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.
‘Aleak. 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!’
2
Usually, Nicky left once the Bloomers session ended, but after the drama of the day, she invited herself for dinner. Nicky was thirty-one, two years older than me, and had married Theo – the loveliest man I’d ever met – five years ago. She’d gone on to set up Baby Bloomers with me while simultaneously qualifying as a GP and competing in brutal triathlon-type competitions involving mud, sweat and tears.
I could have found all this success a bit irritating, except that the reason she filled her life with other things was because she couldn’t have the thing she wanted most, which was a baby. And in addition to her time spent helping pregnant young women, she also found time to provide love, cuddles and stories to her niece and nephew, for which I would be forever grateful.
‘Auntie Nicky!’ My children, Finn and Isla, came bursting through the front door, down the hall and into my living room, having seen their aunt’s electric car in the driveway.
‘It’s Finn McCool and the Isle of Wight!’ Nicky yelled, jumping up off the sofa and scooping them up in a hug.
‘Shoes!’ I pointed pointlessly at the door back into the hallway. ‘School bags on the rack and lunchboxes by the?—’
