BRINGING BACK THE HAPPY

Natali Drake - 23 Sep 14

You lose a lot when you become pregnant. Namely your waist, granted, but there is also your lack of tolerance, your inability to stand up without using your arms, and sleep. You lose a lot of that. (Honestly, why does no one tell you that the baby will keep you awake before it has even been born? Don’t you just love it when Mother Nature and Irony gang up on you). But for me, I lost something much more important when my One became Two. I lost my Happy.

This story isn’t about depression or anything that serious; I’m fortunate to never have suffered anything more than the Baby Blues. Except maybe for the time a very scared doctor once threw a packet of Prozac at me after I spent half an hour moaning about how utterly exhausted I was and begging for help, when actually I was just severely sleep deprived with a two year old and a newborn. Anyway, I digress. So there I was pregnant, excited about it, eager to be all pregnanty and stuff then suddenly…I lost my Happy.

To truly understand what that meant to the 29-year-old me, I will need to give you a snapshot of who I was once was. Now, I wouldn’t say I was bubbly…because that makes me sound fat with jiggly boobs and curly hair. Neither would I say I was chatty…I talk, shit loads, but ‘chatty’ makes my ramblings sound inane when in fact they are clearly both insightful and hilarious. Some might have said I was a glass-half-full kinda girl…I would say I couldn’t give a toss how empty or full the glass was, as long as there was room for more vodka.

No, I would say I was a positive and optimistic person. I believed in ‘yes you can’, in fact people came to me regularly just to get a verbal pat on the back and a ‘go, seize the day’ pep talk. I loved it, because I genuinely believed that life and everything in it was going to work out just fine and that everyone deserved to be happy. I was easily excitable, I was hopeful, I was positively brimming with the joys of fucking Spring. And then I discovered motherhood and all my sunshine and rainbows disappeared.

Personally I blame those women that tell you that being pregnant is akin to Nirvana and that you become at one with nature and feel nothing but calm and peaceful, like life finally has a purpose. I wanted that, I so so so so wanted that. I also wanted to be in control of the whole thing, as if my body would grow as I said and tingle/ache/stretch at my command. But those things didn’t happen. Instead my hormones waged a war with the little normalcy I had left and I became ‘Pregnataur’ – a hulking monster that crushed anyone in her path, cut you with a stare and was completely invincible because of her super bump.

I spent nine entire months stomping. I hated everyone, and I mean everyone. Every stupid bloody person on my train commute that had the audacity to be holding a cup of coffee, (exactly why does the smell of coffee make pregnant women heave? I once sneered at a woman on the seat beside me, clutching her cappuccino, as if she had just farted on my lap), and every boy over the age of fifteen because they all reeked of BO. I hated anyone that didn’t notice my miniscule bump and let me sit down. I wanted to gouge the eyes out (yes, even that) of anyone that dared come within a foot of me and my precious cargo. I don’t think my husband made eye contact with me once during those evil months. Even the day I decided to have three giant slabs of chocolate for my dinner and stomped around the house eating them like a sandwich, even then he knew better than to dare point at a vegetable.

But the weird thing was, I wasn’t UN-happy. I was genuinely looking forward to meeting my baby, I loved her wriggling inside me and Googling to see what size fruit she resembled. All I wanted to talk about was baby stuff and nest and paint and make lovely fiddly bright things out of felt for the nursery. I just didn’t want to be chirpy about it. I was sarcastic, bitter, irritable and angry about nothing in particular.

Then she was born and I was too tired for at least 18 months to feel anything at all. Then went on to have another child (miraculously my husband managed to get near enough to me to make that happen) and I repeated it all over again. So what happened to my Happy?

Well strangely enough I didn’t miss it. People said I had changed after having kids (errrr, I carried a human inside of me, pushed it out of a relatively small orifice, had it suck, pull, puke, lay and hang off me for two years and not slept during the entire time…excuse me for not being the same carefree, unattached, bouncy girl I once was) but I wouldn’t have called myself unhappy. I was pretty okay, just adjusting to my new life and thinking that this was what mid-thirties felt like.

Then one sunny morning, after a decent night’s sleep, I thought a happy thought and smiled. Then I thought ‘shit, I just thought a happy thought and smiled. I actually feel pretty good’. Then I started working, and writing, and going out, and losing weight, and feeling and looking like the old me and I thought ‘hell yeah, welcome back me, I did miss you all along.’ Now I feel pretty darn fine. And hopeful. And (most) people don’t irritate me. And I no longer consider slabs of chocolate as entire meals. In fact just the other day a pregnant lady told me how complete she felt and exclaimed how positively orgasmic the entire process of pregnancy was for her and I actually smiled. And I told her how happy I was for her and how it was utterly marvellous how I didn’t even want to gauge her eyes out any more.

So my Happy came back, although now it’s smeared around the edges with a hint of cynicism and reality, which is even more fantastic. Because now I get to keep my smile and my glare. That angry little Pregnataur grew into a marvellous Mamasarous and she’s frighteningly feisty, fabulously fun and oh so fucking fierce!

Natali Drake

Natali Drake is an author, freelance writer and mother of two little girls. In 2015 she co-founded theglasshousegirls.com - an online magazine for women who say it how it is! Her work has appeared in our very own The Mother Book, as well as in various online magazines and UK newspapers. Her YA Fantasy Romance series 'The Path Keeper' (written under her pen name N J Simmonds) is now available to order at all good bookshops or visit njsimmonds.com

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