How should I react to my pregnancy?

This week: I know how I should react to being pregnant. There are just a few problems...

Almost nothing is as weighted with expectation, pressure, uninvited comment and criticism, guilt, fear and worry, as motherhood.

It starts when we think about having a baby (What, in your twenties? Far too young. What, you’re 35 – why haven’t you procreated yet? A baby in your forties? Are you that SELFISH?) and so it continues through everything we do, probably until our deathbeds when we will be told how we should say goodbye to our children, before they start fighting over the will.

Somewhere in this endless list of “shoulds” is how a woman should react on finding out she is pregnant.

There are several acceptable options, all featuring visible, audible, tangible, instagrammable feelings of joy.

These include: Squeal with delight. Jump for joy, then stop in case the embryo falls out.

Buy a baby hat and weep into it with hormoneinduced elation.

Post the news on Facebook, followed by hearts, smiles, fireworks, kisses and other Overt Indications of Happiness.

Top ways to react when you find out you’re pregnant at 42, with three teenage children, a decade-younger partner of two years, and a divorce (almost) in progress? Well, then you are at Option 5: panic.

My “disaster list” includes:

1. I will be 43 years old when the baby arrives.

2. When my mother was 43, I thought she was an OAP.

3. There will be a 20-year gap between this baby and my eldest daughter.

4. My body and mind are 14 years more exhausted than the last time.

5. In those 14 years, I’ve drunk approximately 700 litres of wine, 7,000 G&TS and a Jaegerbomb. After the Jaegerbomb I don’t remember anything, so I’m not even sure what other “disasters” I may need to worry about.

6. Since the break-up of my 20-year marriage two years ago, and the ensuing social, financial and emotional hell, I can’t remember the last weekly shop that didn’t include wine and vodka. Forget pre-pregnancy detoxing; I’ve done pre-pregnancy nuking.

7. My pelvic floor muscles belong in a museum.

8. My three older children (19, 17 and 14) will see this baby as “replacing them” and stop speaking to me.

9. I hate being pregnant (minor detail).

10. I hate giving birth (bigger detail).

11. I hate the fat pregnancy face I always get.

12. I hate having giant, lactating breasts.

13. might hate me having giant, lactating breasts.

14. We don’t own a car.

15. Instead of being kept up all night by a hot young man, I’ll be listening to a baby screaming throughout the night. Again.

16. Having just survived 15 years of child-rearing, I was enjoying my first delicious taste of that thing called Having a Life. Pregnancy will take that freedom, rendering me unable to leave the house without a military operation again.

17. In maternity terms, I am classed as geriatric.

On the plus side, though:

1. We desperately want to have a child together.

2. We will love this child forever.

3. The child will love us too, sometimes.

4. I feel incredibly lucky, and very, very happy. But more so than in any previous pregnancy, I’m braced for the barrage of criticism that’s about to be fired my geriatric way.

‘Having just survived 15 years of childrearing, I was enjoying my first delicious taste of that thing called Having a Life’