Russian Dolls

Russian Dolls

Article by Lindsey, West Yorkshire, 06/07/2013

It was a Thursday in October, almost thirteen weeks into my pregnancy when I had the first scan. At last proper confirmation that thisnausea wasn’t for nothing – there really was something inside me, somethinghuman. I was still being sick every evening but the misery was now tinged withhope and excitement: hope that the nausea might end fairly soon, and excitementat the knowledge of the life inside me. Meanwhile, a tiny being reclinedcomfortably in my womb as if relaxing on a sun lounger. It looked so laidback,so collected – so different from how I felt. And tiny, yes, but not a bit vulnerableor needy. Not like it might scream for hours, appalled at the shock of lifeitself.

It was time to go public, although by this time it was onlyreally a secret to people who lived far away and hadn’t witnessed the patheticsight of me gnawing miserably at half a breadstick in between gulps ofGaviscon. We’d been nervous about telling our parents – I wasn’t sure how minewould take to our method of conception, involving a man from the Internetmasturbating in our bathroom, but their desperation for a grandchild, theextent of which I hadn’t truly realised, apparently overrode any concerns theymay have had. When I was little over seven weeks gone, my mum took theopportunity while the neighbours were on holiday (since it was still earlydays) to get my old baby clothes and Terry nappies out of the loft, through thewash and hanging on the line in the garden. This child was either going to lookridiculous, dressed in clothes over thirty years old, or like a supercool 70’sretro baby. Close friends either already knew our method of conception or, ifthey didn’t, were quick to ask. More distant friends and work colleagues tendednot to ask and, while part of me wanted to correct their probable assumptionthat we’d been to a clinic and used anonymous donor sperm, I also felt that thequite intimate details of our child’s beginning were best kept as distant aspossible from staffroom gossip. We left our parents to spread the news to theolder family members still surviving, and I still experience a slight discomfortwhen I wonder exactly how much they were told and what their understanding isof how lesbians go about these things; it horrifies me to think that they maybe under the impression that I had sex with a man – but perhaps I’m insultingthe intelligence of a generation that we have actually found far more acceptingof our relationship than the post-war baby boom generation that followed them.

Meanwhile, my body was changing. It was around thefourteen-week mark that a sliver of tummy was starting to emerge between topsand trousers. Keen to avoid both a November crop-top look and the risk ofcatching a chill, I had to reassess my wardrobe. A similarly proportionedfriend had very kindly leant me a mound of maternity clothes, and my forageinto the bag heralded a revelation: the comfort of maternity jeans with ashrewdly practical elastic-and-button adjustable system on the waistband.

There was really no hiding the emerging bump now and onebreak-time, a group of Year 11 girls cornered me; clearly aware of the delicacyof the issue, yet determined for answers, after a little skirting around thetopic they ventured to ask whether the rumours were true. I hadn’t anticipatedthe screaming that my response inspired, and the anxious educator in me was alittle perturbed at their complete lack of concern that their English teacherwould be leaving a month before the GCSE exams.

A couple of weeks later, one of the girls – interestingly astudent who was rather too relaxed where her work was concerned – presented mewith a hat she’d knitted for the baby. I was very touched by the effort she’dgone to, and felt a surge of guilt: my knitting needles hadn’t surfaced sincethe last charity blanket square I’d produced twenty years ago as a Girl Guideand now my baby was reliant on sixteen-year-olds for its wardrobe. I hastilyconsulted Amazon and ordered a copy of Vintage Knits for Modern Babies, somewool and needles, and hoped I’d be able to find a YouTube video on how tocast-on. Meanwhile, I was unaware that around the country a hum of clickingneedles was already picking up tempo; the post-war generation may struggle alittle at first with homosexuality, but news of a baby is well within theircomfort zone and the automatic reaction of many of our mums’ friends andfriends’ mums, it seemed, was to reach for a couple of balls of Baby DK and apattern.

By mid-November, I’d reached seventeen weeks and the miseryof the nausea had been replaced by a renewed appetite for evening meals which Icould now keep down. My weight started to increase – until now, despite theemerging bump, with two and a half months of minimal food and no exercise, bothfat and muscle had been dropping off from the rest of my body. We started tosocialise again; I was still rather prone to more severe travel-sickness than Iwas used to, but we managed to visit relatives in Wales and on the South Coastand for the first time in over twenty years in my family, talk was of babies.We went for an Indian meal with friends, one of whom was two months ahead ofme, and we were able to share both the exasperation of being told for thefiftieth time that ginger could solve the sickness problem (it wasn’t evenslightly effective for either of us) and the excitement of what we both hadahead. The fact was, that pregnancy was starting to become quite good fun.

And all this time I was still only just beginning to get myhead round the miracle inside me. I was reminded of the> colourful RussianDolls I had as a child, especially when I learnt that if our child was a girl,she would already have a full complement of eggs ready to produce her ownchildren: another two generations there, inside me. I was almost ready to don abright yellow headscarf and paint my lips bright red. But if only birth was aseasy as a brief twist and pull of two bits of painted wood…