by Suzy K Quinn
‘How would you know it’s not that racist?’ said Demi. ‘You’re white. No one is going to be racist to you.’
‘They were. In Costa Rica – they thought I was American.’
‘Not the same.’
‘It is!’
We had another cup of tea and a bit more of a think.
‘Maybe we don’t really need to move,’ I decided. ‘We’re going through a stressful time, but things get easier after the first year. Everyone always says that about kids.’
It’s true. Everyone is always saying that about kids. But it didn’t feel like things were getting easier. If anything, the stresses were mounting up.
‘The city is OK for kids really,’ said Demi. ‘If you ignore all the cars and noise and queues.’
We thought about Brighton’s quirky shops, the cinema that sold gourmet hot dogs, the pairs of shoes artfully thrown over electricity lines. But all these things were uninteresting to young children and were also surrounded by busy roads and swarms of drunk twenty-somethings.
‘It just doesn’t feel right any more,’ I said.
‘So what is right?’ Demi asked.
Neither of us knew.
#21 LIE – BABY-LED WEANING IS MUCH EASIER
So we were stuck. Trapped in a life that didn’t suit us any more, but not knowing how to move forwards. We didn’t want to leave the city. We loved the city. But it wasn’t right for us now.
What should we do?
We didn’t know.
And then something happened that made up our minds for us.
A chickpea.
Before you laugh, this is a serious business. Life-threatening, even.
One day (my birthday, to be precise – but who cares about your birthday when you have kids?), I was wandering around one of Brighton’s many organic supermarkets, prodding the spelt loaves and wondering why people buy goat’s milk yoghurt (something to do with lactose digestion, apparently).
It was nearly lunchtime and Lexi was getting grizzly. She was just over one, fully weaned on to solid food and these days she needed a full meal at lunchtime – preferably something hot.
I thought about the leaky Tupperware tub rattling around under the buggy. It contained last night’s lasagne, mashed into a revolting meaty paste.
I’ll have to get that out and give Lexi lunch in a minute, I thought. What a pain in the arse. I wish we could go back to just breastfeeding.
Then I remembered about baby-led weaning. I’m sure you know what this is, but if you don’t, let me describe it for you: ‘Purees and mashed foods are unnecessary. You don’t need to blend anything. Babies can suck and gnaw at whole food items, like bread and fruit. Their little gums will mash everything up and eventually the food will disintegrate. Much less work for you, only make sure you cover your child, the high chair, floor and yourself with five metres of wipe-clean plastic.’
I could try that baby-led weaning today, I thought. It sounds a lot easier than messing around with lasagne mush.
At this point we were swinging by the fresh-beans aisle (they have those in organic supermarkets) and a shop attendant offered us a raw soaked chickpea.
‘Perfect!’ I said. ‘A little snack to keep us going. Lexi, suck on this while I prod the spelt bread.’
I gave Lexi the chickpea, imagining it to be soft and yielding.
I was wrong.
It turns out soaked chickpeas are as hard as nuts.
Lexi began to choke, wheeze and turn bright red.
It’s true what they say about awful things happening in slow motion. I remember every second of Lexi choking, and the overwhelming panic and powerlessness.
Lexi turned redder and redder, her throat rasping, her eyes wide with terror.
It was awful. The absolute worst moment of my life.
‘Help!’ I begged the wide-eyed deli man. ‘Call an ambulance!’
The deli-counter man threw down his large olive spoon, pulled a mobile phone from his striped apron and placed the emergency call in three seconds flat.
Moments later an ambulance sped to a halt outside the supermarket.
Thank you, deli-counter man. Thank you, NHS.
The paramedic team put an oxygen mask on Lexi and shone a torch in her mouth.
‘She’s getting a significantly reduced amount of oxygen,’ they said. ‘But she’s still breathing. She’ll have to come into hospital immediately. What has she got stuck down there?’
‘A chickpea,’ I said.
‘A what?’
‘A chickpea. It’s a type of bean. They use them in hummus.’
The paramedics discussed this and confirmed the hospital would have something for organic-bean removal. After all, this was Brighton.
Lexi and I were rushed to A&E, but as soon as the staff realised Lexi wasn’t dying, just rasping like an angry cat, we were quickly dispatched to the non-emergency part of the hospital and settled in for a long wait.
After eight hours, a paediatric doctor checked Lexi over.
By then it was 7 p.m. and Lexi was falling asleep. She’d stopped rasping a while ago, so I assumed the chickpea must have moved around a bit.
The doctor took a good look in Lexi’s throat but couldn’t see anything. He decided Lexi must have coughed up or swallowed the chickpea. Or perhaps the chickpea had never been there in the first place.
‘It definitely was in her throat,’ I said. ‘She was choking. Could it have gone into her lung?’
The doctor gave me a long, hard look that said, ‘You’re one of those anxious first-time mums who abuse overworked medical staff, aren’t you?’
‘Well, where else could it have gone?’ I queried. ‘If she was choking, it was stuck in her windpipe, right?’
‘Unlikely to have gone into her lung,’ said the doctor. ‘If you want to stay in hospital, you’ll just be wasting everyone’s time.’
I was incensed by this.
Of course I didn’t want to stay in hospital. It was my birthday and I had two cans of pina colada cocktail waiting in the fridge. Lexi always slept between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., I told the doctor, thus allowing me to drink up to seven units of alcohol before the next breastfeed. My golden drinking hours were quietly slipping away with every moment that passed.
The doctor said, ‘Well, you should probably get going, then. It’s gone 7 p.m. already.’
(Demi: ‘May I just point out, I was also at the hospital. Just in case anyone thinks I took a back seat. I also offered to go home and get Su’s pina colada, since she kept going on about it. She said she felt socially awkward about drinking alcohol in hospital while holding her sick child.’)
The next day, Lexi’s chest was bad.
We were very worried.
I took Lexi to the doctor, but he told me to stop being over anxious.
More days passed and Lexi’s chest got worse and worse.
Soon Lexi started to cough all night long – a big, hacking smoker’s cough.
The doctors kept saying it was a chest infection, but I knew better. It was that cursed chickpea. What else could it be?
After various X-rays and PET scans, one specialist eventually found mucus growth and ‘matter’ in Lexi’s lung.
‘It’s a chickpea!’ I said. ‘A rotten, old chickpea!’
‘Well, whatever it is, it needs to come out,’ said the specialist. ‘She’s going to need an operation. In the meantime, you should stay out of damp environments to stop the infection getting worse and causing permanent lung damage.’
I thought about our flat with the green mould growing above the shower, and the black mould in the windowless hallway.
‘Do green patches mean somewhere is damp?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said the doctor. ‘And a mouldy environment is certainly one you should stay away from.’
When we returned home, I called our letting agents to berate them about our dangerously damp apartment.
To their credit, they immediately sent round a comedy builder duo who knocked a hol
e in our wall to fit an extractor fan.
‘Oh no, no, no, Kevin. You’ve gone and knocked half the blimmin’ wall out. I can put my arm through that hole. See?’
‘I thought we were taking the wall down.’
‘NO, son. Not the whole wall. We’re putting in an extractor fan.’
‘What’s a tractor fan?’
The extractor fan, when it was finally fitted, made absolutely no difference to the damp air. If anything, it seemed to let more damp air in.
‘We need to move house,’ I told Demi. ‘We don’t have a choice.’
‘But where?’ said Demi. ‘We’ve been checking Rightmove for months. The only thing we can afford are basement apartments. They’ll be damper than here.’
‘We need a proper family house with nice, dry, upstairs bedrooms,’ I said. ‘It’s time to buy a place. Then rent will stop going up. We’ll make it work somehow.’
I spent a few days looking into mortgages.
There was good news and bad. The good news was we could afford a property in Brighton’s fashionable, affluent Kemp Town district. The bad news was that property would be a garage.
There seemed only one option left: leave the city and its dazzling array of fairy-light shops, bagel bakeries, milkshake parlours and bubble-tea emporiums.
But didn’t we love all that stuff? Wouldn’t we be ever so sad without the buzz and creativity of city life?
Demi and I considered this.
Every day with a one-year-old was a busy, crowded, expensive, unfriendly struggle. Life was a gruelling groundhog day, pushing Lexi along noisy, polluted streets to the childminder’s house, working all day in a cramped freelancer office, then sitting in our dark, miserable apartment all evening long. And don’t get me started on the post office queue – it took hours to send a parcel.
Maybe we didn’t love city life any more.
We were at a crisis point. A jump-or-be-pushed moment. That thing that happens to heroes in all good movies. It was time to take a big, brave leap into the unknown. To start building the new life we should have built a while ago. The happily-ever-after.
Demi and I began scouring Rightmove for affordable family homes in small towns near Brighton.
Our budget didn’t stretch very far. We could afford two bedrooms, but not two bedrooms that fitted whole beds in them.
‘Why don’t we search properties in my home-town area?’ I suggested. ‘Just to see what comes up?’
Demi muttered about ‘racist Essex’ but let me put the search into Rightmove.
We were in for a shock.
A good shock.
‘These houses are in our price range?’ said Demi. ‘They have driveways.’
‘And gardens!’ I added excitedly. ‘This one has a shed.’
‘Are you absolutely sure you’ve put the search terms in correctly?’ said Demi. ‘You haven’t accidentally added an extra nought on the budget?’
‘Positive.’
‘Are these houses in the middle of nowhere or something?’ Demi asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Right in the centre of the village.’
‘A VILLAGE!’ Demi had finally found the snag. ‘So that’s why they’re so cheap.’
‘It’s a large village just outside my home town,’ I said. ‘Because you said you didn’t want to be in a racist town.’
‘A village sounds boring,’ said Demi.
‘Maybe that’s what we need,’ I said. ‘Peace and quiet. We hardly ever go out. We’re tired by 9 p.m. We watch BBC dramas. Perhaps it’s time we accept reality. Look – these are light, bright family homes with upstairs bedrooms. No damp air!’
We’d been struggling for so long, paying sky-high rent for a damp little box in Brighton. It was hard to believe there was anything better for us. But it seemed there was if we were brave enough to take a flying leap into something new.
I booked some house viewings and at the end of the week Lexi and I met an aftershave-fumed estate agent on the driveway of a four-bedroom property in Wivenhoe (Americans – you may snigger here at silly British village names).
The sun was shining as we walked up the driveway, past spring flowers and a jaunty little wheelbarrow full of daffodils.
Fucking hell.
Compared to our Brighton place, this house was massive. You’d literally pay millions for this in the city.
Also, the surroundings were green and peaceful. No car noise. No screeching drunk people. I doubted anyone had sex in these porches and there were no empty beer cans either.
‘This is the place?’ I asked the estate agent. ‘It’s enormous.’
The estate agent raised a doubtful eyebrow. ‘It’s just a 1970s semi.’
‘But it’s got a garage.’
‘They all do around here.’
‘And a dining room.’
‘Well, where else would you eat your meal?’
‘On the sofa with a plate on your knees?’
The estate agent gave an amused chuckle. But of course, I wasn’t joking.
‘The owner is home for our visit,’ said the estate agent. ‘So please don’t say anything negative about the house. The last couple laughed at the carpets.’
As if I would! I didn’t care if the inside of this property was covered with used syringes – we were taking it. Of course, I didn’t tell the estate agent this. That would have been poor bartering.
We went inside the house and I oohed and aahed at the cupboard under the stairs, the loft hatch, the bath, the airing cupboard and the garden shed.
Wow.
The house was styled at a time when Dallas was popular and it boasted heavily lacquered dark-wood kitchen cabinets, wedding-cake swirly Artex, wood-chip wallpaper and a gas fire surrounded by patio slabs.
Retro cool, right? Even better, the house didn’t feel in the tiniest bit damp. All it needed was a lick of paint here, a wall knocked down there.
The elderly owner whispered, ‘The couple before you talked about knocking down walls. And I thought to myself, I’m not selling my house to you!’
I laughed politely and decided to keep quiet about any renovation plans, telling a white lie about the ‘nice’ salmon-pink carpets.
Decor aside, I was blown away by the property. There was so much space. This was luxury living, no matter what the estate agent had to say about it.
‘We’ll take it,’ I said.
‘Don’t you want to ask your husband first?’ asked the nice lady owner. ‘Or come back for a second viewing?’
‘Oh no,’ I assured her. ‘We don’t have time for all that. And my husband usually goes along with whatever I want these days or I cry.’
(Demi: ‘Yes, you have started doing that.’)
‘OK,’ she said uncertainly.
When I got home, I told Demi the good news.
‘Lexi and I found a house today,’ I said. ‘You like Dallas, don’t you? And it’s got stairs and an airing cupboard and a loft. I’ve told the owner we’ll take it. That’s OK, isn’t it?’
Demi is an easy-going fellow.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Sure.’
Were we making a terrible decision and possibly ruining our lives? Neither of us knew. But we’d run out of choices a long time ago.
PART III: TO SUFFER IS TO GROW
#22 LIE – YOUR STRETCHMARKS WILL GO EVENTUALLY. USE COCOA BUTTER!
Soon we were packing boxes, redirecting mail and swearing at conveyancers for their slow, slow house-sale progress.
As I filled boxes with a lifetime of possessions, I noted the many items we’d bought before Lexi was born. The oversized St Patrick’s Day squishy top hat. The beer pong game. The novelty pineapple sunglasses and the Jack Daniels shot glasses.
We hadn’t used that stuff in a while. Should we bag it all up and throw it out?
No.
One day, some day – when Lexi was older – we would need these things again. Right? We would drunkenly sing again one St Patrick’s Day, wearing that large bright-green top
hat. We would attend a Hawaiian-themed party and wear those novelty pineapple sunglasses again one day. We would return to this city.
We would come back and reclaim our old life when Lexi was older and we had more money.
In the meantime, we would store these things in the new loft. We have a loft!
With every packed box, the past faded like a photo in the sun.
I thought about all the dear friends we’d be leaving behind. Our lovely maternity gang. Other friends we’d got elaborately drunk with, pre-children.
It was a sad business. A very sad business. Sure, we’d be moving nearer my parents, who were absolutely ecstatic about our return to sunny Essex. But most of my childhood friends had moved away.
‘Don’t worry,’ Demi reassured me. ‘You’ll meet lots of new people. It’s easy when you have kids.’
Shit, I thought. New people.
It was high time I stopped dressing like a sofa-lounging invalid and more like a responsible adult.
For the last year, I’d been slouching around in oversized sports clothes, my hair pulled into a badly combed shark-finned ponytail.
The parents in this quiet, rural location didn’t know me pre-baby. They wouldn’t know I’d once been a human being.
I really needed to sort myself out and start dressing like a functioning adult.
Think more responsible mother, less hobo troll.
During my pregnancy, I’d refused to buy the standard maternity clothes, instead buying size-eighteen dresses from Topshop, oversized eighties rock vests, and leggings from H&M.
Why were maternity clothes so sensible, I’d wondered. I’m pregnant, not dead. Where is the leopard print? The hot pink? Even the maternity jeans had dark-blue turn-ups and creases ironed down the front. Where were the rips? The studs?
Now, with a more mature, motherly figure and a young baby to look after, I understood. Despite slapping cocoa butter on my wrinkly stomach for the past year, I still had an abundance of loose skin. No amount of dieting or exercise would get rid of it, and the cocoa butter made absolutely no difference.
My body shape had changed. I now had sticky-out, saggy bits that did not look good in tight clothing.
