Handmaid’s tale

Already I feel my liberties curtailed, my choices (such as they) are truncated; I feel the laser intrusion of other people’s judgment.

Sipping a homeopathic shandy, punters in the sunny bar across the road gaze upon my four-month belly and pale yellow liquid in casual scrutiny, let none fails to light up within the same breathing space. Judge not lest ye be judged, I think, defiantly waving away their smoke and making my ‘beer’ last three of Tom’s.

At a BBQ with Tom’s work colleagues, the pale pink grape juice I sip was actively questioned, despite medical opinion on wine to be out, if only 1 glass a day is drunk, and not more than 5 days a week. I’m not drinking because I shouldn’t but because I don’t actually want to, but it’s not for others to tell me what’s good for my baby. Fucking hell, I’ve already saved its life once. Give me some credit for knowing what’s best. It’s what mothers are good at.

At a management training course, I feel my awkward waddle undermines my authority. I find myself using my sternest voice to counteract my curves. And yet when I’m called out for sitting as the instructor drones on, I default to crying pregnancy as if it were an illness. I’m anaemic, you see; my body betraying me as it concentrates on someone else. A metaphor for womanhood. My innate generosity allowing me to be exploited. But when I’m offered my first seat on the tube, I scuffle into it gratefully, the other person all too quickly martyred by their own magnanimity .

The leadership course allowed me to define my problems. Already motherhood has disempowered me, workwise. The facts corroborated by the big data. The age at which you have your first child defines your career progress, and now I fear I’m being written off again. Big rhetoric at the organisation can not distort the facts. Women at senior level are few. There are more CEOs called John, and so on and so forth ad nauseum, and yet my corporation waxes lyrical about the importance of championing women in the workplace, yet fails to mention the elephant in the room – motherhood and what it does to women’s careers. I’m supported, I am told- but that doesn’t mean I will be allowed to progress.

But perhaps that’s fine. Right now, I need to concentrate on holding it together; staying sane. Yet even that may be denied me. My insurance company refused to cover a clearly defined, medically requested claim to see a gynaecologist to discuss my hormones and how they affect my mental health. That comes under aging, and pregnancy, I’m told, doesn’t count as important – or words to that effect.

Yet I already know that a tendency toward PMS (I have PMDD, diagnosed) means PND is more likely, and already I fear the inevitable – a hormonal crash that will take my will to live with it. The algorithm predicts it’s alarming likelihood and yet nothing can be done. Everyone’s hands are tied. I must await the tsunami and bear it alone.

Sipping said shandy, so watered down as to taste more of chemical sweetener and pipe cleaning fluid than of beer, I received a well meant email from the course director of the masters I’ve been trying to do for three years, which life, or rather, work, has so far prevented.

Having a baby’s an intense experience, it wrote, making an assumption that I didn’t know this already- so you may feel as though deferring another year may work better for you etc etc.

My own experience tells me that toddlers are harder to plan around than newborns so I declined, with thanks for the concern, but the remark that new fathers would be unlikely to offered the same. It’s true. Back to work they go, two weeks after the birth and it is us (for all times may be changing) whose lives are interrupted as we become milk machines and primary carers because often it’s just easier that way.

I know it will be difficult, but surrendering my infant to a professional child carer one day a week won’t harm it – although my breasts may feel the strain, my time will need to be planned, my sleep will be curtailed. And yet, according to this woman’s concerns, I may be better off surrendering myself to the humdrum tasks of early motherhood, despite knowing full well my brain will need something other than my schedule to occupy it, lest I go completely mad.

And unlike work, where my boss’s expectations confine me, my new miniature ruler has none, except those set by me, so perhaps it’s better to get this child used to the inevitable – that I must leave them, right off the bat, so they don’t know what comfort they might miss if I gave them exactly what they want. I know that doesn’t end well. I still get phonecalls from Jonah’s teachers every few weeks about this problem or that, and he was breastfed on demand, co-slept and otherwise attended to without delay, so “on tap mothering” is no panacea to behavioural problems- perhaps rather the cause?

The modern world seeks to put me in my place, but I already know it – my child is more important to me than anything else, even, while it is young, the ones I already have. It doesn’t need me to virtue signal it; or judge me when I set an agenda for myself that does not live up to society’s expectations. I need to look after myself and earn a living as much as I need to feed my baby. So when I know myself to be capable of doing both, why must others stand in my way?