Bed Rest Diary

Woman's Hour

To hear Sarah's interview on Woman's Hour (Radio 4, 13 April), click here

Hup hup hup

Before bed rest, I'd begun a curious enterprise known as "Dancing Through Pregnancy." Anyone else tried that? It's hilarious really. Twenty very large ladies with Easter Egg bellies jumping gamely - er, two inches off the ground. Holding their arms above their head for about five seconds then collapsing in a sweaty heap on the floor. Pensioners in the room next door, meanwhile, were grooving to "I Like to Move It (Move It)." We watched them wistfully through the glass and remembered the days when we could shake it like that.

Now I've stopped Dancing Through Pregnancy, "exercise" means rotating my ankles. As a real thrill, I occasionally turn my knee to face the wall. Then back again. Seriously, it's crazy stuff in here. I ponder the appropriate music mix to accompany my toe-lifts and thumb flexings. Suggestions, please?

The Honourable Alison

"Dear me, Q," my sister Alison said over the telephone this morning, "motherhood isn't coming easily to you, is it?"

I slammed the phone down, positively frothing at the mouth. Alison drives me to the brink of stark staring insanity. Ever since she married the Honourable Gregory, and waltzed down the ailse in a wedding dress that cost more than our mortgage, she's become entirely impossible. Familiarity with the Titled has given her an appalling sense of superiority. I make as many references as I can permit myself to the minor aristocracy, but she gazes back at me with a look of smug amusement that makes me ponder modern punishments for sorroricide. 

Just because she appears to have burped her children out, she views the problems I'm having as signs of  some deep maternal failing. Trouble is, there are times when I worry they actually are.

Secrets and Lies

My best friend Brianna has a secret, I'm sure of it. She's being terribly coy. I'm sorry I was tied up over the weekend, she said brightly. I was very, very busy. Seeing - er - my grandmother.

"Grandmother" my foot. If that was the case she'd be palming mouldy strawberry jam off on me (I know granny's cooking of old). So Q the sleuth suspects a lie. An affair? Must be. Brianna looks way too happy to me. She hates work, and coming to see me here, stuck in this flat for days on end, can't possibly be the cause of that sunny, relaxed smile. I wonder who he is?

Hurricane Quinn

Q, my husband said to me today, seriously, could you possibly make this place less of a pig-sty? I come home at night and it looks like a hurricane hit the place. Or a tornado. Possibly both. Every crevice of the sofa is filled with chocolate cake fragments. You've drooled all over the cushions. There's spilled OJ all over the floorboards and slopped milk all over the rug. A week's worth of mangled newspapers are littered under the chair, and sixteen half-opened books are tumbling off the side-table. Plus the air - look, I don't want to be nasty, Q, but frankly it smells kinda stale in here. I get home from the office and I'm tempted to turn around and go straight back again. Can you do something about it, please?

You think I want to spend my days in the middle of this lot? I told him, furiously. I have the power to create disaster but not the power to clear it up. A few weeks ago I was the kind of person who yelled at coffee cup rings on the kitchen counter. Now I'm making close acquaintance with my own dead skin cells. He looked sour. Sorry, Q, but I think you could do better, he said coldly, turning tail and walking out of the room.

I threw a slipper after his retreating figure. He doesn't understand, he just doesn't understand.

Spring is Something That Happens to Other People

The weather is gorgeous today, which simply increases my irritation at being bedbound.

An entire season is unfolding outside my window. I know - of course I know - that I'm doing this for my son's wellbeing. I lie here, hand on my belly, and think of him; I think of all that wonderful fluid surrounding him, and I imagine his little body safe and sound and growing inside. I tell myself that it's worth it, and I believe it. But that doesn't mean I don't long to walk outside in the sunshine, to feel the light on my face, the pavement under my feet. I've taken it all for granted in the past. I'll never take these first days of spring for granted again.

What do you do when...

Ths morning my husband left for work AND FORGOT TO LEAVE MY CAKE BY THE SOFA.

Now I want that cake. If I close my eyes, I can see it. I can smell it. I can almost taste it. It's a truffle torte sort of a thing, dense and intense, with a cocoa dusting on the top. My friend Brianna brought it yesterday. It is nestling in a deep, sky-blue cardboard box laced with gold ribbon.

On the kitchen counter.

In a normal life this wouldn't be a problem. I would simply stand up, walk into the kitchen, and get the cake. But it's absence poses a serious problem for the bed resting woman. I've been told to stay completely still. To rest in bed at all times. Don't fix yourself a bowl of cereal, my doctor told me; don't get up to make yourself food. She specifically said that. Don't get up to make yourself food. No unnecessary activity whatsoever.

And so the cake rests peacefully in the kitchen, uncut and untasted. Meanwhile I lie here, drooling slightly. Longing, longing for that small slice of heaven.

What Not to Wear on Bed Rest

       Buy yourself some nice clothes, my husband said the other week. You have maternity clothes for the office, you have maternity clothes for slobbing about at home, but you don’t have maternity clothes that make you feel good about yourself. Go out shopping and don’t come back until you’ve maxed out your credit card. (He didn’t actually say that, but I’m sure it’s what he meant. Well, sort of).

       So I did. Not that the experience was as blissful as it might have been pre-pregnancy (it’s not the bump I mind, it’s the flabby neck and thickened ankles) but still, I arrived home with a satisfactory collection of slinky clothes in oversized bags and rustling tissue-paper.

       Then came bed rest.

       Now I’m back in my shapeless gray jogging pants and chocolate stained T-shirt, and frankly I can’t see much point in strapping myself into a lace-edged babydoll for the sole edification of Jerry Springer. Plus I can’t wear anything with zips or buttons or fiddly fasteners on the left hand side, for obvious reasons, nor anything plunging or excessively detailed, because it gets all twisted from a day on the sofa and I can’t stand up to right myself.

       I should really return everything I've just bought. Oh wait, I forgot. I can't leave the house...

Five Annoying Things to Be Asked on Bed Rest

1. Bed rest.... mmmm, sounds good, could do with a bit of that myself. Aren't you having a lovely time?

2. Yadda yadda yadda ... seriously, why don't you come to my party on Saturday?

3. You're being very selfish, sis... I could really do with some help with mum/dad/great-auntie Freda/our new dog. Can't you just take a day off?

4. The church/town council/school really needs contributions for its cake sale/pot luck/fund raiser, do you think you could rustle something up?

5. What, you mean you can't put the older kids to bed? What kind of a mother are you?

Tom's View: The Husband's Take

It may be awful being on bed rest, but it's almost as awful having a wife on bed rest.

I work - a lot. Long, long hours. And now there's no-one to share the daily routine of life with. It's like she's stepped off the travelator. And I have to run twice as fast to keep our living moving at the same speed.

We need food - I've got to get it. And the list of things she HAS to have is staggeringly long. Milk, cheese, eggs, and meat must be constantly by her side (to improve fetal growth, she tells me; I'm trying to keep two human beings sustained, it seems). Leafy vegetables with lots of vitamins. Prenatal vitamins in case the vegetables don't work. Bread, cake, biscuits, crisps to deal with the yawning hunger of a heavily pregnant woman.

Two pitchers of iced water by her bed side to keep her hydrated. A constant supply of new magazines and DVDs and newspapers to keep her entertained. Stamps, envelopes, and paper so she can write letters to friends. Pads of drawing paper, in case she's feeling inspired.

Clean sheets, so she doesn't feel too disgusting. Blankets to cover her cold, cold feet. Indigestion tablets to deal with the ever-present pain of heart-burn. Paracetemol in case the headaches become unendurable.

Dinner at night. Breakfast in the morning. And a tempting lunch, plus three snack meals, to keep her going through the day.

I run through an enormous check-list before I leave in the morning. I dash around the apartment collecting magazines, shaking out the washing, filling up pitchers, collecting post, cutting up carrots, slicing portions of cake, covering cups and plates and bowls with cling-film.

By the time I get into the office, at 7am, I'm exhausted.