Lies We Tell Mothers: A True Story

by Suzy K Quinn

  You know the sort of club I mean – there are dozens of them. You can eat delicious food. Here are some pictures of delicious food. We’ll show you how you can eat all this delicious food and lose weight! Now come and get humiliatingly weighed once a week and chit-chat with other fat women.

  My first fat-club meeting was exactly as I had imagined. It was held in a dusty church hall (of course), and every lady who walked through the door was weighed on public scales.

  There was a table of artificially sweetened snacks for sale, including chocolate-brownie bars, biscuits and juice – none of which could possibly foster good dietary habits. Still, the fat-club members were buying them in bulk, forming a long queue to get hold of these aspartame-laden goodies. Better stock up, I thought, before those chocolate-brownie bars run out.

  The group leader was a jolly lady who’d lost a lot of weight and therefore had the requisite skills to lead us on our fat-to-thin journey. To be fair, she was still a bit chubby. But from what I gather, she had been hugely fat before and had needed specially fitting boots.

  Along with useful weight-loss tips, our fat-club leader taught us fun, low-calorie drinking games and gave us warnings whenever a chocolate product had changed its sizing.

  During the first meeting, I was given my calorie ration for the day. And a small fat-club biscuit to take home.

  Breastfeeding allowed me an extra chocolate bar a day, but this didn’t help much because I was used to eating three extra chocolate bars a day, plus drinking a LOT of hot chocolate.

  I needed to take control of myself. Exercise some restraint. Just as soon as I’d eaten my rationed piece of chocolate and all those chocolate-brownie bars.

  I left the meeting with a healthy-eating book, some new fellow-obese friends and a determination to shift thirty pounds and find my inner Beyoncé – tanned and toned after having kids.

  Once home, I threw out all the crap food: frozen pizza, garlic bread, cans of tomato soup, bags of jelly fried-egg and foamy raspberry sweets and, most heartbreakingly, a metre-long novelty chocolate bar I’d been working my way through.

  I then filled the cupboards with low-fat, artificially sweetened, fat-club products.

  Demi was appalled. He would have eaten all that stuff I’d thrown out, he said. Why waste food like that? Why not give it to people? Where were my eco-credentials? And what was with all the fake, sweetened crap?

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I whined. ‘I don’t have self-control like you do. If high-calorie food is in the house, I’ll eat it. Even from the bin.’

  Demi offered to hide unhealthy items, but I knew this wouldn’t work since I’d long been familiar with all his hiding places.

  After a quick row, I downloaded the fat-club app so I could calculate every calorie from now on. I bought lots of vegetables and tried to exercise more, squeezing in hot-yoga classes when Lexi had gone to bed.

  Pleasingly, the weight started to shift.

  I upped my vegetables and even more weight began to shift. When I ran out of fake, high-carb, sweetened fat-club products, the weight practically fell off.

  It took a few months and some humiliating public weigh-ins, calorie-restricted tiredness, rage and depression, but I finally shed twenty pounds. And I really did feel better. Much better. Less tired and cow-like. I was still two sizes bigger than pre-Lexi, but I could run upstairs without huffing and puffing.

  However, there was some bad news. My stomach hadn’t sprung back to shape like an elastic band. My thighs had not become magically smooth and tanned. I did not look like Beyoncé.

  I had lost weight, but I had to accept that my body had changed forever. My stomach would never be flat again. My boobs – let’s not even go there. Just whisper: older.

  Yes, my youthful body had gone. Just gone.

  Clothes-wise, I was in a weird no man’s land. My pre-pregnancy clothes didn’t fit, but Topshop and H&M didn’t sell anything that flattered my new, older body. So I just carried on wearing maternity stuff and Demi’s sweatshirts.

  I should have gone out and bought a new wardrobe of clothes right then and there. I should have transformed, grown up. Embraced my new life and body. But I couldn’t accept maturity just yet.

  I mean, honestly, who wants to embrace big old-lady pants in their early thirties?

  Growing up looked rubbish.

  #20 LIE – YOU’LL ENJOY IT MORE AFTER THE FIRST YEAR

  As Lexi reached her first year, the pressure really began to build.

  Demi and I were both working, juggling baby care and the occasional interrupted night’s sleep, while living somewhere unsuitable for a family.

  Our apartment was noisy, slightly damp, dark and cramped. Plus, our proximity to the chaotic, hard-partying city centre came at a premium. We were paying thousands of pounds a month to live somewhere with sick on the pavements.

  People were always chucking beer cans in our front garden, and one evening a couple had sex in our porch.

  We still hadn’t got the memo: ‘This isn’t a family-friendly location.’

  With me working part-time (although life is never part-time when you have kids) while getting the second novel finished, and Demi working full-time as a freelance songwriter, we had enough money to get by. Sometimes.

  (Demi: ‘I also had a part-time job as a phone monkey and was finishing a sports journalism course. Just saying. I was doing a lot. Yes, I know you were too.’)

  It all depended on Demi’s commissions. If he got a big songwriting project – great. But at slow times of year things were tough. We dreaded summer and Christmas, when everyone goes on holiday and stops commissioning.

  The trick was not to think too much about the future (and possible rent increases) as that brought about major anxiety.

  Life became survival. I’d get through the night praying not to be woken too often. Then I’d ferry Lexi to the childminder, bid an emotional farewell, work through my lunch break, pick Lexi up and try to fit in a few more hours’ work during her afternoon nap.

  We were existing, but not in a joyful way. The combination of freelance employment, the expensive and crowded city living and our small, unsuitable apartment was taking its toll.

  Demi and I should have moved to a nice family home before the birth, of course. We should have had responsible jobs with maternity leave and sick pay. We should have understood why parents have gardens with trampolines in them. But we threw ourselves into parenthood prepared for babies but not family life, and now we were too tired to make major changes.

  Life was stressful.

  Things weren’t quite as dark and awful as the early days, but life felt overwhelming and unrewarding. There was no finish line, no prize for having a baby scream in your face for hours. No financial bonus for working all day on five hours’ sleep. Just less money and more exhaustion.

  We hadn’t yet reached our happy ending.

  To top it all off, sometimes Lexi cried for two hours at a time without stopping, and if that doesn’t raise your blood pressure then you’re technically dead.

  Because Demi and I hadn’t yet embraced parenthood in a meaningful way, we coped with stress the same way we did pre-children.

  We drank alcohol.

  Now Lexi was eating solid food and I was breastfeeding less, I could cheerfully imbibe seven units of alcohol at night without poisoning my baby. This was based on a mathematical calculation that considered units of alcohol, weight, height, gender and ethnicity.

  Just to make really sure I’d got the calculation right, I bought some special paper that tested alcohol in breast milk. The paper turned a tarry black colour if evil alcohol was present in breast milk, but it only ever turned a light grey for me – even if I tested directly after drinking a glass of wine. It was always snowy white a few hours after drinking.

  My first conclusion: not much alcohol goes into breast milk. (But don’t take my word for it. I’m not a doctor.)

  My second conclusion: you can drink a whole bottle of wine, go to sleep, a
nd your boobs will be booze-free in the morning.

  I’m not saying I did drink a whole bottle of wine every night. But it was nice to know I could.

  Of course, there would be no more banging shots of tequila any more, now we had the responsibility for a little life. No. Wine was the thing. Sophisticated wine. I even bought wine glasses.

  Some evenings, Lexi had a fever or molar teething pain and took two hours to scream herself to sleep. This sent our stress levels sky-high.

  ‘We should get some wine,’ one of us would say, an eyelid twitching. ‘I’m heading down to the supermarket.’

  ‘Make sure it’s thirteen per cent or higher,’ the other would shout with a little pretend laugh to cover up the seriousness of this request.

  Before kids, alcohol had been a casual ‘let’s all go out and have fun!’ kind of thing. Now it was medicine for stress. A much-needed relaxant. A necessity rather than an enjoyment.

  Take away all the stylish glassware and you were essentially left with a painkiller. Something to lower our ever-growing stress levels.

  Often, I’d reassure myself that we weren’t drinking for the wrong reasons. We were sophisticated parents, just having a few glasses of wine in the evening, as many moderate people do.

  We’d lay out cheese and wasabi nuts on our Freecycle coffee table, just to make everything feel more like a gastropub experience rather than an ugly drug addiction.

  Then we’d down our first glass of wine within ten minutes.

  ‘The first drink always goes down quickly,’ we’d chuckle. ‘We’re very stressed.’

  Half an hour later, our second glass would be empty again.

  ‘You don’t get many glasses in a bottle, do you?’ we’d observe.

  One of us would tentatively offer to ‘pop out and get another bottle’.

  ‘YES!’ the other would shout.

  The ‘bottle of wine each on a Friday and Saturday’ ritual soon became a weekend tradition. And sometimes it wandered into weekdays too.

  I found myself wondering what counted as ‘too early’ to start drinking.

  Seven p.m. was clearly fine – this was middle-class dinnertime, and everyone knows people have a glass of wine with their meal.

  Six o’clock? Getting a bit less respectable, but there is such a thing as an aperitif, is there not? I’d been to Italy. Italians have big glasses of Aperol before their leisurely evening meals.

  Five o’clock was clearly too early. Or was it?

  Summer was approaching, and Brighton was having all sorts of open-air family festivals. These tended to include Prosecco tents, locally produced cider stalls and other ‘grown-up’ ways to drink alcohol. You often saw parents sitting on geometric-patterned blankets, drinking from fun glassware.

  If other people were doing it, surely it was OK.

  Were we technically sitting on a bench, drinking cider at midday?

  Yes, technically. But this was organic, locally brewed cider with an authentic apple smell and taste.

  We were parents, for goodness’ sake! Of course this was entirely respectable. And a medical necessity for stress.

  At one year of age, Lexi had passed through the rolling-over, sitting-up, teething, weaning and crawling phases. She was now entering the ‘baby walk around and wreck things’ phase.

  Every passing day, things like a broken mug or a ripped-up book reinforced how small and unsuitable our home really was.

  The storage heaters couldn’t be turned off, so were burning hot and ready for Lexi to stumble upon. Unless, of course, we needed some actual warmth in the house. Then they would inexplicably be stone cold. The kitchen was only big enough for one person, which made Lexi a trip hazard.

  Demi and I were dimly aware that our house wasn’t suitable for a one-year-old vandal. But was it really bad enough to move? We had friends living in far worse places. Our neighbour lived in a similar flat to ours and had four kids. Yes, four.

  Moving house seemed drastic. And extremely tiring.

  Before Lexi came along, Demi and I had been delighted with our apartment. What could be more perfect? Friends upstairs. The rent wasn’t too bad for Brighton. It was a little dark and dingy, sure, but it was somewhere to hang our hats and our Arsenal scarfs.

  Every piece of furniture we owned was second-hand (one accidentally stolen, as mentioned), and the most decorative we got was sticking a load of coloured pencils together to make an interesting wall feature.

  But as Lexi got bigger and we got larger gadgets (the Bumbo seat, the VTech baby walker, the Scuttlebug, the big baby bed), our feelings about ‘home sweet home’ changed.

  It was clear we were stuffing family life into a young couple’s pad. And not a sophisticated couple’s pad either. A crap one.

  The apartment had been right for carefree twenty-somethings who weren’t bothered about thin, cheap carpets and mouldy showers. But when you have a baby, you want cleanliness. A toilet that flushes properly. And space – lots and lots of space.

  Our unsuitable home seemed even more unsuitable when we visited the homes of our new maternity-group friends. These sensible souls had climbed the property ladder in their early twenties while we had been out getting drunk. They had planned not just for pregnancy and newborns, but for a life beyond. Family life.

  Our ‘new parent’ friends had lovely, cosy, child-friendly homes with modern cooking facilities, nursery rooms and neat little gardens with spongy alphabet tiles covering hard concrete areas. They had new furniture, Dyson vacuum cleaners and furniture polish in plastic caddies under the sink.

  These grown-up family spaces were a stark contrast to our orange-and-brown flat, with its retro cooker, brown wallpaper and semi-ironic ‘shit hole’ poster in the lounge.

  Not only had our antenatal friends already bought and decorated family homes, but they had jobs with maternity leave and pension plans. This was proper adult stuff.

  In contrast, we had stumbled into pregnancy as feckless freelancers.

  I had no maternity leave, believing I could ‘work around’ the baby. Our home was a one-bedroom rental property. We didn’t have a car or a tumble dryer or Ikea click-together storage.

  The more time we spent at home (and we were home a LOT now), the more everything felt wrong.

  The storage heaters, which had previously amused us with their bizarre heat conduction, were now irritating enough to be kicked and shouted at regularly.

  The damp, windowless hallway was oppressive.

  The concrete and rock yard, formerly admired for its cheeky resident fox, was now full of dangerous steps and jagged edges. And who’s to say foxes don’t eat babies? Who really knew for sure?

  Plus, our apartment was noisy at night, thanks to our child-free friends upstairs, enjoying the life we used to have.

  The selfish bastards.

  I was usually good at forward planning. How had I made this massive oversight? How had we careered into this new life without any of the necessary infrastructure?

  In hindsight, we were both naive and delusional. Neither Demi nor I realised just how much of ourselves would have to change to have a family. People had warned us, but we had ignored them.

  We were free-thinking, creative types, unencumbered by houses and cars and all that jazz, man. We thought outside the box. Why conform to a cookie-cutter family life when we didn’t conform to anything else? We’re not dead yet!

  We wanted kids, but we also wanted our fun, quirky, independent lives in the city.

  We didn’t realise we couldn’t have both.

  We were stupid.

  It was becoming very clear now: having a baby was not a ‘slot into your life’ sort of deal. Kids don’t slot into your life. They smash your life to pieces and you have to rebuild it on their terms.

  Everything had to change.

  If parenthood has taught me anything, it’s this: if you don’t embrace change – if you refuse to grow, if you try and cling to the past – life will become painful. And soon the pain will be
so bad that you’ll be forced to change because you can’t stand it any more.

  (You might want to highlight that profound statement.)

  One afternoon, after Lexi had torn up my new copy of Heat magazine, I had an epiphany/meltdown.

  It was the day of the royal wedding, when Prince William and Kate Middleton married in a dazzling, romantic (Demi: ‘and expensive burden on the taxpayer’) ceremony.

  I had taken Lexi to see the royal wedding at our local Wetherspoons pub because Demi, a strident republican, refused to have it on our TV.

  When Lexi and I arrived home, someone had thrown a beer can and an empty packet of cheese Doritos (jumbo size) in the front garden.

  People were always doing that.

  I did the usual front-garden litter-pick as Lexi fidgeted and cried in the buggy. Then I went through the faff of folding the buggy, putting the rain cover over it and bike-locking it to the gas pipe outside, all while trying not to drop my young daughter.

  When we got inside, I found Demi moving fans around, trying to get some cool air flowing through the windowless hall.

  The bedroom looked impossibly full with the bed, cot, changing table and various baby toys.

  ‘The cooker isn’t working again,’ said Demi. ‘I’ve phoned the letting agents, but they won’t fit a new one. Not until all four rings stop working.’

  I started to cry.

  ‘We don’t fit here any more,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve been thinking that too,’ said Demi. ‘The trouble is, I don’t know where we do fit.’

  We had a cup of tea and a think about things.

  ‘What about moving nearer my family?’ I suggested, remembering Mum’s sensible words about family homes in Essex (and strategically forgetting that I’d sworn at her). ‘To my home town, where houses are less expensive.’

  Demi did not like this suggestion. ‘I’m not living in Essex,’ he said. ‘It’s racist and full of Greggs bakeries.’

  ‘Essex isn’t that racist,’ I insisted. ‘And Greggs bakeries do filter coffee now.’