It’s 6am one March morning in 2013 and somewhere in an east London bathroom, a thin blue line is forming. She returns to our room carrying a small plastic wand. I wake up and she’s sitting there next to me with a look on her face I’ve never seen before. A magical event horizon has been crossed: two becomes three, the creation of matter. Just like that. The universe according to Tommy Cooper, a cosmic joke.
We smile like we’ve never smiled before. Intense happiness spiked with pure fear. Like dark chocolate with pickled jalapeños.
We go to work and pretend everything is normal – slightly easier for me than for Sasha as her day starts with a bout of sickness that outstays its welcome. It’s not so much morning sickness as permanent nausea, she says. And the only thing that stops the urge to be sick is food, she tells me as I phone her during lunch that first day.
I’m detached, staring at my colleagues’ lips in cutaway close-ups, their words garbled like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Am I really meant to care about any of this?
I get home that night and she’s face down on the sofa with her coat and shoes still on. Spark out.
I take her shoes off, sit her up, sort her out. The dawn smiles are gone; her face and voice are flat with exhaustion. I thought pregnant women were meant to bloom.
“You hungry?”
“No. God, no. Can’t eat. Feel awful. I’ve got a splitting headache as well. I haven’t eaten anything all day. Just crisps. Three bags. And an emergency chocolate bar.”
She’s one of the few women I have ever met who doesn’t go on and on and on about chocolate. And it’s not just chocolate. Popcorn, cupcakes and ice-cream are, and I quote, “non-food items”. She thinks it’s genuinely funny that some people see overeating as a treat: a naughty, conspiratorial shared sin.
“I can’t face anything,” she says. “I just want crisps. I’d love some Monster Munch. I wish we could just have some mussels.”
I knew very little then about what pregnant women can and can’t eat. I knew sharks were off the menu, as their food-chain dominance makes them mercury sumps. Nearly all crustaceans, most raw fish and shellfish, too. I’m pretty sure that the NHS website doesn’t urge an exclusively crisp-based diet in the first trimester, but I check anyway.
It’s a minefield, one of many to come. The obvious things are all there, but there’s loads of other stuff too. Chorizo, gorgonzola, pâté: listeriosis, miscarriage, stillbirth. Same goes for Parma ham, any cured meat or salami. Oily fish are out, as they contain dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls, persistent organic pollutants – which is a nice way of saying that kippers are a fishy toxic wasteland. No more than two portions a week. “Foods with soil on them” has its own entry: verboten. Haggis is a no-no.
I cook a stir-fry, heavy on the vegetables and ginger, pondering idly upon the root’s anti-emetic magic. She scarfs down the noodles and chicken, sidelines the veg with a queasy face and I know things have changed.
Next night she gets in later than me. There’s loads of last night’s stir-fry left, so as she slumps on the sofa I cook it up. I’m knackered myself as she was up four times in the night.
What else am I meant to do at this stage? Antenatal classes don’t start for ages, I can’t face reading anything scientific about the pregnancy in case something goes wrong, so I’ll fill her plate and empty my head instead.
I wonder what to cook for breakfast, because she hardly ate a thing the previous night as the food I served made her want to vomit again. “Every time I eat something that I ate the day before it reminds me of wanting to puke,” she says.
A tip for would-be fathers: Avoid the Wikipedia entry for hyperemesis gravidarum. The list of complications is terrifying.
I’d been looking forward to her licking the walls, or eating feathers and chips with jam or something funny that I could tease her about at some point. But this changed the next eight months in a totally unexpected way.
So I set out to cook her a different meal every day for the rest of her pregnancy. It wasn’t hard – I’ve always loved cooking, but each day now became an odd cookery challenge. At first, I’d ask what she wanted each morning, but she’d never know: the last thing someone with morning sickness wants is a discussion about food, so I had to wing it.
I started by cooking something from every city and country I have ever visited or lived in. There was Panamanian sancocho de gallina, chicken stew thick with yucca, yam and plantain and bright coriander; Colombian sopa de costilla de res, chunks of rib floating in clear broth; Spanish tortilla, but dry to the core, which misses the point. Mexican tacos, Argentinian steaks with chimichurri, Haitian pumpkin stew, and Turkish rice pudding. I’d spin an invisible globe, stick a pin in it and see if I knew anything from that country, and if I didn’t I’d learn something. Indian, Thai and Vietnamese were tricky, as the spices were too much for Sasha. I caned the stained pages of Mrs Beeton and Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall; I devoured Larousse. I cycled through every dish I knew, changing them slightly.
I’d serve the food each night and watch her. The fork would come within sniffing distance and she’d either grin or grimace. My repertoire expanded weekly. Japanese noodle soups were always a winner. French wasn’t so bad, but it took too much time with no guarantee of success. Italian was my default. I asked the vigorous 82-year-old Italian man, Leonardo, who runs my favourite shop in the world, KC Continental Stores in King’s Cross, for advice: “Pasta. Lots of pasta. And always the wine. Oh yes.”
I served her massive bowls of bucatini all’Amatriciana made with guanciale, fatty chunks of pig’s cheek stewed into a hearty tomato sauce, though I didn’t mention that as she wolfed down the meal, which contained about 1,000 calories per portion.
My main aim was to get as many calories inside her and the growing bump at each meal as possible – and thankfully it was her aim, too, though she felt torn.
“I hate it. I’m eating too much,” she sighed one night between gobbled forkfuls. “The only time I don’t feel sick is when I’m actually eating. It’s doing my head in.”
By the fourth month, she couldn’t walk into the kitchen if the dried goods cupboard was open, as she could smell the stock cubes, which she said were “bowfin’.”
Pasta with tinned clams and parsley and white wine was saved for the nights she was feeling really bad, the clams cooked for about 20 times as long as necessary. Or carbonara with extra double cream and egg yolks – till I remembered with a start at 4am about salmonella. Cooked broccoli actually once made her throw up at the meal table and after that no cooked vegetables passed her lips.
A psychiatrist might say I was displacing anxiety about the prospect of fatherhood into the pots and pans, and that might be right. But in the meantime, she was starting to bloom, and the scans came and went with nothing to report other than a headspinning, headlong rush into the future.
Wintry bowls of Jamaican oxtail and butterbeans with rice and peas, or mounds of steamed callaloo faded away into summer salads, picked fresh from the garden in a Good Life fantasy. A summer solstice barbecue of gilthead bream, the fish of Aphrodite.
Her belly grew to Mr Greedy-size proportions and so in the sixth month I started making pies. Huge, cartoon things bursting with lumps of meat and herbs and potatoes that she’d polish off like Desperate Dan or Mr Creosote.
By the eighth month, Sasha was unable to eat anything after 4pm as the indigestion had got so bad, so I wound down the cook-a-thon. She ate two full packets of corned beef a day or cheese slices, straight from the packet, often as she walked out of the shop, like a ravenous shoplifter.
December came and with it, Zachary, a baby boy so cute that every day many hundreds of strangers stop dead in their tracks in the streets of the capital, stunned at his angelic aspect.
I stayed indoors for six weeks after he was born, barely getting dressed. I read Stephen Hawking at 5am, prepared bottles, lost in astrophysics or breast-pump and steriliser assembly. I watched my boy eat the same thing every day.
Christmas dinner was cooked in a haze of sleep deprivation and eaten with one hand as he cried whenever I put him down. I kept cooking, I kept eating as if Sasha were still pregnant as she was now permanently ravenous from the feeding, but not as sick.
A year after the thin blue line appeared, none of my clothes fitted. She was shrinking, he was growing and I was 10kg heavier than I’d ever been. I was unfit and fat with an exhausting baby. With grim inevitability, I started a diet. I’m too busy to think about food, so I did the 5:2 diet and ate the exact same thing every Monday and Wednesday for three months. Porridge, salad and soup. Chicken or vegetable. Again and again, a calorie-controlled Groundhog Day.
Zac and I had a weigh-in one day this summer – his third, my final. I’ve lost what he now weighs. As I carry him around, back aching, ribs bruised, shoulders throbbing, I can’t believe I was carrying this much extra weight. Sasha is back to normal, eating whatever she wants, whenever she wants. Job done. What’s for dinner then?
