Becky Boop

I didn’t get on particularly well with my midwife. When I first met her I really warmed to her – she was pink-haired and very Brighton, and extremely positive about the fact I was about to spend two weeks of early pregnancy in India (a school trip which I had no intention of dropping out of,  but some anxiety about actually doing). However, I am generally very bad at first impresssions, and this was no exception. My main issue was that she was very pro-home birth from the get go. I knew immediately that I didn’t want one but I am not good at disagreeing with medical professionals, so I allowed this conversation to span a few appointments and kept saying placatory things like “I’ll think about it”, knowing the idea filled me with dread. At the very least home birth seemed to involve getting gore all over your own duvet, and even that was enough to put me off. In one speculative conversation I told her of my friend H who had an unidentified breech and narrowly avoided giving birth

You stumble around in your dressing gown, stunned by how different everything looks in the watery dawn. Your sleepless eyes survey the detritus of the night before, scattered all over the house in a series of unlikely places. Your top is stained and your mouth tastes like metal. You stare at your reflection in the bathroom mirror, eyes black and wide. Your skin seems a different texture, your hair a different colour. In your clumsiness you smear toothpaste on the side of your cheek instead of getting the brush in your mouth first time. You know this feeling. This is the feeling of floating around the house aged 22, at 10am, after your birthday party, full of chemicals and a nascent but palpable dread. Or, it’s the feeling you get when you’re on buckets of codeine and you’ve been up all night nursing a tiny baby at home for the first time ever. Turns out, Irvine was wrong – today, ‘choosing life’ doesn’t feel wholesome, it feels a lot like choosing hard drugs and sleepless, wired