It Had to Be You
Chapter 1
I was more used to sudden puddles appearing on my kitchen floor than most. However, despite it being the third time it had happened this year, it still gave me tingles.
‘Libby, I think I just wet myself.’ Daisy looked at me in horror. Despite celebrating her eighteenth birthday a week ago, she still embraced teenage theatrics. ‘Nobody look!’
The only other person in the room was Tari, her best friend, and she didn’t seem to be able to stop looking. Her saucer eyes framed with electric-blue lashes were transfixed on the trickle of liquid running down Daisy’s bare leg.
‘This is a nightmare!’ Daisy wailed, pressing both hands over her face. ‘Why did nobody tell me about this until it was too late? If I ever see that twazzock Raz again I’m going to kill him.’
As she continued lamenting about how her life had become a disaster, I put down the tray of cakes I’d been preparing to take outside and gently placed my hands on her shoulders until she opened her fingers wide enough to peek at me through the gap.
‘Take a deep breath. It’s fine. That isn’t wee, it’s amniotic fluid.’
‘What? What the fudge is that?’
‘Your waters have broken. Remember, we talked about it a couple of weeks ago?’
Daisy was thirty-seven weeks pregnant, just inside the timeframe for full-term, so I wasn’t worried.
‘Tari, fetch a couple of towels from the cabin, please.’
Tari was still staring, her mouth hanging open in fascinated revulsion.
‘Tari!’ Daisy shouted. ‘Get me a fudgin’ towel!’
Having slightly misinterpreted a discussion that morning about how her unborn baby could recognise her voice, Daisy had decided to cut out swearing.
‘Pee off! My boy ain’t going to have a foul mouth like mine,’ she’d pronounced during our Preparation for Parenting session, in response to the other expectant mums’ teasing. ‘One of the only things I remember my mum saying to me was to shut the eff up. I’m not going to be like her.’
‘So, you’ll tell your baby to shut the fudge up instead?’ Kaylee, who was pregnant with twins, asked.
‘No.’ Daisy patted her bump. ‘I’ll tell them to talk to Mummy about whatever they fudging well like.’
At that, the group started laughing so hard I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had contributed to the current puddle. But a few of the others had decided to think more carefully about their choice of language as well, and I didn’t hate that the chatter now buzzing around my garden was slightly less blue, given that my own eight-year-old son had a habit of repeating any expletives he overheard to his schoolteacher.
Tari jolted out of her trance and glanced quickly at me before scuttling through the open patio doors and across the garden to the outbuilding where I held antenatal and parenting classes for clients ranging from uber-rich couples to today’s group of teenagers and their female birth partners.
‘I’m starting to think I should have listened to you, Libby, and asked Lisa to be my new birth partner.’ Daisy groaned as she waddled towards the table and leant on it with both hands.
‘Wild horses won’t stop Lisa from being there,’ I replied. Lisa was Daisy’s foster carer. Usually, around half the teenage mums who came to my Monday sessions were ‘looked after’ or ‘care experienced’ children, most of them with specific mother and baby foster placements. Others – like Daisy – had been in the same foster family for years. Currently, three of the group lived in hostels, a couple had already been set up in a council flat and I occasionally accepted mums who lived with family but still faced particularly challenging circumstances. I’d started the Monday sessions three years ago, when my sister and I established our charity, Baby Bloomers. It had been challenging and heartbreaking in equal measure. Every one of the young people I welcomed to the cabin had faced troubles or trauma, often in the form of grooming or abuse. Some had deliberately got pregnant because, after a life of rejection, they simply wanted someone to love them unconditionally. The youngest group member had been thirteen.
Daisy had been engaged to Raz, the father of her baby, until a few weeks ago when she found out he’d slept with her arch-enemy from school. After a break-up that could be heard across Sherwood Forest, and while quite possibly not in a sound state of mind, Daisy had chosen her best friend to be her new birth partner. Earlier that morning, Tari had confessed that she found the whole idea of pregnancy and childbirth ‘freaky and gross’.
To give her credit, she wasted no time in hurtling back into the kitchen with a bundle of towels. I handed one to Daisy and spread another over the puddle. Daisy’s head was lowered, eyes closed, and she was no longer talking, igniting a prickle of alarm that had me scanning the room for my phone.
‘She’s not going to have the baby, like, any time soon though, is she?’ Tari asked, now hovering by the patio door. ‘You said first babies take ages. Like, a day. And just because her waters have broken doesn’t mean she’s even in labour yet.’
‘I did say that.’ I nodded, more than a little impressed that she’d listened in the first place, let alone remembered. ‘But occasionally once the waters have gone, a baby can come pretty quickly.’
Daisy reached out her hand, grabbed onto mine and squeezed, tucking her chin into her chest. This baby was not going to be taking all day.
‘I’m getting my nails done at three.’ Tari shot a worried frown in her friend’s direction.
‘Yeah,’ I said, my voice tight as Daisy squeezed again while emitting a groan that made Tari’s eyebrows shoot halfway up her forehead. ‘I wouldn’t cancel just yet. You might still make it. In the meantime, come and hold her hand.’
I placed Daisy’s hand firmly in Tari’s, then hurried to the door and scanned the garden for my sister, who also happened to be a part-time GP.
‘Anyone seen Nicky?’
There were around twenty people sitting on garden chairs or helping themselves to a lunch of sausage pasta and sides from the trestle tables (my oven had been broken for a few weeks now, so options were limited). I couldn’t see my older sister’s violet pixie-cut amongst them.
‘She’s in the cabin setting up a craft,’ Ingrid said. Ingrid was a foster carer who’d been accompanying pregnant teenagers to my Monday sessions since the first class. Once the babies were born they’d swap to my Wednesday postnatal group for a few months, usually until the mum moved on to independence, and then Ingrid would soon be back on Mondays with someone new.
‘Can you let her know I need help in the kitchen? Immediately?’ I asked Ingrid, trying to convey the gravity of the situation without alerting the young mums.
‘Is everything okay?’ she asked, failing to pick up on my silent message due to being distracted by the choice of salads.
‘Daisy’s had a spillage.’
Ingrid looked up, her forehead creased in confusion.
‘A leak. Which I think is about to be followed by another… something… ending up on the kitchen floor if we don’t act fast,’ I said, as quickly as possible.
There was a sudden groan from behind me, and Ingrid snapped to attention. She’d heard that sound all too many times before. Unfortunately, some of the other occupants of the garden heard it too.
A second after I’d shot back across the kitchen to where Daisy was still standing, bent over with her head resting on the table, a clamour of eager voices appeared at the patio doors.
Tari had at some point in the past minute flipped into birth-partner mode, not only locked into Daisy’s death-grip but also rubbing her back. I gave her a reassuring smile as she slid my phone along the table towards me.
At that point my arteries were swamped with adrenaline. But for the sake of Daisy, Tari and the wide-eyed faces ogling us through the now closed – thank you, Ingrid – patio door, I was a vision of competent serenity.
I’d have asked someone else to call the nearest labour suite, which was at King’s Mill Hospital in Mansfield, but had learned from experience that a panicked teenager screeching down the phone might not be taken as seriously.
‘It’s Libby, from Baby Bloomers. I have a young woman here whose waters have just broken and is now in rapid-onset labour.’
‘Hey, Libby! How’s it going?’ Lillian was so used to calls from half-hysterical fathers-to-be that at some point over her thirty-something years on labour suite reception, she’d lost any sense of urgency. Even when, as in this case, things were urgent. ‘We had one of your mums in here a few days ago. An older one, not a Bloomer. Had a right time of it, as it turned out…’
‘Shittlecocks!’ Daisy groaned through a clenched jaw. ‘It’s coming!’
‘Okay, forget that.’ I hung up on Lillian before she could breach patient confidentiality and dialled 999, just as Nicky calmly slid through the patio doors.
‘Ah. Okay. I’d assumed Kaylee was exaggerating.’ She took one look at Daisy before removing her cardigan and starting to wash her hands. ‘The last time she summoned me to a desperate emergency, Harley had ripped off a false nail.’
Nicky glanced over at the cluster by the door, before making a firm shooing motion. ‘You really need to get blinds.’
Living down a single-track country lane, my garden overlooking a quiet corner of Bigley Country Park, an offshoot of Sherwood Forest consisting of over a thousand acres of woodland and wildflower clearings, I really didn’t need blinds. That was until now.
As Nicky began a deft examination of the labouring mother, Ingrid and I herded the gaggle of eager spectators into the cabin. After handing Tari the giant cushions I brought back with me so she could help Daisy get comfortable, I ducked into the living room and left a message with Daisy’s foster carer, her social worker and the community midwife, stepping back into the kitchen just in time to see the miracle of a whole new person taking his first breath.
‘Fudging fudge, Libby. You said this would take ages.’ Daisy gasped, her head collapsing onto Tari’s shoulder. ‘It wasn’t that bad!’
‘Well, let’s hope the rest of motherhood turns out to be as easy.’
I very much doubted it, as Nicky did her thing and I held the baby until Daisy was ready for him, at which point Tari made everyone the standard post-labour tea and fetched some bread and other bits from the lunch table. While the birth had been brilliant, and her little boy was as close to perfect as it got, Daisy had a long, hard road ahead of her. Statistically speaking, the odds weren’t great. But, of course, the whole point of Bloomers was to empower women like Daisy to defy the odds, smash the stereotypes and conquer that long, hard road together.
‘What?’ A sudden screech from the new mother interrupted my musings. ‘That bleeping b-word Sienna has only gone and shared a photo of my bare bits! Someone take my baby and someone else help me up. I’m going to fudging kill her!’