The Shoe Princess's Guide to the Galaxy (11 page)

       
Blimey! I watch in horror. Could they not make it any more difficult? A moat to swim over, perhaps. Nevertheless, I follow her down, secretly cursing my stupid pushchair and its stupid metal framework for scraping enormous pieces of leather from the tips of my pointy pink mules.

       
Mary immediately spots me. She latches on to my elbow with an enthusiastic and welcoming tug, and guides me into the heart of the room. I feel eerily like the new girl at school, being dragged into the bowels of hell by a mad woman in size 11 white trainers and
Teletubbies
socks. Whatever am I getting myself into?

       
I can hardly believe the sight before my eyes: there must be about a dozen women who look
exactly
like me – all with very bad hair, bulging bosoms, puffy eyes and babes in arms – sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in a cosy and familiar circle. I’m gob smacked to learn from Mary that every one of them lives near by. They shuffle along to make a space for me.

       
Millie sucks her fist and peeks over my shoulder with interest. Clearly unperturbed by the slightly musty smell and dodgy magnolia paintwork, most of which is stained and peeling from the edges around the radiators. (A far cry from the smart meeting rooms at work.) There is a large hospital sheet on the floor in the middle of the circle, which Mum will be pleased to know Mary washes and starches after each session, and has done so
every
Wednesday for the past thirty years. (Something tells me that nobody elbows in on Mary’s patch very easily.)

       
Some babies are lying on the sheet. Some are with mums being fed or burped, while others are asleep in baby capsules and pushchairs. The room is a simmering, bubbling soup of animated conversation.

       
I start chatting to the mum in a pair of trendy trainers next to me, though I forget her name as soon as she says it. But I remember the name of her baby – Hugh. (She says she’s always had a bit of a crush on Hugh Grant and made sure to ask her husband to agree to the name – which he detests – while at the pinnacle of her labour pains.) Hugh is one month older than Millie, and does have a bit of a cheeky Hugh Grant grin.

       
She catches me yawning.

       
‘Not getting much sleep, either? Don’t worry, you’ll soon find we’re all obsessed by it – or at least our memories of it.’

       
‘So nice to hear I’m not alone then.’ The relief in my voice obvious.

       
‘I complained to my mum only the other day that I felt tired, and she flippantly said that I’d spend the next fifteen years tired,’ she says. ‘And the scary thing is – she didn’t seem to be joking.’

       
‘Well, I think Millie was born with an altimeter in her head. She’ll be comatose on my shoulder, but the second I put her down she’s like, “I’m awake now!” Wide awake.’ I shake my head and give Millie a playful tickle for being such a monkey. She smiles and all is forgiven.

       
‘I
so
know what you mean. Hugh had day and night completely reversed when we came home from hospital. I thought I’d given birth to a vampire. I barely saw my husband for two months.’

       
‘I seem to have spent the last few nights sitting with Millie on the chair in our bedroom – and very gradually sliding down to a semi-horizontal position and transferring her to her crib. And I thought the chair’s only purpose was to display my collection of soon-to-be-covered scatter cushions.’ I laugh, and then explain how I went through a John Lewis scatter-cushion mania in the last trimester of pregnancy. But failed to get any covered – mostly due to Tim protesting that we could buy a car for the same price.

       
‘Men just don’t get scatter cushions, do they? Mine was handbags – the pregnancy mania thing. The only fashion item that truly brought me joy and fitted over any part of my bloated body.’ She giggles.

       
And basically, that’s all it took to start us off – sleep, soft furnishings and handbags. Sophie – I soon got to remember her name – and I barely stopped talking, managing to swap horror-birth stories, war wounds, makes of pushchair, colic remedies, addresses, telephone numbers and emails.

       
It’s a truly strange feeling to meet someone at this stage in life that I have so much in common with. And so nice, too.

Mary gathers us around the kitchenette for her cooking demonstration and talk on weaning. A scraggy, handwritten sign instructing us to wash up our cups, and place all food scraps in the bin to prevent rodents (I don’t even want to think about it), hangs lopsidedly above the sink.

       
I must say that Mary’s enthusiasm for puréed vegetables and the uses of ice-cube trays is admirable. As is her patience. At the end of it, we’re all filled with hope and confidence. I for one am counting on her advice that all Millie needs now is ‘something to stick to her sides’ and she’ll sleep like an angel.
Please, yes
. I make a mental note to walk home via the greengrocer, but need to feed Millie first.

       
As I stare aimlessly into space holding Millie on my shoulder with one hand while undoing the buttons of my blouse with the other, a voice from behind me says, ‘Still
feeding
. Good.’

       
‘Oh, this is –’

       
‘Hi, Victoria,’ I interrupt Sophie. I immediately recognise her black boots and clipped voice, though I’d completely missed her in the mix of women in the room.

       
Bloody hell ... I knew things were going too smoothly.

       
‘Just having some trouble remembering which side I last fed from.’ It’s the most cerebral activity I have to perform in my day – and I haven’t mastered it particularly well.’

       
‘Oh, I
always
switch my Tiffany bangle from arm to arm when I’ve just fed,’ Victoria informs me. ‘You really must try it – it works a treat.’

       
The Tiffany bangle would be a nice start.

       
She then bleats on about how happy she is to have given up her high-profile job with a PR agency, how much she is
loving
being a full-time-stay-at-home mum, and the many virtues of breast-feeding.

       
Out of the corner of my eye, I spy one of the other mums listening to our conversation as she gives her baby (who looks a little younger than Millie) a bottle. Victoria continues to rabbit on about her voluptuous boobs, how Allegra never gets ill, how she feels so womanly and sexy, and how she has so much milk she feels it is her community duty to donate it to the milk bank at the local hospital. The mum’s eyes gradually well up with tears.

       
I try to sidetrack Victoria by asking whether she’s a ‘round-, pointy- or square-toed girl’ when it comes to shoes.

       
‘Points, of course,’ she says matter-of-factly, and somehow manages to steer the conversation back to ‘breast is best’.

       
The mum is now in floods of tears, and Mary leaps across the room to her rescue. They go and find a quiet corner. I think I’m the only one who’s noticed.

About twenty minutes pass before they come back, tissue box in hand.

       
‘I think it’s time I had a word with my girls,’ Mary announces and motions us all to move our chairs closer. ‘More of a little pep talk,’ she brightly informs us.

       
‘I’ve learnt a lesson today.’ She glints and turns briefly to the mum, whose eyes start to glaze over again. ‘And I want to share it with you all. See this.’ She holds up a piece of paper between the tip of her right index finger and thumb with disdain. It appears to be a certificate of some sort. ‘Bureaucracy gone mad,’ she says, and gleefully rips it up into tiny shreds.

       
‘What is it?’ I ask nervously.

       
‘It’s a declaration – on the benefits of breast-feeding – which I’m to get you to sign (in triplicate – hah) before letting you bottle-feed your babies. It’s in your new-mothers’ pack.’ Mary smiles and pauses thoughtfully. ‘Now, I know for a fact how hard every single one of you has tried to breast-feed. Some with greater ease than others.’

       
She is suddenly earnest.

       
‘All of you are good mums. Trying your very best, day and night, for your babies. Don’t you
ever
let anyone make you think otherwise. You hear me now.’ She makes a point of trying to catch each one of us in the eye.

       
We nod meekly.

       
‘I’ll have none of it.’

       
‘No wonder women get post-natal depression,’ Sophie drily whispers to me as we sit and try to digest what’s just happened. ‘How
moronically
insensitive. The sort of tick-list-league-table-trash only a
male
bureaucrat could have initiated,’ she hisses.

       
‘More like Nanny State gone mad,’ I add.

       
‘My friend has a theory that all first-time mums get PND to some degree. Notwithstanding the really serious stuff, the whole thing sort of strikes me as something that should be relabelled from being an illness to an entirely normal coping reaction,’ Sophie says.

       
‘What do you mean?’

       
‘Well, maybe it’s a natural reaction to finding yourself in extraordinary circumstances,’ she reflects. ‘Paddling like crazy to stay afloat with one arm, keeping the baby afloat with the other, whilst grappling with your husband (with what free arm?) to save him from drifting away in the tide of flotsam and jetsam that is your new life.’

       
At least I don’t have to worry about Tim – he’s been so incredibly supportive of my need to devote myself to Millie in these early months.

       
‘It’s true, though,’ I say, as I reflect on it a little more. ‘Especially for us modern-day girls – who often have no contact with babies before our own.’ Certainly not a day passes that I don’t think I’ve been given the chief executive’s job of being a mum, without the barest trace of skills and experience on my CV to back up my appointment.

       
Sophie wistfully strokes Hugh’s chubby, mottled cheeks.

       
‘Before Hugh, the sum total of my exposure to babies was watching two-year-olds unravelling rolls of loo paper with Labrador pups in TV ads. But don’t get me started ...’ And we break out into a fit of the giggles and laugh until our sides hurt.

       
I think I’ve just found a soul mate. Well, a new best-mum-friend and ranting mate at the very least.

       
As I push Millie up the hill towards home, there’s a distinct new spring in my step. Quite frankly, I am beside myself with excitement as I think about Sophie and the motley crew of mums. Even full-on Victoria has an entertainment factor – I almost felt like I was back in the office. I wish not only that I had gone months earlier, but that it was held twice a week – wild horses couldn’t keep me from it.

       
But most incredibly, I smile to myself in disbelief when I think of my newfound adoration of Mary. Maybe there
is
room in a shoe princess’s life for squeaky, smelly white trainers after all.

www.ShoePrincess.com
 
Shoe Catastrophe
 
First-time-mum SPs beware: Do not under any circumstances be tricked into wearing flat wide shoes either before or just after the birth. Unless you wish to go up a full (yes!) shoe size and consign your hard-earned shoe collection to a dusty death at the back of your wardrobe.
 
It’s all to do with an overzealous little hormone that makes ligaments supple in preparation for childbirth (ha!). Regrettably, it takes the scattergun approach and softens all ligaments – and your feet are full of them.
 
Boxing Clever
 
For the legion of SPs that love a good shoebox, here are two special commendations:
 
Emma Hope’s shoeboxes in high-gloss white, with black-embossed logo on the lid: ‘Regalia for Feet’. Pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? Wonderful.
 
Prada’s multicoloured shoeboxes for their ballet slippers; and peep-toe and cut-away flats. Using different combinations of vibrant shades of cerise, purple, emerald, yellow and cobalt for the boxes and lids. Covetable.