‘Everyone knows that I have an adult child and must therefore be very old’

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Hester is heavily pregnant with her fourth child, 21 years after she gave birth to her first. A lot has changed in all those years, but she still expects it to be the same again: completely unpredictable.

With a sigh I click away from the website. “Ridiculous,” I growl. “Due to the new rules, a child is now obliged to sit backwards in the car for up to 15 months and, as far as I can see, only one Maxi-Cosi is eligible for this. Whether we want to pay 510 euros including chassis.” My friend does not look up from his phone and reacts quite hypothermic. “Will the police really check that? What are they going to do then, give a fine?”

New guidelines

The hormones are coursing through my body; I really don’t understand how he can think like that. That new directive is not just there, is it? If we do transport our baby face-forward after a year, you will see that we of all people have that one horrific accident that causes her to fly through the car and we will have a lifetime of guilt about our fatal baby layette choice.

I try to make him understand that, but he is not impressed. His colleague got a Maxi-Cosi from Marktplaats; 25 euros, he then adds completely meaningless. What should I do with that information? Like I’m going to do that; both alive and against the guidelines and purchasing a second-hand seat that may have been involved in a previous accident.

“Hey, you’ve raised three kids already, haven’t you? They weren’t in golden car seats either,” he tries to save the situation somewhat when he sees that I am about to have a mental pregnancy breakdown to get. I no longer respond and open the website again to order the transport combination for 510 euros.

Other concerns

When I’ve calmed down a bit an hour later, I think back to the arrival of my first child, Wouter – a grown man of almost 21 now. I bought his Maxi-Cosi on Marktplaats, there was hardly any money at the time, because we were quite taken by surprise by my pregnancy and also had to furnish a complete house. I didn’t care where that car seat came from, as long as it was blue and white striped; I was in my Breton phase at the time.

“I didn’t care where the Maxi-Cosi came from, as long as it was blue and white”

My insecurities played out on a completely different level. What did the world think of me, a 23-year-old with such a huge belly, for example. It didn’t match what I had in mind for the future. Or: what if I didn’t like it at all, that motherhood, what would my child notice? I was still a child myself, or so it felt. Just out of school, going out, busy with friends and now suddenly inhibited by things like ultrasounds, maternity gym and a blue and white striped Maxi-Cosi.

Oh, how intensely uncomfortable I felt on that yoga mat among those other pregnant women who carried their bellies with so much more verve. I thought they were very old, real women already. They must have all been around thirty, maybe a little older. At least not as fresh as I am.

With two fingers in the nose

I was one hundred percent happy, that motherhood. It went so well that another child was born, more than three years later: Floortje (now 17). This time I was already slightly approaching thirty. I was no longer ashamed of my belly, but bought such a band around it to emphasize the entire bulging condition – you did that then, preferably after eight weeks of pregnancy.

I had lost my insecurities. I did that motherhood with two fingers in my nose, we no longer kept extensive light-neurotic sleeping, eating, pooping and peeing diaries as with the first, but opted for freestyle upbringing under the motto: you don’t need grass don’t pull it either, it grows by itself. I had found my way in a balance between being myself and motherhood.

I only realized later that the scales regularly tipped in favor of myself. I found it no problem at all to regularly climb on a bar at the weekend in Amsterdam if the family plans even allowed it for a while and I bought my own horse because: hey, I’m still there myself, aren’t I? I thought it was cool how I dared to choose for myself. And I really didn’t forget the children, we just took them everywhere with us, including to the bacchanal at the football club and to the annual skiing holiday-with-friends-without-children. “Do they get a nice adult humor from it”, I would say.

Again

Well, after eleven years I got a divorce – the cake was gone and there was another one, I can’t and don’t want to make it more beautiful. The other, my current boyfriend, had no children but wanted them. Or maybe I wanted to go through that whole state of being pregnant one more time. Even though he had asked me to give birth to sextuplets! I was now 36 and I thought I could handle anything.

And that’s how our daughter Belle was born eight years ago. I would show my friend how that worked, parenting. After all, I had already done it twice and he hadn’t. I can still see myself walking around the kitchen distraught with a completely red-screeched baby on my arm. The sweat was on my back, because I felt like I had been walking there for hours. He came home from work and I held him our child in my arms. “Here, hold on, before I throw her on the kitchen floor,” I yelled, completely freaked out.

“I would show my friend how that worked, parenting”

I didn’t understand how this could happen to me, despite all my experience. Belle was a crybaby. She refused to sleep in her own bed and lay between us for months; something I had heard from other parents, but had always dismissed as a weakness. “Just a matter of perseverance”, I said. Little did I know that I had had a child with a stronger will than myself. And then she turned out to be a picky eater too. Even with all my knowledge of children, I couldn’t change that. At 23 it was considerably easier for me in many ways.

But there were also things for which I stuck myself and a whole bunch of feathers up the proverbial ass. That way I had plenty of time for Belle. While I was still very restless at Wouter and Floor’s, I preferred not to skip parties and when we had friends over for a visit, I reduced going to bed to a ritual of three minutes, at Belle’s I was calm itself. I baked cookies with her, we took an extended shower or to the petting zoo and I read to her for hours.

‘Now it’s still possible’

After Belle’s arrival it was all over, I thought. At least, one month I felt that way, the next my ovaries rattled so hard I could barely function. “Now it’s still possible”, I tried to persuade my friend who, strangely enough, was always in a different mood than I was. If I wanted a fourth, he thought it was enough. And if he wanted a fourth, I asked him if he was in his right mind; we were having such a good time with all our freedoms.

When our noses finally turned the same way for a month, I was 41. I had three miscarriages. We draw a line under it, but not definitively with a waterproof marker. I found it difficult to have a spiral set again. It wouldn’t go that fast, I thought. I hoped. And then a bit quietly the transition into babbling and becoming a grandmother or something.

“The whole village knows that I have an adult child and must therefore be very old”

Of course it turned out differently. I got pregnant again and this time everything is going well, although… every day I can cross off the whole pregnancy ailments bingo card. When someone asks how I’m doing, I’m like an LP on repeat. “I am done. I feel so miserable. I’m not eighteen anymore, am I?” And no, and neither 23, 27 and 36, but 44. Everything squeaks and creaks. While I sometimes thought of Wouter during my pregnancy: what will people think, I now have that again. I can still consider myself very young in mind and young in body in good times; the whole village knows that I have an adult child and must therefore be very old.

Differ

Oh and how different everything is from 21 years ago. Our baby – another girl, by the way – has at least a hundred razor-sharp ultrasounds in her photo album. While: she has yet to be born! She has a state-of-the-art stroller at her disposal and therefore a car seat with which you can be transported insanely safe backwards for up to fifteen months.

I don’t do a pregnancy course. Am I not going to lie there as an elderly person among those undoubtedly lithe young girls of thirty? And I did not carefully request the epidural from the gynecologist, but just not yet forced it with a firm blow on his desk. This is how we do it in 2021.

Where I let the whole birth come over me 21 years ago, now nothing is going to happen that I don’t feel like. The same applies to maternity visits. I well remember how my brother came in with his best friend at the time and sat ‘cosily’ chatting for hours next to my bed. The midwife came by for a check-up and asked if I had already had a bowel movement. Embarrassed, I replied that this was not yet the case. I was 23 mind you† “Well, then I’ll give you until Monday, otherwise you’ll get an enema,” she responded. The beer just barely spurted out of my brother’s and his best friend’s noses, they laughed so hard.

All going to do something very different

This time, probably no one will come to a maternity visit that first week. We’re going to cocoon, us and the new baby and I don’t care what anyone else thinks about that, they’re just waiting.

Last week Belle ruined dinner again by fiddling with her food endlessly. For some obscure reason, the pasta that was her favorite didn’t live up to her expectations: she didn’t have to and thought it was “f*cking gross”. Despite her best efforts, we were unable to stop her from adopting the language used by the older two.

“We just mess around a bit and then everything will be fine”

Despondently, my friend sighed that we are all going to do things very differently with this new baby. “We teach them to eat right from the start. And we’re going to watch our language here!” My two teenagers and I burst out laughing. “We’re not going to do it any other way, honey,” I said. “Just like with the other children, we just mess around a bit and then everything will be fine.”

After a while, he cleared the table and put dessert in front of her. “At least she will get something in there”, he said by way of explanation, when he saw my questioning look. I’m looking forward to having yet another unpredictable person in my life. Everything has changed in 21 years and yet it is the same.

This article can be found in Kek Mama 03-2022. Hester has now given birth to a daughter: Frenkie Loïs.

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