Boys are great, Kate, but a girl’s the best thing ever
THIS time round nobody’s talking about the Royal Baby #2 until it happens and, as I write, the satellite trucks are converging on St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where the hordes of press and bunting-draped tea-swilling super-fans are swelling by the second.
This could all have changed by the time you read this but I wanted to write anyway; you have a Big Birthday this weekend, and the day you were born, 21 years ago exactly, is the supposed due date of the Duchess of Cambridge. Your birth was also the happiest day of my life (I can say this as your brothers know I love them just as much and also because it’s true).
LIKE Catherine (do let’s make this all about me) I had a boy first (also at St Mary’s, just like Her Royal Highness!). I returned to my day job when he was six months old. On my first day back at the Financial Times, the news editor asked me to go on a tour of marginal constituencies. When I flustered ‘But I’ve got a six-month-old at home…’ – I couldn’t say the word ‘ breastfeeding’ out loud in the newsroom, this was 1993 I remind you – he said: ‘So you’re ruling yourself out for assignments like this?’
‘No,’ I said, stoutly, went to the Ladies’ and threw up. It was then that I knew I was pregnant with you. I can’t remember much about it because, as Catherine admitted to a fan, you almost forget you’re pregnant second time round as you’re so busy with your first. All I remember is that if I smelt food – chips, curry, kebabs – I had to eat it.
I needed what my sons call ‘actual meals’, ie not salad or veg but platters of meat covered with gravy. If my food wasn’t ready in time, I went the full Clarkson after a l ong day’s filming in Yorkshire. When I went into hospital for my planned straightforward NHS delivery, ha ha, they discovered after 24 hours in labour that you were in such an impossible position that I had to have an emergency caesarean, and ended up afterwards in the Lindo Wing (yes, snap! The exact same wing as the Duchess!).
After the operation, I thought I was dying. I couldn’t breathe – I didn’t dare make a fuss – but when someone said ‘a girl’, it was as if a shaft of light pierced my heart. I’ve never in my life felt such joy before or since.
I had a daughter. I have a daughter! I still feel thrilled as I always worried that I wouldn’t have a girl, as my mother only ever had boys apart from me.
I’M TRYING to think what to say to the Duchess of Cambridge if she is lucky enough to have a daughter too – especially in the light of last week’s research that teenage girls are 55 per cent more unhappy and anxious than they were in 2009.
And, well, I think I’d boil it down to this: treat your daughter the same as you treat your son, and don’t worry about getting it right as your children will let you know immediately if you get it wrong, from birth onwards.
You see, pretty much the most important thing I’ve learnt after more than two decades of parenting is that wisdom is not so much passed down the generations, but up.
It was only by having you – and your brothers – that I learnt how to grow up, a bit. Having your first child makes you a mother. But having your second makes you an ADULT.
I just read Yeats’s A Prayer For My Daughter again. The poem is lovely, but it’s not me and it’s not you. As a girl and as a woman, I want you to be opinionated even if it puts off men. I don’t want you rooted in one dear spot. I want you to be wild and free.
Above all, I am so pleased that you are YOU and no one else. I wish this precious Royal child every health and happiness but I’m grateful you’re not a princess unable to do your own thing, and won’t bear the curse of being a famous person from the moment you’re born till the end of days.
No, I can’t teach you anything on your 21st. After all, I learnt almost all of it from you and your brothers to start with.
PS: I note even your name – Charlotte – is the bookies’ second favourite, after Alice, if the Royal baby is a girl…