What your Mum forgot to tell you and your best friend never dared.
'Whoever said a baby just fits into your life is a liar. Xena had been in this world for the sum total of eight minutes and try as I may I couldn't see anything vaguely fitting about my situation.
For starters, she hadn't exactly 'fitted' out of me and therefore I wouldn't be fitting into anything except a rubber ring for the next foreseeable month. And her lack of, shall we say, shapeliness, meant that she had no chance fitting into her hideously expensive disposable nappies with any degree of panache for at least three months.
The other option - washing festy cloth nappies - didn't fit into my life either. But the real clincher was Xena herself. A mini replica of the Big Guy's hairy uncle Otto wasn't exactly what I'd had in mind when trying to picture my little womb-mate. Nope. Not even her looks fitted either!'
Welcome to the world of the newborn - where the reality of life is not the Kleenex commercial image we thought it was; where nobody tells you what being a mum is really like; where the generation before ours is of little help because they've forgotten how hard it is; and where 'Staying Mum' is code of practice for your best friend, now the mother of a one-year-old, who smiles knowingly and then denies struggling through the whole, crazy, upside down experience anyway.
