Motherload

This morning I was rushing back from buying gift wrap for son's 7th birthday, when I was waylaid and forced to have coffee with some other mothers from his class. Forced,  I tell you. Somewhere in the chat, one of the mothers proudly displayed bright red shellac nails, and told us she'd found a lady whose own children are in nursery, who does nails much more cheaply than on the high street, and that as a result she could allow herself to have a manicure every three weeks, rather than never. Another mother promptly reminisced about her own mum, who had frowned upon nail polish as risqué . As a result the daughter now feels naughty whenever she has her nails done. Luckily her mother's opinion hasn't actually stopped her doing what she wants with her nails. Which led somehow to a discussion of Cougar Slutting. Which made us all laugh immoderately. What was a Cougar Slut? And how wonderful that, if you turn it into a verb, 'to cougar slut', it can never be in

When our second child was three months old, I flew from Sydney to London with him and our three-year-old firstborn. My husband stayed in Sydney to finish things off. Without going into the details, the experience of flying, alone, with a breastfeeding infant and a toddler, for twenty-four hours, was almost exactly the same as labour. I knew the pain would have to end at some point, and I also knew that I was completely on my own, while simultaneously surrounded by people looking at me, just as most women are during modern births. The main two differences were (a) the lack of epidural on the plane, and (b) the fact that the stewardesses actively ticked me off, rather than telling me when to push. Nothing could have drilled into my brain better the understanding that we had not added to the family in having a second child, but rather that we had gone forth and  multiplied . No one talks about what it is like to move from one to two children. There is no What To Expect book, wi