with Alex was all part of the plan – the rehearsal, if you will – for what would be the wedding of the year with Ben?
‘Will you take over pushing the buggy for a minute?’ Marie asked, breaking me from my bonkers bridal thoughts. ‘I’ve got cramp, another wonderful side effect of being with child,’ she grumbled.
We were slowly meandering around the local park – and I mean slowly; even the ducks were waddling faster than us. Marie was on her ‘get this baby out of me’ mission, and I’d completely forgotten that I’d agreed to support her until she called me this morning. Her due date was still weeks away but she was determined to deliver precisely on time. She’d been exactly the same with her toddler, Cole, her firstborn. Marie was having this baby on her due date, come hell or high water.
‘I don’t feel like I did with Cole, so I need to be upping my game to get this baby out of me,’ she said, as I took over wheeling his pushchair for a while over fallen branches and skirted round piles of dog poo. Marie had a crazed look in her eyes as she spoke. It was a look I remembered seeing when we were both eighteen and she was determined to finish the line of shots in Waverley’s bar in order to win a free T-shirt. Those luminous shooters never stood a chance.
‘Marie, it’s a baby. I know I’m not a world expert on the subject matter but don’t they kind of come when they’re ready?’
She glared at me. The mood swings were clearly still going strong. ‘Georgia Green, I may have developed haemorrhoids, darker nipples, and lost the ability to hold in my pee when I sneeze or cough or laugh, but this, this is something I know I can control.’ She looked like a determined Michelin Man under the many layers swaddling her neat bump as she waddled around.
‘I still can’t believe that you haven’t found out what you’re having.’
‘We’re having a baby, Georgia. Did no one tell you?’ She stuck her tongue out playfully.
‘Ha, bloody, ha. I mean, how have you not been desperate to know if it’s a girl or a boy? I’d certainly need to know if a teeny, weeny penis was currently growing inside me.’ I shuddered.
‘Well, we all know there have been enough of them inside me.’ She laughed, blushing at the carefree memories of her single days. ‘Nah, seriously though, I don’t want to ruin the surprise. It will make it even more magical when he or she does finally make an appearance.’ She put on that drowsy hippy voice that she used to use to imitate Lorraine with the lazy eye. Lazy-Eye Lorraine. She was an earth-mother type woman who ran the antenatal classes and got right on Marie’s nerves by implying that basically she’d been a lousy mum to Cole and that nowadays they did things differently. Everything was magical in Lorraine’s world.
Marie didn’t do ‘magical’; she did practical, and right now the most practical thing she could do was try her hardest to get her baby safely into the world on her due date. It was a mini achievement but still one way to show bog-eyed Lorraine that mummy Marie wasn’t a failure.
‘If you don’t know what you’re having then what have you been buying for it? Isn’t there some unwritten code of motherhood that you go all out and splash the cash on anything and everything pink for a girl or blue for a boy?’
Marie rolled her eyes and sighed. ‘It’s all about gender-neutral clothes for babies nowadays, so he or she is going to have a wardrobe filled with yellows, greens and whites. I just hope people will be able to tell what sex it is by the look of him, or her.’
I scoffed. ‘Well, if it was me I’d dress my baby only in teeny tiny Halloween costumes. That’s one way to do the gender-neutral look.’
She let out a burst of laughter. ‘Thank the Lord you’re not expecting then. I’m not sure how the baby would like to look back at their first year of life to realise they were dressed as a pumpkin or a bat for most of it.’
‘Yeah, maybe, but how cute! God, Marie, it’s just mad to think that soon he or she will be here sharing this buggy with Cole.’ I felt this strange tingle in my chest as I said it. Everything was changing. My best friend’s life would never be the same again. When she was pregnant with Cole we had spent ages imagining what he would be like, how he would grow into an actual person with a personality, and what becoming a mum, rather than just being Marie, would be like. I guess a small and selfish part of me had worried that I’d be sidelined from our friendship once she had this other human who was the complete centre of her world. How could her best friend ever compete with that?
They say a mother’s love is like no other, but not having a child I could only understand that from a rational perspective. Now we were on the edge of her life changing again, but this time I was less concerned with how I was going to fit in, and instead focused on the fact that my life was about to change, too.
‘I know.’ She smiled tiredly. ‘And then Operation Skinny Jeans is back on.’
I frowned at her.
‘Don’t give me that look! I’m not going to be going all A-List celeb and ping straight back but I am desperate to feel like my body is my own again. Plus, if I’m going to meet my five-year plan then I need to be getting trim for the big day.’
‘This big day that Mike knows nothing about,’ I teased, then let out a deep sigh. ‘It’s amazing to think that a few years ago we were both in such different places – and yet somehow exactly the same – as where we are now. What with you popping out sproglets and me…about to get engaged…’
It took a few moments for this to click in.
‘Oh my God! What? You’re getting married!’ Marie’s squeals made a lone dog walker jump from the other side of the lake. My ring finger throbbed in memory of the torture it had been under as she mentioned the M word.
‘Shush! You’re going to wake Cole!’ I glanced down at her toddler son, wrapped up in blankets in his buggy. He remained fast asleep with just his pink nose and angel-bud lips peeking out of the many covers she had piled on him earlier.
‘Tell me everything!’ She’d stopped in her tracks and snatched up my hand to hunt for any sign of bling. ‘Wait – where’s the ring?’
‘Well, okay, so I’m not engaged yet. But I will be…’
She stared at me, blank faced, as if I’d totally lost the plot. ‘You what?’
I sighed and told her about the trip to Ikea, the unpacking, finding the ring and damaging the nerves in my finger from the force of trying to get it off before Ben caught me.
‘Wow, so what was it like?’
‘Dreamy.’ I hugged myself without realising it.
‘Better than the last one you got?’ She raised an eyebrow.
I pulled myself together. ‘Yes, actually.’
She nodded slowly, thinking of how to word the next question. ‘Are you ready to do all of that again? You know, with what happened last time?’ she eventually asked, leaving a whisper of breath hanging in the air.
‘Yeah, course. I mean, I think so.’ She gave me a look. I stared back. ‘I love Ben, and this time it already feels so different to how I felt with Alex. It’s like I’ve grown up and realised what’s actually important in a relationship. Plus, I just know myself so much better – I know what I want now. I am so different from old Georgia, it’s like I finally know who I am. At least, I think so. It has come as a bit of a surprise.’
‘You think so? Georgia, this is a big deal. You need to be sure.’ She paused. ‘I’m only asking because I was the one who saw how everything collapsed the last time. I never ever want that to happen to you again.’ She visibly shuddered.
I stuck my chest out. ‘It won’t. Ben loves me, and he obviously thinks we’re ready for this otherwise he wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of buying the ring –’
‘I just worry about you that’s all.’