Beans

I had been apprehensive about Christmas.
My favourite festive song (Fairytale of New York of course) just evoked the feeling of static charge from the storm that was threatening to break over this period last year.
And I don't expect the divvying up of important family dates, namely Isobel's first Christmas followed by her first birthday (on consecutive weekends when she would normally be staying with us) to go smoothly.
But last week that feeling changed.
Isobel stayed with us again after almost four weeks' gap.
She was wearing a fleecy Snowman bodysuit grandma bought her and looked and felt like a cuddly little teddy bear.
"I'm a real girl!" Matt squeaked in a cute Pinocchio reference when I lifted her and cuddled her all up.

She's running around in the same suit today, and we'll go out in the snow later in her reindeer hat and booties.
All is back to normal.
Matt and I have had yesterday's leftover Yorkshire puddings and gravy for breakfast and Isobel has found a box amid the mayhem on the living room floor to play in.
Which gives me a few more minutes to continue my story...

After the weekend that changed everything, I cooled things with Matt.
We spoke and texted as if nothing had changed, but I realised I was getting in too deep, felt hurt and decided to spend my time instead having a giggle with Nick. He was silly and fun and safe because he was leaving the country in a few months to study as a mature student in Spain.

But a few weeks later Matt wanted to visit. It was one of his friends' birthdays and he wanted me to go with him.
I've never really known how to say no to him.

I had told Nick I might be able to meet him after work, but hadn't said for definite. So I let Matt in and started to get ready to go out.
Nick was furious. He'd waited all day for confirmation from me. He'd got stuck with his housemate's awful family instead of taking up a better offer from friends because he was waiting for me to pop round.
He called while we were getting ready to go out. He wanted to come and pick up his oversized jumper I had borrowed but no longer deserved to wear.

I threw a paddy at Matt. "We're going to be late and then you'll blame it on me. It's always my fault when we're late!"
Actually it's usually his because he pounces on me when I'm getting dressed up and it tends to ruffle me up more than it does him.
"Go! Shower. Now. Hurry. Up!"
Matt, shocked, obeyed, ten seconds before Nick rang the doorbell.

I didn't care if Matt heard but didn't want to hurt Nick more than necessary. I gave him back his jumper and he scolded me for being selfish, then left.

My housemate Gemma, who was watching the soap opera unfold from the living room sofa with her boyfriend, quoted from a Confucius calendar she had on her desk at work.
"If you don't like beans, you shouldn't have opened the tin." Her arm was outstretched for me to gulp from her glass of red.

Matt didn't hear Nick come round, but later that night, he found condoms hidden down the side of my bed.
We didn't sleep together that night. He sulked and pushed me away. "I thought we were more than that," he told me.
I told him he had double standards and he agreed.

Two days later, I got a text of two horrifying words: "Lizzie's pregnant".
I told him I was very happy for them.

The ex

I may not incur sympathy for what I say next, although it's unlikely a surprise.
I hate Isobel's mother more than anyone I've ever met.
Actually, I don't think I've ever hated anyone before.
Lizzie and I have nothing in common, other than the two people that mean the most to me in the world.
I'm a tall leggy blonde (37in inside leg to be exact). She's about ten years older than me, short with dark hair.
I sometimes compare short people to small dogs. I find them aggressive, stubborn and bitchy. There are many exceptions, but she isn't one of them.
Lizzie already had two children, 17 and 13, to two different dads before Matt made it a hat trick.
She lives in a school caretaker's house illegally sublet to her in a rundown part of the city.
She owns a three-bedroom house up the road, which she lets through the council to her mother who lives there on her own.
She's six years older than Matt, flirty, dirty and her disregard for the rules makes her fun.
She's also manipulative, vengeful and furious that he left her.
Matt had gone back to Lizzie a few times since they broke up, but then stopped.
We were closer than we'd expected to become and he'd witnessed her nasty side too often to truly believe it wouldn't be his turn soon.
And he was right. That fateful night she deliberately conceived gorgeous innocent little Isobel as her revenge.

The first chapter

For the next couple of weeks, there's no little bubba crawling around and doing funny things I'd like to write about. So this seems like a good opportunity to explain a few things about how our funny little family came to be. The events that brought Isobel into my life have sometimes been difficult and don't easily fade into the past. Matt and I were 'friends with benefits' for a long time, during which I hoped to stumble upon a more reliable man and he played around with other women. My career was flying so I didn't have the time for a full-time boyfriend and was still pretty sore about the last one that had ended in tears. It was a good set up, giving us all the good bits of a relationship without the complications. And he'd left the northern city in which we lived temporarily to suit his career. I was fiercely independent and enjoyed being single. I had no desire to have to rely on anyone else. I didn't really believe in love, marriage or happily ever after (or a man's ability to hold to their part in any of the above). If it were ever to happen for me though, I had a vision of the man who'd eventually win my heart being much different to Matt. But annoyingly for someone so sure they break the mould, the predictable happened. Matt travelled to mine every weekend. We went out in public with our other friends and, instead of just having sex, we started to cuddle and kiss. The perfect arrangement couldn't last forever. Though now I suppose I'm glad it didn't. It started to unravel on a Saturday night in April, when I planned a night out with a girlfriend. She lived near him and I arranged to stay at his the rest of the weekend. Returning on Sunday, my bag was hidden in the wardrobe and there were two used wine glasses on the counter. "Fast work. I was only gone one night." Stupid girl, you're not supposed to care. The next weekend was Easter and my parents were having a relative over. I was summoned to their house in the village where I grew up for the weekend. Matt didn't ask me my plans and I didn't tell him, for a number of reasons. I feared I was being presumptuous that he'd come in the first place. What if he said he wasn't planning to anyway? I wanted to ruin his weekend plans last minute, not give him the chance to make more. And I wanted to teach him to have the respect to ask me first, rather than presume I'm always there waiting for him. Even if I usually was. What wasn't part of the plan however was that he was already on his way. On arrival at an empty flat, he was never going to drive all the way back home. I understood immediately what I'd done, although not yet the extent of the repercussions. My mum suggested on the Sunday of the bank holiday weekend that I go home early. I was being a mardy bitch. Back in the city I went out, got sh*t-faced with a friend and pulled a really sweet guy before falling down the staircase in the nightclub. Nick picked me up, took me home, put me to bed like a gentleman and called me the next day to meet for coffee. He was funny, cheeky but not too sure of himself. We spent a lot of time together in the warm early summer, having barbecues and drinking while he played my favourite Counting Crows songs on guitar (Mr Jones is actually quite complicated). I wasn't to know it then, but he was not the new love that was working it's way into my life.

Tidings of comfort and joy

Being a non-parent is so fleeting sometimes.
As a real parent, once you've become it for the first time, you'll always hold that status. When they grow up, move out, get married, even if a child sadly died, it still leaves parents.
I'm a non-parent on weekends and I don't get to be one now for the next three weekends.
Matt's on a boys' weekend in Oslo next week and Isobel is staying with his sister.
Her mother doesn't let her stay with me, which we found out in June half an hour before I was due to set out on the hour and a half journey to pick her up.
Matt texted me from Spain : "She says she comes to see me and if I'm not there then she's not coming."
He doesn't fight with her because that's what she wants.
I have to admit I had been surprised she'd appeared to agree in the first place. But she's not stupid and knows leaving it until the last minute hurts more.
I threw the bag of toys and books I'd bought on my lunchbreak in the boot of my car, went home and cursed them both.

This weekend he and I are holidaying in Prague so I won't complain about that. We miss her, and the Christmas markets with pretty frosted lebkuchen, wooden toys and massive Christmas trees dripping with lights would make her grin so widely she might swallow them. But I don't think it's fair to take babies on aeroplanes just because I want to go on holiday.
At least when they're older you can stick them a Werthers' Original if their ears start to pop.
Another sharp criticism of parents or am I just bitter we wouldn't be allowed to take her away anywhere if we wanted to?

Next weekend I planned to counteract the hole left by Isobel in Prague with a trip to Lincoln Christmas market. 
I booked the hotel. It would be our little family Christmas because we won't get to have her on the day.
Christmas is always going to be tricky.
I've made sure I'm working Christmas day and as much as possible over the period so Matt can go see her without guilt if he wants.
I asked Matt if maybe we could have her both Friday and Saturday night, as a trade for Christmas. He said he forgot to mention it, but coincidently her mother is now taking her away for the weekend.
He doesn't fight, it's easier that way. He says we'll still go, but I don't want to stomp around all day with the hole felt in Prague just getting bigger.

A familiar ache burns in my belly. This selfish control-freak wonders how the hell the two most important parts of her life came to be under complete control of someone else.

Parental Privilege

When Isobel was first born, I feared I'd develop an irrational jealousy of her. I have since found that while I have developed this jealousy, it isn't of her. I'm jealous over her.

She's now at a fantastic age. She's seeing everything with new eyes and understands the world a little bit more each time. She grins from ear to ear.

We play all day, while her dad, Matthew, intermittently zones out watching telly. She clings on tight when I pick her up and plays with my hair and necklace, sometimes pulling it impressively hard for someone her size. I wonder if that's something her mother has taught her to do to blonde women.

In public, people smile at me. “How beautiful is your baby!” I'm sad she's not mine.

At the play centre, we find an area called Pre-Walkers for Isobel. We want to go in the ball pool, but despite the 'Under 5s Only' sign, there's a group of big kids and we don't want to get caught up in the crossfire of coloured plastic missiles.

The Pre-Walkers section is secluded and I show Isobel and abacus with numbers, letters, colours and farm animals, which provokes the wide toothy grin.

Some older kids hop into our zone and crowd the space and a skinny little blonde girl sparks up a conversation with Matthew.

A weathered-looking mother or grandmother gazes over. I will her to call her noisy busy-body child away but she just looks at me suspiciously and returns to her group of friends who are sitting in a cluster about ten feet away.

Matthew patiently engages in conversation with the child. She wants to know Isobel's name.

Why does she make me so uncomfortable? I realise that it's because she's an imposter too. Maybe she has a little brother or sister, or maybe she wishes she did. She's in training to be a mother already, ugh.

While I envy certain aspects, as a general collective, I dislike parents. Not my own, they're fantastic, although as human and flawed as all of them are.

Parenthood is an exclusive club. The people in it have done something wonderful for the future of the entire human race. They have evolved a little bit more than all the rest of us, and they have parental instincts, which just make them right.

They are bringing up the future, which isn't a service to themselves, but the world, and this entitles them to “parental privilege”. Parental privilege is what gives parents the right to say “I know best”.

It entitles them to push their buggies in front of cars to halt traffic, it allows them to pull over on corners and junctions without indicating or do whatever they feel they need to do.

As Isobel's non-mother, I don't cross the road unless there's a green light. Matt rolls his eyes from the other side of the road as the lights change again and another channel of traffic passes. There had been plenty of time, but if anything had happened...

I am afraid to lift Isobel above my head, while Matthew throws her in the air and catches her – her favourite game.

I keep rigidly to her diet and schedule, or else it will be my fault she's constipated or doesn't sleep.

He gives her whatever he can find to shut her up and it does the trick.

I watch her with terror tottering on her chubby feet as she holds herself up against the coffee table. On his watch, I hear him pause the games console to pick her up as she screams. “She's fine. She's got to learn these things.”

It's obviously something I'll understand when I have kids of my own, isn't it.

Maybe I just will start a blog

Today I read that personal blogs were over. They remain only for right-wingers and smug yummy mummies, the blogger behind Belle de Jour told The Sunday Times.

I'm neither of the above. I may even be the opposite, or can be characterised by the distinction.

I'm certainly not a yummy mummy.

In that fact I suppose I am a little smug. What a bore it must be to be one of those. I take some kind of self-satisfaction in overindulging in alcohol, cigarettes, swearing, sarcasm and non-organic food.

More than just a stubborn self-centred twenty-something, I put a finer point on it during a recent identity crisis. I'm actually a non-mummy.

I became a non-mummy at the end of last year when my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend gave birth to a little baby girl. But it was only a few weeks ago I realised that that's what I was...

It's Saturday morning and I suggest a children's play centre I've heard of through work.

“This place looks good baby. You know what? You should write a blog about places that are good to take children.”

Why the f*ck would I want to do that?

“Why? Because we have managed to leave the house with her a total of four times now?”

Isobel's ten months old and we have her every weekend. Between the two of us we have finally mastered, with teamwork, to get her (and ourselves) up, fed, bathed and dressed, napped, fed and napped again before 2pm, leaving us a couple of hours to do something with the weekend before she goes home.

“It would be good experience, wouldn't it?”

I glower at him. I'm a journalist on a daily newspaper. It's hardly like I'm a work experience girl after bylines.

“Just a suggestion, baby.”

The insensitive and frankly bad suggestion stays with me, however. Why would I write a blog about child-friendly activities? I don't even have my own children. Talk about unqualified.

I avoid the instinct to scrape my hair into a ponytail and I put on some make up. We appear to be thinking similar thoughts, although with a key difference.

“Maybe we'll meet some new friends, for us and Isobel,” he says chirpily.

In my head I picture three thirty-somethings exchanging stories about the safest car seats, the healthiest foods and the most educational toys. I add something vanilla to try to fit in, which is met with an awkward silence. She'll understand one day, they think.

In the car, Isobel and I chat, in an improvised language we both understand.

“Nga.”

“Babababa.”

“Uhhhhhhhhhh.”

“Lalalalalala.”

“Don't worry she's fine,” he says. I know.

Two minutes into the five minute journey she's asleep. She's soon rudely awakened as I delicately unlock the car seat, secure my hands around her little chest and scoop her out, step on my own foot, wobble backwards and bump her head on the door.

“Be careful of my baby!”

She cries as we cross the car park. So do I.