Prologue
I think it is possible that I am dying.
For quite some time now, in any case, it has felt like I have been watching as my life scrolls past in front of my eyes.
My earliest memory: It is winter, sometime in the early 1980s. I am wearing mittens, a badly knitted hat, and an enormous red coat. My mother is pulling me across our back lawn on a blue plastic sled. Her smile is fixed. I look completely frozen. I can remember how cold my hands were in those mittens, the way every dip and bump of the ground felt through the sled, the creak of the snow beneath her boots.
My first day at school. I am swinging a brown leather satchel with my name written on a card peeking out from a small plastic window. EMMELINE. One navy knee sock is bunched around my ankle; my hair is in pigtails of slightly unequal length.
Me and Polly at twelve years old. We are having a sleepover at her house, already in our tartan pajamas, wearing mudpacks and waiting for our corn to pop in the microwave. The two of us in her hallway, slightly older, ready to go to the Halloween party where I had my first kiss. Polly was a pumpkin. I was a sexy cat. Us again, on a summer’s day, sitting cross-legged in our jeans and Doc Martens in a field of stubble. In spaghetti-strap dresses and chokers, ready for our end-of-school leavers’ ball. Memory after memory, one after another, until I find myself starting to wonder whether I can call to mind a single emotionally significant scene from my teenage years in which Polly does not feature, with her lopsided smile and her awkward posing.
Only as I am thinking this do I realize what a sad thought it is now.
My early twenties are something of a blur. Work. Parties. Pubs. Picnics. Holidays. To be honest, my late twenties and early thirties are a bit fuzzy around the edges as well.
There are some things I’ll never forget.
Me and Dan in a photo booth, on our third or fourth date. I have my arm around his shoulders. Dan looks incredibly handsome. I look absolutely smitten. We are both grinning like fools.
Our wedding day. The little wink I’m giving to a friend behind the camera as we are saying our vows, Dan’s face solemn as he places the ring on my finger.
Our honeymoon, the pair of us blissed out and sunburned in a bar on a Bali beach at sunset.
Sometimes it is hard to believe we were ever that young, that happy, that innocent.
The moment that Coco was born, furious and screaming, whitish and snotty with vernix. Scored into my memory forever, that first glimpse of her little squished face. That moment they passed her to me. The weight of our feelings.
Coco, covered in confetti from a piñata, laughing, at her fourth birthday party.
My son, Bear, a fortnight old, too small even for the tiny sleep suit he is wearing, cradled in the arms of his beaming sister.
Only now does it dawn on me that what I am seeing are not actual memories but memories of photographs. Whole days boiled down to a single static image. Whole relationships. Whole eras.
And still they keep on coming. These fragments. These snapshots. One after another after another. Tumbling faster and faster through my brain.
Bear screaming in his carrier.
Broken glass on our kitchen floor.
My daughter on a hospital bed, curled up in a ball.
The front page of a newspaper.
I want this to stop now. Something is wrong. I keep trying to wake up, to open my eyes, but I can’t—my eyelids are too heavy.
It is not so much the idea of dying that upsets me as the thought I might never see any of these people again; all the things I might never have the chance to tell them. Dan—I love you. Mum—I forgive you. Polly—I hope you can forgive me. Bear . . . Coco . . .
I have an awful feeling something terrible is about to happen.
I have an awful feeling it is all my fault.
Six Weeks Earlier
Chapter One
Emmy
I never planned to be an Instamum. For a long time, I wasn’t sure I’d be a mum at all. But then who among us can truthfully say that their life has turned out exactly the way they thought it would?
These days I might be all leaky nipples and little nippers, professional bottom wiper for two cheeky ankle biters, but rewind five years and I guess I was what you’d call a fashionista. Ignore my knackered eye twitch and imagine this frizzy, pink-hued mum bun is a sleek blow-dry. Swap today’s hastily daubed MAC Ruby Woo for clever contouring, liquid liner, and statement earrings—the sort that my three-year-old daughter would now use for impromptu pull-ups. Then dress it all in skinny jeans and an Equipment silk blouse.
As a fashion editor, I had the job I’d dreamed of since I was a problem-haired, bucktoothed, puppy-fat-padded teen, and I truly, truly loved it. It was all I’d ever wanted to do, as my best friend, Polly, would tell you—sweet, long-suffering Polly; I’m lucky she still speaks to me after the hours I spent forcing her to play photographer in my pretend shoots, or strut with me down garden path catwalks in my mum’s high heels, all those afternoons making our own magazines with yellowing copies of the Daily Mail and a glue stick (I was always the editor, of course).
So how did I get from there to here? There have been times—when I’m mopping up newborn poo, or making endless pots of puréed goo—when I’ve asked myself the same question. It feels like it all happened in an instant. One minute I was wearing Fendi in the front row at Milan Fashion Week, the next I was in joggers, trying to restrain a toddler from reorganizing the cereal aisle in Sainsbury’s.
The career change from fashion maven to flustered mama was just a happy accident, to be totally honest with you. The world started to lose interest in shiny magazines full of beautiful people, so, thanks to shrinking budgets and declining readership, just as I was scaling the career ladder, it was kicked out from under me—and then on top of everything else, I found out I was pregnant.
Damn you, the internet, I thought. You owe me a new career—and it is going to need to be one I can build around having a baby.
And so I started blogging and vlogging—I called myself Barefoot, because my stilettos came with a side order of soul-baring. And you know what? Although it took me a while to find my stride, I got a real buzz out of connecting with like-minded ladies in real time.
Fast-forward to those first few months after giving birth, and in the 937 hours I spent with my bum welded to the couch, my darling Coco attached to my milky boobs and the iPhone in my hand my only connection to the outside world, the community of women I met on the internet became a literal lifeline. And while blogging and vlogging were my first online loves, it was Instagram that stopped me from slipping too far into the postnatal fog. It felt like a little life-affirming arm squeeze every time I logged on and saw a comment from another mother going through the same things I was. I had found my people.
So, slowly, it was out with the Louboutins and in with the little human. Barefoot morphed into Mamabare, because I’m a mama who is willing to grin and bare it, warts and all. And take it from me, this journey has got even crazier since my second little bundle of burps, Bear, came along five weeks ago. Whether it’s a breast pad fashioned from rogue Happy Meal wrappers or a sneaky gin in a tin by the swings, you’ll always get the unvarnished truth from me—although it may come lightly dappled with Cheeto dust.
The haters like to say that Instagram is all about the perfect life, polished, filtered, and posted in these little squares—but who has time for all that nonsense when they’ve got a ketchup-covered curtain climber in tow? And when things get hard, both online and off, when wires get crossed, when food gets tossed, when I just feel a little lost, I remember that it’s my family I’m doing all of this for. And, of course, the incredible crew of other social media mamas who’ve always got my back, no matter how many days in a row I’ve been wearing the same nursing bra.