Time for my teens to meet my baby

This week: I’m now officially a gap mum… and I can’t stop smiling

‘I feel so fantastic that I start to wonder what they put in that epidural’

‘So… what is it like?” This is the question I have been asked most often since getting pregnant aged 42.

It’s also the main reason why I started writing this column; so many people asked me what it’s like to have babies two decades apart and return to sleepless nights, nappies and teething, after years of the relative freedom and independence of children who can feed themselves and wipe their own backsides. Most of the time.

The simplest answer I can give, since giving birth to Scout, is this: it’s wonderful. Two days after she is born, my cheeks ache from smiling.

I haven’t stopped, since she was born. I just smile. At everything. All the time.

I probably look permanently drunk or insane, and to be honest I feel a bit of both. My whole body is flooded with an oxytocin high so strong I feel madly in love with everyone and everything. I’d snog a bar stool if I could, and would marry just about anybody I pass in the street.

Gone are the pregnancy pains, contractions, fear, worry, nausea, heartburn, and back ache. In their place; a feeling of pure, distilled, head-spinning bliss that I’d totally forgotten about, and am awash with.

It’s probably hugely irritating for everyone around me, as I drift about on cloud nine with a perma-grim across my face, but I don’t care.

I’m totally in love with my baby, and feel so fantastic that I start to wonder what exactly they put in that epidural.

Another shock in this new, postnatal life I’m floating about in, is that everything feels easy.

Physically, I don’t remember recovering so fast after any of my previous births. I wasn’t expecting this at all.

Maybe it’s the past 15 years of going to the gym to stave off The Droop, maybe it’s luck, or a band of high pressure sweeping across the North Atlantic. But whatever it is, almost overnight I feel like a new person, like me again – even if it’s a me who’s still bleeding through five maternity pads a day, and has giant, lactating melon-breasts.

Hormonally charged to the hilt, I feel almost superhuman with happiness; if I ran a marathon now I would smash it. I’d probably lose my uterus along the way, but I’d be standing on that Olympic podium, gold medal in hand and baby on breast, shouting: “I’ve just had a baby, I’m leaking like a burst pipe, but I can do anything!”

I can almost hear the Happy Hormones whispering, “See? It wasn’t THAT bad was it..?”

Yes, it was that bad. But for the look of love on my partner’s face, to see him this happy, this complete, and for us to be a family, I’d do it again a thousand times.

The day after Scout is born, we go out for a walk; for a sense of normality and vats of caffeine. I feel a strange combination of easy familiarity with the practical things – feeding, changing, pram-pushing and so on – and uncertain beginner’s novelty.

It’s as if I’ve never seen a newborn before, while feeling so familiar with her as if I have known her all my life. She looks amazingly similar to her older siblings, yet also like an exact girl-clone of her dad.

And I am much more tired this time. Pained with exhaustion. Mentally almost incapacitated by lack of rest. But for one kiss of this baby’s cheeks, I will take all the tiredness in the world.

Seeing my three teenage children meet their new sister, hold and kiss her for the first time, was the cherry atop the baby cake.

Here we are. A new, “blended”, gap family. And it feels pretty darned good.