The days weren’t a great deal better either. Lily grew into a clingy baby who cried when anyone else held her but Kate. If she put her down, even for a minute, she would wail and kick her little legs in frustration. It was relentless and Kate had no idea how to soothe her. As her anxiety worsened, so did Lily’s tears. Kate became convinced that everyone thought she was a terrible mother, and her fears were made worse when she met up with the other new mums and they all seemed to be doing a brilliant job. They’d talk about adventures they’d been on at the weekend – popping their offspring into a sling and getting the Tube into town for a day of culture or going away for a couple of nights with a big group of friends – when the idea of simply going to the local park brought Kate out in a cold sweat. Each day felt like a new battle and over time, she became less and less able to face it.
She knew she was hard to live with in those days. Pete would return from work and offer to have Lily for a while but the minute he took her she’d find some fault – he was holding her wrong, or he was making her overexcited and she’d never sleep, or how dare he suggest giving her a bottle? She sounded neurotic, she knew, and she hated herself for it afterwards, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.
Looking back, it was obvious now that it was far more than ‘just the baby blues’, which is what she called it when Pete had gently suggested that she seek some help. She’d clearly had postnatal depression but she’d never allowed herself to admit it as it seemed like another admission of failure. If only she had, she might have got some much-needed help and found a way to navigate through the long, dark, lonely tunnel of hopelessness.
She did eventually find her way out on her own, when Lily was a toddler, but by then the damage had been done to their marriage. Pete was coming home later and later, claiming that things at work were crazy when she knew it was because he wanted to avoid being around her. The tiny little seed of resentment that had been planted inside her during those first few months of pregnancy, that she had been left to go through all of this while he still got to live his life almost as normal, had been growing. Some days she’d have killed to sleep in the spare room and get a full eight hours, or to go to work and leave him at home with the baby but he simply didn’t understand that.
To him, as he once joked before seeing the murderous look on her face and quickly trying to backtrack, maternity leave was made up of going for long, lazy walks in the park, watching box sets and meeting other mums for cappuccinos and gossip. And although he tried to be understanding and sympathetic about how she was feeling, she sensed at the back of his mind he was really thinking, Why is she finding this such a struggle when everyone else seems to manage just fine? She’s hardly the first woman in the world to have had a baby.
As the end of her maternity leave loomed ever closer, Kate got in touch with her boss about returning to work. As much as she’d fantasised about slipping back into her old life and going back full-time, she knew deep down that she didn’t really want to go back to fifty-hour weeks and never being there to put her own daughter to bed.
‘You don’t have to go back at all,’ Pete had told her. ‘You had to work some pretty long hours and go to so many evening events, it’s not compatible with our lives anymore. With my promotion, we can afford for you to stay at home.’
But she’d been desperate to go back to the job that she’d excelled at, to get her identity back for just a few hours a week, and so she’d applied to return part-time. She was absolutely certain they’d say yes, after all she’d been there for years and she was one of their top performers. She’d already started ordering new work outfits online with a growing sense of anticipation, knowing full well there was no way she’d be squeezing into her old ones any time soon, when she got the email from her boss, declining her application. It was full-time or no time.
‘At least the decision’s been taken out of your hands,’ Pete told her. ‘The short-sighted pricks can’t even be flexible for one of their most loyal employees. You wouldn’t want to work at a place like that now you’re a mum anyway, they’d make your life a misery, making you work full-time hours for part-time pay. Tell them to stuff it, and apply for jobs at smaller, more family-friendly agencies.’
And so she’d handed in her notice and the final connection to her previous life was severed just like that. She didn’t even bother having a leaving do, so unceremonious was her resignation from a place that she had given her all to for nearly a decade. They sent her a gift voucher in the post and a card signed by some of her old team with the usual messages, expressing their devastation that she was leaving and promises to keep in touch. She never heard from any of them again.
She had cancelled the nursery place that she had secured for Lily. ‘I’ll keep her at home with me for the time being,’ she told Pete. ‘There’s no point her being
