother’s Holiday
(Prequel) Bad Mother’s Pregnancy
Text copyright © 2019 by Suzy K Quinn
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542044677
ISBN-10: 1542044677
Cover design by Lisa Horton
CONTENTS
START READING
PART I: NATURE’S SHIT STORM
#1 LIE – JUST GO WITH YOUR MOTHER’S INSTINCT
#2 LIE – PREGNANCY IS SUCH A SPECIAL TIME
#3 LIE – YOU’LL BOND WITH YOUR PARTNER MORE THAN EVER
#4 LIE – ONCE THE MORNING SICKNESS HAS PASSED, YOU’LL FEEL BETTER
#5 LIE – JUST BREATHE THROUGH IT
#6 LIE – AT 40 WEEKS, YOU’RE OVERDUE
#7 LIE – SPICY CURRY AND PINEAPPLE BRING ON LABOUR
#8 LIE – CHILDBIRTH ISN’T THAT BAD . . .
#9 LIE – BREAST IS BEST
#10 LIE – YOUR NEW BABY WILL TELL YOU WHAT IT NEEDS
#11 LIE – BABY BLUES ONLY LAST A FEW DAYS
PART II: CHANGE OR DIE. THERE IS NO THIRD OPTION
#12 LIE – YOUR POST-BABY BELLY GOES BACK TO NORMAL AFTER SIX WEEKS
#13 LIE – NEWBORNS SLEEP ALL THE TIME
#14 LIE – SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS
#15 LIE – YOU’LL LOOK BACK ON THIS AS THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE
#16 LIE – IT’S JUST A PHASE
#17 LIE – ONCE THEY START WEANING, THEY’LL SLEEP BETTER
#18 LIE – IT’S BETTER WHEN THEY’RE BABIES – THEY DON’T TALK BACK!
#19 LIE – BREASTFEEDING HELPS YOU LOSE WEIGHT
#20 LIE – YOU’LL ENJOY IT MORE AFTER THE FIRST YEAR
#21 LIE – BABY-LED WEANING IS MUCH EASIER
PART III: TO SUFFER IS TO GROW
#22 LIE – YOUR STRETCHMARKS WILL GO EVENTUALLY. USE COCOA BUTTER!
#23 LIE – YOU SHOULD NEVER BRIBE YOUR CHILDREN
#24 LIE – THEY’RE HAPPIER WHEN THEY CAN RUN AROUND
#25 LIE – SECOND PREGNANCIES ARE MORE STRAIGHTFORWARD
#26 LIE – YOU SHOULDN’T FLY DURING THE THIRD TRIMESTER
#27 LIE – SECOND BIRTHS ALWAYS HAPPEN QUICKLY
#28 LIE – TWO KIDS ARE THE SAME WORK AS HAVING ONE
#29 LIE – THEY GROW UP SO FAST
#30 LIE – GIRLS DON’T FIGHT AS MUCH AS BOYS
#31 LIE – CAMPING IS A LOW-COST FAMILY HOLIDAY
#32 LIE – WHEN THEY START SCHOOL, YOU’LL GET YOUR LIFE BACK
#33 LIE – KIDS ARE PORTABLE, YOU CAN TAKE THEM ANYWHERE
TRUTH – WE WOULDN’T CHANGE IT FOR THE WORLD
THANK YOU for…
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Truth – there is no birth, only transformation
PART I: NATURE’S SHIT STORM
#1 LIE – JUST GO WITH YOUR MOTHER’S INSTINCT
They say the darkest hour is just before dawn.
Well, 5 a.m. on that cold Christmas morning was the loneliest, scariest, darkest hour I’d ever experienced.
There I was, sobbing, alone and anxious, wishing some sort of mother’s instinct would kick in and tell me what to do.
It was Christmas Day, but our dark, damp apartment did not glow with festive magic.
Save for the single string of cheap tinsel hung over the framed ‘Excuse the Mess, We’re Alcoholics’ print, ours was the apartment Christmas forgot.
Santa hadn’t slowed the sledge for us. He kept right on going.
I stood in the blackness, bats beating their wings in my chest, rocking my newborn baby as she cried and cried.
It wasn’t working, the rocking. It turns out a wild-eyed, anxious mother on the verge of tears isn’t soothing for a baby.
In the winter darkness, I honestly thought I would have a mental breakdown.
Last Christmas Eve, Demi and I had been child-free and living in a big shared house with friends. We’d laughed. We’d celebrated. We’d made interesting cocktails with chocolate liqueur, amaretto and sherry.
This Christmas Eve there was only me, a newborn baby and crippling anxiety.
I had no friends with kids.
No one I could call at 3 a.m. (it’s always 3 a.m., isn’t it?), and I didn’t want to wake Demi. He needed energy for my daytime meltdowns.
In the early hours of that dark, lonely morning, Lexi just wouldn’t sleep.
I’d done everything.
Fed her.
Fed her again.
Fed her a third time.
Jiggled her around while bending my legs in time to the hokey-cokey. But every time I laid her down . . . WAAAH!
I couldn’t do this parenting business.
I just couldn’t do it.
Yet somehow I had to.
Before I had a baby, I saw myself as a reasonably capable, competent person. And tough too – I mean, I once slept upright on a Thai night bus all night. But this competent, capable self seemed to have been smashed with a big hammer and set on fire.
If I wasn’t a capable, competent adult, who on earth was I?
A frightened, empty shell.
I’d had bad nights before, of course.
The night I first tried cider and threw up into my own hands.
The aforementioned fourteen-hour night-bus ride through Thailand on a non-reclining seat, watching fellow backpackers sleep comfortably on seats that did recline.
The night I gave birth, sick and fairground-dizzy on pethidine, listening to other poor labouring women screech things like, ‘Jesus H. Christ, I’ve shat on the bed!’
But this was the longest, loneliest, scariest night of my life.
‘If I survive tonight,’ I thought, my inner voice quivering with the drama of it all, ‘what about tomorrow night? And the night after that? Surely I won’t survive those.’
I’d been woken five times since 9 p.m. and Lexi just wouldn’t fall asleep. It was torture and I was going out of my mind.
On paper, it doesn’t sound too bad. Woken up five times? So what? But I was used to a world of light switches and TV remotes; things I could control.
Lexi had no ‘crying turn off now’ switch. No sleepy-time button. In fact, no buttons or operations manual at all.
I was exhausted and stressed to the point of terrified.
Can people die from lack of sleep? I wondered, and the bats doubled their wing-flapping in my chest.
SAS soldiers suffered less, I
was quite sure. I mean, they can always choose to quit.
Why couldn’t I do this? Where was my mother’s instinct?
Pre-baby, I had a proper adult, responsible job and believed I was a real proper adult. But during that long, dark Christmas morning, it became horribly apparent that actually . . . well, I wasn’t really an adult at all.
Adults don’t cry just because they’re tired.
Almost overnight, I had become an anxious, hysterical female with the brainpower of a table leg.
I was unable to do simple things like make a cup of tea and remember where I’d left it.
I started enjoying Big Brother.
Who was I?
I didn’t know it back then, but I was experiencing a transformation of sorts. My old identity – the carefree, child-free, twenty-something ‘me’ – was being squashed, squeezed and pushed out of existence.
This squeezing and squashing was necessary. It would (eventually) allow me to emerge as a beautiful, sparkly parent butterfly, floating on glittery rainbow wings around small children with a happy, content smile on its older, wiser face.
Most of the time.
Unbeknown to me, I was on a path to happiness. However, back then it didn’t feel that way.
You might be wondering who on earth I am and on what authority I champion this identity squashing and squeezing.
Am I a psychologist or something?
Well, no. I’m a fiction writer and I write novels about parenting. I wrote the Bad Mother’s Diary series (romantic comedy) and Don’t Tell Teacher (absolutely not a comedy, unless you have a questionable sense of humour). Oh, and I have two kids.
Really, I’m the last person you can rely on to talk sense. I mean, I spend the day making things up. But there is nothing made up in these pages, because I am way too honest for my own good and frequently overshare.
This is my true story of transformation: how I changed from a free-and-easy twenty- something to a gibbering wreck and then, after a lot of pain, a really, really happy parent.
It was a roller coaster, but roller coasters can be a lot of fun. So let’s jump into a wobbly cart together and go on a profound journey. The great, swirly, turny, joyful trip of parenthood.
Strap yourself in – we’re in for a bumpy ride.
#2 LIE – PREGNANCY IS SUCH A SPECIAL TIME
It all started with pregnancy.
Obviously.
There I was, a normal(ish) late-twenty-something enjoying work and life in the big city. Having fun with my partner and friends. Drinking too much. You know the sort of thing.
Demi and I had recently got married and I felt very lucky to have him. He was (still is) a kind, creative, sensitive fellow who cleans the house and does all our laundry.
(Demi – ‘I am lucky to have you too. And by the way, I also do the cooking, the washing-up and put out the recycling. Just in case you’ve forgotten.’)
Suddenly, it dawned on me.
I would be thirty soon.
Thirty felt monumentally old (ha!). And Demi was no spring chicken either. Come to think of it, he was already thirty-three.
Wow.
I realised we should have kids soon, before my womb turned to dust.
Demi was in agreement. He’d wanted to have kids for ages.
Six weeks later, I stood in a shopping-centre toilet cubicle, staring at two pink lines on a pregnancy test.
Pregnant.
I felt . . . well, pretty happy.
We were going to have a little baby!
I was excited to be pregnant, have a giant tummy and get funny cravings for things. I didn’t even mind the idea of morning sickness.
Demi was delighted by the news – possibly more delighted than me.
‘I will do everything I can to look after you and the baby,’ he said.
‘Yes, you will,’ I replied. ‘Or I shall beat you around the head.’
We were pregnant.
What a special time. I was extremely grateful to the universe for blessing us (especially considering my alcohol consumption over the summer) and couldn’t wait for our little bundle of joy to arrive.
A few weeks later, dark, swirling hormones of doom began whooshing around my body, sweeping away excitement and delight in one big sicky tide.
I felt awful.
Demi and I trotted along to the midwife for our first pre-natal appointment and she gave us the low-down.
There would not be fun times ahead. Only nine months of discomfort, culminating in the agonies of childbirth.
We were duly slapped with a big list of ‘Don’t dos’.
I couldn’t eat raw egg, blue cheese or sushi. I couldn’t sleep on my back. I couldn’t eat a cinema-size bag of M&Ms without getting heartburn. I couldn’t drink alcohol or smoke – well, that was a given. And I wasn’t too bothered about the raw egg. But no blue cheese?
I hadn’t eaten much blue cheese before I got pregnant. But when I couldn’t have it . . . why hadn’t I eaten more Stilton before?
As pregnancy progressed, I missed more than blue cheese.
I couldn’t travel – not really. I was too tired. I couldn’t go out to the pub with my friends. I couldn’t wear nice clothes. I couldn’t walk very far without wanting to sit down.
Things were . . . changing.
This wasn’t the special time I’d been promised. It was, in fact, a frightening insight into old age.
I couldn’t do half the things I used to and I felt weak and tired and needed to be near a toilet.
My life, pre-kids, was exciting. I travelled to Tokyo, Costa Rica, Cambodia and Thailand and had all sorts of crazy jobs while I waited for the big publishing deal I was sure was just around the corner.
I wore bright neon vest tops, skinny jeans and plastic jewellery. I home-dyed blonde and red streaks in my hair.
Me, pre-pregnancy, with my one of my bessie mates, Richie, at a Fat Boy Slim concert during my carefree twenties. Richie looks uncomfortable to have my great bulk on his shoulders, but I’m having a great time.
If you’ve ever been to Ko Phi Phi in Thailand, you may have visited Big Banana Club. It’s a hip-hop bar with a palm-leaf roof and opens out on to the sort of beach you’d expect to see James Bond sauntering along with his latest bikini-model fling.
Before I had kids, one of my crazier side jobs was ‘floor filler’ at the Big Banana. What’s a floor filler? Well, some Thai nightclubs ask sunburnt British travellers to bounce around the dance floor and make their clubs look popular. After all, an empty dance floor is a sad dance floor.
I’m a below-average dancer, but Big Banana had a cure for this: free plastic buckets of SangSom whiskey mixed with Red Bull. They gave me three of these alcoholic mini-buckets during my shift, and hey presto – suddenly I was a FANTASTIC dancer.
Every night, I danced (badly) while sipping from a bucket of amphetamine-laced whiskey and shouting ‘Woooo!’ And I got paid for it. A pretty good deal, I thought.
My days were free for writing articles and novels (usually with a pounding hangover), eating prawn curry and watching people have bamboo tattoo stakes hammered into their arms.
Good times, right?
For a twenty-something, yes.
I was free, exploring, writing my books and having fun.
After travelling to all sorts of amazing places, I moved back to the UK and carried on with the serious business of failing to get published.
I moved to the city of Brighton and shared a house with lots of friends. Overnight visitors could stay on an unhygienic guest bed in the bathroom (‘unhygieno bed’!).
We had fun.
There were parties every weekend, during which we wrote hilarious, philosophical sayings on the kitchen cupboards in wipe-clean marker.
I met my future husband, Demi, at one of these parties (he wrote ‘Su is lovely’ on a cupboard and it went from there).
Demi and I got together, he moved into the big shared house and we shared a small room overlooking a car park.
&
nbsp; We worked really hard – me carving out a career as a writer, Demi in some call-centre hellhole position too boring for me even to remember it and writing songs in his spare time.
After two glorious, fun years, we decided to get married and trotted down to the town hall to apply for a marriage licence.
The registrar asked me questions about Demi’s job in case we were marrying for visa purposes.
Registrar: ‘What’s your partner’s job?’
Me: ‘Errr . . .’
Registrar: ‘This is the person you want to marry. Don’t you know his job? Tell us the truth, are you marrying for visa reasons?’
Me: ‘Errr . . . look, I’m sorry. Demi’s job is too boring to remember. Telephone operative? Phone monkey? We’re both UK residents, so . . .’
A few weeks later, we married in a Star Wars-themed wedding on Brighton pier.
(Demi: ‘It wasn’t a Star Wars-themed wedding, Su. It was general fancy dress. But it just so happened that five Jedis and one Darth Vader turned up. The best man dressed as a giant banana.’)
You see? We were fun people.
Demi and me on our wedding day. I am crying with happiness. Demi is apparently laughing at me. Unbeknown to us, life is about to change more than we could ever imagine.
That all changed when I got pregnant.
I didn’t realise, back then, that things would never be the same again. Or that it would get worse before it got better.
‘Sure, I can’t eat blue cheese right now,’ I thought as I waddled around in oversized Aerosmith and Guns N’ Roses vests. ‘I’m pregnant, tired and bored. I don’t see my friends much because drinking tequila would be irresponsible. I have to go to bed at 8 p.m. because I need to wake up starving hungry at midnight to drink Heinz tomato soup alone in the dark. But this isn’t my life. The baby will come out and we’ll all have fun again. It’ll be fine.’
As pregnancy progressed, I felt increasingly sick, frail and old.
I’d never felt so bad in my life, and I’ve experienced salmonella poisoning, swine flu and some pretty horrendous hangovers.
Most of the time, I had travel-sickness-type nausea that made healthy food upsetting.
I didn’t want the midwife-recommended ‘vegetable stir-fry’.