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  Meanwhile, Pete is on his continued crusade to never spend Christmas at home. Last year, he carted us halfway across the world to Cambodia. This time I put my foot down and insist on a European destination. I just don’t have the energy to bring eighteen-month-old Aran all the way to South East Asia. And, what with being pregnant, I’d prefer to avoid the scenario of having to take anti-malarials again like I did in Ethiopia. I’m not interested in constantly worrying about damaging this new baby.

  We search around for destinations that are relatively warm in December. We happen upon a small town in southern Spain called Salobreña, where the temperatures are in the teens. Pete finds a cute little traditional villa high up on the hillside overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. He books us in for three weeks over Christmas and New Year’s.

  We fly into Malaga two days before Christmas. And after a short ninety-minute drive, we reach our final destination. In my child-free days, I would have loved the villa. But with a toddler now in tow, it is a total nightmare to stay in.

  Within seconds of entering the house, I find Aran dismantling the kitchen cupboards. They are simple shelves without doors and are filled with breakable earthenware jugs and bowls.

  I start the arduous task of childproofing the place. Everything has to be removed and placed on shelves that are least one metre above the ground. Aran is not happy with this new arrangement and immediately starts to bawl.

  Next, I discover a set of steep stairs without any stair gate in place. Aran loves going up and down stairs at the moment, but I only allow such exploration when I am there to supervise. I move a large armchair in front of the steps to slow Aran’s approach. I can’t block them off totally, or Pete and I won’t be able to go downstairs to the bathroom or bedrooms on the ground level.

  Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about the rock-hard quarry tiles that cover the villa’s entire floor. I resign myself to the fact that Aran will leave the villa with multiple bruises and scrapes from silly falls.

  The CDs and books that our host has provided for our entertainment are relocated to lockable cupboards. And I instruct Pete that there’s no lighting the fire at night, as Aran will undoubtedly burn himself on the hot cast-iron frame.

  Pete is not happy at all with this new décor. He finds the place cluttered and constricted by my assorted barricades. But I know what Aran is like, seeing that I am with him every day. With Pete spending so much time away from home, he hasn’t yet witnessed Aran’s latest phase of compulsive demolition.

  It is not long, however, before Aran puts on a show for Pete. He has seen the stairs, and wants to go down them, but the armchair is blocking his path. Aran tries to push it to one side, but I pull him quickly away.

  Aran is not pleased with my intervention. He arches his back and throws himself backwards, screeching at the top of his voice. Aran’s skull speeds towards the tiles with incredible velocity.

  ‘Oh God, mind his head,’ Pete shouts, hoping I’ll intercept this touchdown.

  Fortunately, I know this signature move of Aran’s well, and catch him just before he makes full contact. I lie him down on the ground, and watch over him closely as he wriggles and writhes in frustration.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Pete says.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I say. ‘He’s having a tantrum. He’ll be fine in a few minutes.’

  I had tried to tell Pete that Aran is becoming a ‘terrible two’, but Pete didn’t believe me, as Aran is only a year and a half old. Even when I described his violent actions and vocal outbursts, Pete remained the ultimate doubting Thomas. However, Aran seems determined to put on an up-close exhibition for his daddy right now.

  Pete is so perturbed by Aran’s behaviour that he tries to pick him up and physically restrain his son.

  ‘Leave him, Pete,’ I say. ‘Seriously. He’ll calm down in a bit.’

  I am so busy explaining to Pete the importance of not reacting that I fail to see Aran getting back on to his two feet. Aran launches himself toward the nearest wall and headbutts it at speed.

  Even I am shocked by the dull-thud sound Aran’s head makes when coming into contact with concrete. Aran seems also a little surprised at the painful outcome of his latest attention-seeking outburst.

  Both Pete and Aran start wailing.

  ‘Oh good God, is he all right?’ Pete says, lifting up Aran’s fringe and checking his forehead. ‘Do we need to get him to hospital?’

  We’re not even in the country twenty-four hours, and already Aran might need medical attention. But when I look closer, there’s barely a mark. Aran has harmed himself just enough to get our full, undivided attention.

  ‘Headbutting is a new one for me, I must admit,’ I say, taking Aran into my arms while walking away from the stairs’ edge. I’ve learned that distraction is the best technique to deal with his tantrums. I need to find something else for Aran to destroy, instead of allowing him to total himself on the villa’s stone stairs.

  Pete soon finds the ideal diversion for his temper-tantrum-prone son. He discovers a playground in the centre of town, and takes Aran there every day. Aran runs around the swings, slides, and roundabouts for several hours, expending energy safely outside, instead of wrecking the interior of our rented villa.

  While Pete and Aran get to spend quality time together, I get to ride Bike. Bike, as an integral part of our family, has also come along on our winter holiday. Eamonn has also customized my training regime to take into account my pregnant state. Seven weeks in, and he has scheduled a two-hour bike without efforts. This would normally be considered an easy ride.

  I find a wide road that leads out of Salobreña and follows the Mediterranean coast west. I cycle through the sunny tourist towns of Almuñécar and La Herradura, and then turn around after one hour. Though I don’t feel the effects of my pregnancy, my speed data shows otherwise. I ride painfully slow and my heart rate is proving hard to control. The next day I go for a gentle one-hour run. And though I should be well able for such a session, I feel like death warmed up as I shuffle along the road. I barely make it home, having to walk up the final hill. I collapse in a heap on our villa’s doorstep and burst into tears. I am only seven weeks into this pregnancy and already I feel totally shit. How am I going to cope with the thirty-three weeks of baby-making that are still ahead of me?

  I soon realise that the pregnancy is not solely responsible for my sorry state. The day after my disastrous run, I start to feel unwell. I go to the bathroom and hack up tonnes of phlegm, green crusty stuff that clogs up the plughole.

  No one else in the household is sick. Only I have succumbed to this illness. I had read that pregnancy can make your immune system shift down to a lower gear. The advantage of this suppression is that my body doesn’t fight off the baby, who is technically a foreign invader. But the downside is that my body struggles to fight off common colds that it would normally shift in seconds.

  Already feeling sorry for myself with a stuffy nose and sore throat while on holiday, all of a sudden, morning sickness arrives with a vengeance. It is New Year’s Day and I should be celebrating with plentiful paella at a beachside restaurant on Salobreña’s spectacular coastline. Instead I am staring at the bowl of coloured rice and crustaceans that Pete has ordered, feeling like I want to puke all over it.

  When I was pregnant with Aran, I thought Ethiopian food was responsible for making me feel so sick. Now I realise the injera and spicy meat on offer had nothing to do with it. It was the foetus growing inside of me that had made my stomach lurch. And if I thought that the second time round I’d be more prepared for this feeling, the sickness is actually twice as bad as it was first time around with Aran.

  I spend the next two weeks unable to train due to my unshakable cold. Bike sits there in his bike box, trying to comprehend why he has come all this way to Spain for just one single solitary ride. And while Pete enjoys chorizo, soft cheese, Rioja wine, stiff espressos, and everything wonderful that Spanish cuisine has to offer, I can barely st
omach a few oranges and the occasional sip of Coca-Cola.

  God, I so hate being pregnant.

  18

  Exhaustion

  I arrive back home in mid-January, into the depths of a dark and cold Irish winter. I hated every moment of our break in Spain, what with my body letting me so badly down. But at least there were blue skies and warm weather in Salobreña, something I bitterly miss now.

  Ten days after our return, I go to see the local surgery for my twelve-week antenatal check-up.

  ‘So you’re back for a second one?’ the midwife says with a smile.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, before immediately adding, ‘but this is so definitely my last.’ I am just coming out of a hellacious first trimester. I really hate feeling so unwell. I still can’t believe some women go through this voluntarily.

  ‘I see last time you had a water birth,’ she says, reading my hospital notes.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It was great. Apart from the childbirth part.’

  ‘Well, seeing that it’s your second child, and you’re a low-risk mother, do you want to give birth at home?’

  I think about it for a moment. A good friend of mine once opted for a home birth. She told me the midwife bagged up her placenta after she delivered, but subsequently forgot to dispose of it. My friend’s father then accidentally stepped on it when he came to visit her and his new grandchild.

  Though my friend and I laughed about it afterwards, I’d prefer not to go through anything remotely similar. ‘No, thanks,’ I say. ‘I’ll just go for the water birth again.’

  I’ve come to the conclusion that, if something worked first time round, there’s no point in deviating from the original plan.

  ‘Well, if you’re twelve weeks along now, that gives you a due date of the twentieth of August.’

  Oh God, that sounds so far away. Fingers crossed the baby will arrive on or before then.

  The midwife takes my blood to do the usual checks. She then gives me my antenatal file that I must carry to all appointments between now and the birth.

  Carrying that bright green file is a dead giveaway that I’m expecting a baby. Even though I’ve no bump or anything, it identifies me as a marked woman. So when I meet Bridgeen, my community health worker, on my departure from the surgery, she immediately knows that congratulations are in order.

  ‘That’s great that Aran’s going to have a wee brother or sister,’ Bridgeen says.

  ‘That’s the only reason I’m doing this,’ I reply.

  Bridgeen nods. She understands. She’s heard this rationale before.

  I wonder then and there if I can share with her a different issue that’s also been bothering me lately.

  ‘I’m just worried though that they’ll be totally different temperaments,’ I say, knowing how silly my concern already sounds. ‘It’s just that, we’ve been so lucky with Aran, like he’s so healthy and quite easy to deal with, in retrospect. I’m just wondering if our luck is going to run out with this second one.’

  Bridgeen laughs and tells me not to worry.

  ‘No, seriously, Bridgeen,’ I say, trying to justify my fear. ‘I’ve friends who have had a lovely first child, and then produced a devil child the second time round.’

  I am sure she has heard concerns like these, and probably worse, from an assortment of mothers-to-be. It seems like every mother has worries; they just differ from one child to the next.

  ‘Everything will be fine,’ she says, patting me on the back. ‘And I’ll see you once this second one arrives.’

  Now that I’ve entered the second trimester, I start to feel semi-normal again. And though the nausea has gone and I’ve found some of my old energy, Eamonn still gives me pretty conservative sessions to do. He gets me back in the pool and starts me swimming again, for an hour each time I go. He makes me do bike sessions with mini thirty-second efforts, and most of these are indoors on rollers. I struggle, however, to raise my heart rate over one hundred and forty beats per minute even when I’m going flat out. My pulse seems to have gone on strike.

  Eamonn also gives me plenty of strength and conditioning exercises to do as I prepare to carry the baby’s extra weight. I find, however, that everything seems much more of an effort this time around. By mid-March I have to reduce the number of squats and lunges I can attempt in one go. When I do planks, I collapse in a heap gasping for breath after less than a few seconds. Luckily, as soon as I struggle, Eamonn adjusts my training and reduces the next session’s load.

  Though Eamonn is trying to keep me moving, I am the cautious one now. Gone are my gung-ho days of training and racing regardless of how I look or feel. I do eventually manage to take Bike outside, but am incredibly careful about how I ride. At one stage, a group of six lads catch up with me on a road spin. With a slight push, I could easily have stayed with them and drafted along. But my new prudent self stops pedalling on purpose to let them go past. I want to go at my own pace, not one dictated by somebody else. Not long after, a large plump man on his bike appears on my shoulder. He has just seen me dropped by the group that is now ahead.

  ‘Couldn’t stay with the big boys, eh?’ he says as he draws alongside me, sweating from the considerable effort he’s making to catch up with me.

  ‘Not at all,’ I say without thinking or losing breath. ‘I’m pregnant, so don’t want to risk crashing in that group.’

  He stops pedalling for an instant, digesting what he has just heard. ‘Oh,’ is all he can muster up in the end. And, with no more smart-arse comments at his disposal, he pedals hard to pass me out. The idea of a pregnant lady biking faster than him is obviously too much for him to handle.

  Even though I am keeping well within safe limits, I often still find myself totally worn out. I just can’t understand it. I am only in my second trimester, when I should be full of energy. Around this time in my first pregnancy, I was hiking up and down mountains in the Lake District and competing in adventure races. Now, if I go for a thirty-minute easy run, I need to go to bed for the remainder of the afternoon. However, having such rest is easier said than done.

  Ever since Aran was weaned off breast milk, I have struggled to get him to sleep during the day. Before, all he needed was a quick breastfeed, and he was off to la-la land in broad daylight. But now, the only way I can make him doze off is by putting him in the car and driving him round and round for at least half an hour. It costs us a fortune in petrol. The strategy also comes close to causing several accidents, as I frequently check in the rear-view mirror to see if he has conked out. But I am so desperate to make him sleep, so that I can lie down too, that I will drive anywhere and everywhere to make sure it happens.

  Pete has no sympathy though for how tired I am.

  ‘You should be fine,’ he says. ‘Sure isn’t Aran sleeping through the night these days?’

  It has taken a full eighteen months for Aran to finally stop waking up in the middle of the night. I get a solid nine hours rest nowadays, but even this seems insufficient. I get up most mornings, and within an hour, desperately want to go back to bed.

  The problem is, not only am I dealing with the exertions of pregnancy, but I’m also running after a hyperactive toddler. And Aran is getting up to all sorts of mischief these days. He has learnt how to open doors, which is an unfortunate development. Even if Pete shuts his office door to try to do some work, Aran has learnt how to slip through this line of defence, disturbing Pete right in the middle of important business calls. Pete doesn’t take this interruption kindly, and reads me the riot act. He knows if he gives off to Aran, it will have zero effect. It may even encourage Aran to disturb him more often so he can see Daddy’s hilariously funny reaction when he loses the plot.

  As soon as we find keys to lock our interior household doors, Aran discovers the wonderful world of cars. He somehow works out how to open Granny’s car door and, once inside, experiments with all the control buttons. He switches on the blinking hazard lights, turns on the windscreen wipers, and puts the headlights on full
blast. It is only the next morning, when my mum tries to start her car, that she realises Aran has run down its battery.

  Aran doesn’t realise yet that doing such things can make him very unpopular. It is only when Mum buys Aran his own toy car dashboard that flashes and bleeps and distracts Aran endlessly that Granny can finally forgive her grandson.

  Aran never fails to amaze me with the mischief he can get up to. I only find out he has stolen my mobile when I’m browsing the phone’s photos section and find hundreds of random selfies. Most of them are of the ground or of Aran’s knee. He then works out how to reverse the camera and take photos of the kitchen ceiling. It’s only when he takes a burst of fifty or more photos, and uses up all the memory, that I ban him from touching my cell phone.

  Stopping Aran from doing what he wants to do, however, has its consequences. He hurts my ears with his screams; he bruises my body with his tantrum kicks and punches. And even though these outbursts are troubling, I find Aran’s silence even worse. If I can’t see Aran or hear what he’s up to, I have to search him out. If Aran is quiet, it means he is getting into some sort of trouble, like unravelling toilet rolls or scribbling on walls or sticking his fingers into plug sockets. If Aran is banging something or crying uncontrollably, at least I know he is still alive and can easily track him down by following his sound waves.

  While I am busy running after Aran, Pete decides he wants to get in shape again. Before we met, Pete would keep fit by doing the occasional marathon. However, since we got together nearly eight years ago, Pete hasn’t completed such an event. I’ve teased him mercilessly that he only ran those long-distance races to keep him slim and attractive to single ladies, and now that he’s married and settled, he has let it all slide.

  ‘So, what kind of session do you think I should do today?’ Pete asks, as he prepares himself for his first training jaunt. He announced only yesterday that he is entering the Belfast City Marathon in three months’ time.