“Why does he smell so good?” my eldest daughter, Ophelia, asked. She and her sister had just arrived at the hospital to meet their new baby brother. Only a few hours earlier, as the girls were eating their breakfast of pancakes and chocolate spread, they had watched me tear through the kitchen and into the car. “The baby is coming!” my worried mother explained.
“I can’t believe I have a baby brother,” Ophelia said, holding him on her lap for the first time, and has said many times since. The joy this little human, whom we have named Octavian Robert, after my father and my husband’s uncle, has brought his sisters has been heaven to watch. A serenity amid the chaos has fallen on the house and all my anxieties about not being able to cope have disappeared. This is how it was meant to be.
And what a thrill it has been to have a boy after two girls. I know girls because I am one. My cousins were all girls. I can picture the path ahead and feel at least vaguely equipped to deal with the struggles it will entail. But a boy! What a thing of mystery.
Yesterday, at a motorway service station, after fulfilling an order of Quavers and blackcurrant Fruit Shoots, I walked into a swarm of tall and vigorous young sportsmen piling out of a coach. As one of them gave me a big, friendly smile, it suddenly hit me that my little boy, who has just outgrown his Moses basket, will, judging by the size of his father, one day tower over me like that. I rushed back to the car and picked him up, and inhaling the beautiful scent from the top of his head, reminded myself to live in the moment.
People ask me which was hardest – going from nought to one child, one to two, or two to three. I know the answer immediately: the arrival of the first was like a tornado which tore up my selfish existence, shattering my identity and the world as I understood it. My poor first baby, I sometimes think. Her frazzled mother expected so much from her. Like a robot, she was to eat on a four-hour schedule from day one, to sleep through the night soon after that, and never to cry in between, no negotiations.
The arrival of number two was marginally easier, or less difficult, because I had some sense of what to expect. But with baby number three, it all feels so much less overwhelming. My expectations are at rock bottom, which is nothing but liberating. Having two was already more than I could manage – what difference does a third really make? I now consider it a triumph if we get to the end of the day without any major accidents. Someone has rubbed Sudocrem into the brand new carpet? Who cares, as long as we are all alive?
As I write, Octavian is reclining in his bouncy chair, chewing his hand, while listening to a particularly splendid rendition of Handel’s “For unto us a child is born” sung by the Tenebrae choir. Other pieces Octavian can recommend strongly include Voces 8 singing “Jesu bleibet meine Freude” accompanied by oboist Nick Deutsch, who plays seemingly without ever taking a breath.
Oh, the joys of maternity leave. How I wish, when I did have only one child, I had embraced the guilt-free sitting around that comes with looking after a newborn, rather than pushing a pram around London like a headless chicken trying to pretend that my life hadn’t changed.
Of course, now with two other children, aged 5 and 3, these blissful hours of cuddling my baby are confined to when his sisters are at school and nursery. The early mornings and late afternoons, when everyone is home, have a distinctly different feel to them. Sometimes, when all three are crying at the same time, the fire hasn’t been lit and I haven’t even started to think about what I am going to feed them for supper, I have out-of-body moments when I look down on the chaos, barely able to believe that this is now my life. Me, an only child, used to a compact and ordered existence, now a mother of three? How did this happen?
Since Octavian arrived, I have left the car door open and wandered off four times, once for five whole hours in a busy car park in the middle of a city. Luckily, I haven’t yet left anything more valuable inside than a chocolate wrapper and a single mud-encrusted Peppa Pig wellington boot. Otherwise, I have yet to leave the house without having some kind of major wardrobe malfunction or with the shopping list actually in my pocket, rather than still on the kitchen counter at home.
Now, when I take the children to Mass, we don’t even attempt to sit quietly and primly in the pews like we used to, but instead set up camp on the floor by the bookshelves at the back. That way Octavian can lie on his back on the carpet and look up at the beams and I have an easy exit when he get bored and starts to cry. The girls, with their crayons and colouring-in books, spread themselves out further and further every week, and no one, including me, seems to mind.
This article originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world clickhere.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.