This blog is just practical notes based on my own experience of c-section as I’ve been asked a few times by expectant mums and I will probably start forgetting things soon.  Techniques develop fast and things were possible on the second that weren’t on the first, so if you think you may have a c-section, do ask your midwife about things that are important to you.

1. It is possible to have skin-to-skin contact immediately after birth.  With my second c-section the baby was immediately placed at the top of my chest, his cheek against my cheek.  While it wasn’t possible to go to immediate breastfeeding, that might be possible too in the future as techniques develop.  So if skin-to-skin is important to you, talk to your midwife/consultant about it.
2. On my second c-section I was keen to get home asap to be with our older child. I had the c-section about midday and left the hospital at 6pm the next day. The doctors had to be satisfied that my scar was set to heal, that my bowels and waterworks were back to working order (first time I’ve had to fart for an exit visa), and that I was able  to breastfeed.  Breastfeeding was very important to my hospital, and might not be such a priority elsewhere.  I also had support at home.  C-section doesn’t have to mean a long hospital stay if you’re a bit lucky.
3. During my first c-section, the consultant surgeon said “you’re the captain of the ship, we’re just the sailors.”  Although you are on a gurney and can’t move, you can talk.  Talk to people, ask questions.
4. On my second c-section, unlike my first, I was allowed to keep my glasses on which was very important to me as I have very poor eyesight.
5. As my second was a planned c-section I was able to bring my own music in and it was quite a party atmosphere, until they placed the baby on me and all the staff somehow seemed to melt discreetly out of view while my husband and I bonded with our baby. It can be lovely.
6. I was trembling heavily during my first (emergency) c-section and I wish someone had told me that the trembling was due to the epidural I’d already been on for some hours and not anything to worry about. It didn’t happen on the second.
7. Given my experience with the first birth, I didn’t make a birth plan with the second. I felt this would help me to just roll with the experience. I was however encouraged by my midwife to keep talking to her about my birth preferences, and we put my preferences in order (e.g. I was not willing to try an induced birth again).
8. After the planned c-section was agreed my midwife supported me to still try to have a natural birth, e.g. scheduling the later of the two recommended dates for the c-section and giving me a cervical sweep to try to get labour going naturally.  Although it didn’t work, I was happy that I’d been supported to cover all the bases and felt very content going into my c-section.

So that’s it really. I was lucky with supportive family and friends, a great partnership with my midwife (thanks Steph!), a fab hospital (thanks GSTT!) and a party anaesthetist.  It’s not always so easy for everyone and I don’t pretend it is.  But hopefully some of these ideas may help someone else have a c-section that is fine too.

The first person I heard telling me that I could not be both British and Finnish was a prospective Conservative MP in 2009.  It was at a work event that had turned into a long lazy evening of summer-time drinking.  I was used to being professionally bi-partisan, and it was a charming evening with the sun setting over the mellow brick of one of London’s storied members’ clubs, and someone else was buying the drinks, so it was intriguing to find out how different my worldview was to his.  Labour was in power and had been for a long time.  Gordon Brown was exercised over problems to do with national identity which seemed rather academic to me, even though my organisation had been a bit involved; organising the launch event for Lord Goldsmith’s Citizenship Commission and going to meetings about the proposed “Statement of British Values”.  In retrospect, I see it was in the air.  I asked the future MP what had drawn him into politics.  “Well, in one word,” he said, “if you really want to know – MargaretThatcher”.  He continued to be adamant that it was literally impossible to be loyal to two countries at once.  I wasn’t worried or frightened that he and his like would change my life, or my standing in either country.  I saw nationalism as an interesting debate but one on the fringes in a nation with much bigger fish to fry because of the financial crash.

Seven years later, I woke up the day after the British had voted (narrowly) to take Britain out of the EU, and Nigel Farage was on the radio declaring it a ‘victory for decent people’.

So I was wrong about the importance of nationalism in British social life.  Nationalism played out differently among different Brexit voting groups.  The racism of the man who yelled at one of my relatives in a hospital is different to the protectionism of the trade union leader who said that his job was to protect British workers (forgetting that his union happily accepted subs from EU workers in Britain).   But when people on both left and right talk about sovereignty, what can they really mean except that their vision of the nation wasn’t being fulfilled?

Being both British and Finnish, the debate affected me differently to pro-Europeans who were only British.  I would remain an EU citizen despite the vote, whereas their rights are being stripped away.  But I felt my sense of belonging, of having a home, or homes, had been pulled out from under me.  I mulled a lot on what patriotism meant, how to think of my relationship to Britain while also being from somewhere else.  If not an ethno-nationalism of saying “the people here are better”, then what was it?  What did Britishness mean to me?

It was definitely landscape – the Yorkshire moors, the Scottish mountains nosing at the sky, the fields in Devon rolling towards the the fishing boats pulled up on pebble shores; the narrow old streets of London opening onto plazas of glass and steel tower blocks, and people from all over the world streaming through our streets.  And it was the food that came from these places: the fish and chips, the ploughman’s lunch with a  block of crumbling cheddar, and also the food from all over the world that those city dwellers had brought with them.  Britishness for 500 years had been exploratory, outward looking.  Not always to the benefit of those people Britain had looked outwards to, but that curiosity and ambition, both good and bad, had led, I  proudly thought, to Britain’s fairly decent foreign policy and its international aid programme.  In spring 2017 I stood watching clouds and sunshine chase each other over Glastonbury Tor, and thought  ‘Britain, such a beautiful country full of delightful, polite, people who make terrible decisions.’

And, to me, deeply, Britain was in its language. English (I don’t speak Welsh or Gaelic) – that wonderfully absorptive language, full of Latin and Greek and French and German, and loan words from all over the world.  The ketchup on my chips had come via Malaysia, once.  I studied English Literature at university and could never quite believe I was getting a degree for something so lovely to do as read books.  I engaged passionately and traumatically with reading.  I cried after my Medieval exam because I felt I had not been able to fully do justice to Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight, and spent much of that summer lying on the lawn meditating on the Middle English teutonic word ‘draumr’ meaning ‘joy’ which gave us our modern English word ‘dream.’  I nearly went mad dreaming my way into Ozymandias and felt I had tracked some important thoughts about post-Providential Victorian narratives through Shelley to George Eliot.  Twenty years later, for much of the summer of 2016, I hugged this thought to myself.  I was sure Nigel Farage did not love English literature the way that I did. It made me more British than him, in my head, for a while.  I felt that love gave me rights. I had a distressing moment on Twitter when Leavers Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell quoted Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins at each other over a photo of a landscape.  It was the poem my sister had read at my wedding.  They were on my turf.

There is something to say about what it means to be a re-migrant to Finland too, but I am still in the middle of that.  The only thing that has become clear in recent weeks is that Brexit or no Brexit, I cannot lose my Britishness.  People divorce their spouses but they rarely leave their children (my biological father did, but he was a shit).  For most people, there are ties that are too profound and too intertwined in everything about them to break.  My ties to both my countries are that.  I have two children, my love for one does not displace my love for the other.  The senses I have of both my countries sit happily inside me, they are not in conflict, whatever the future Tory MP thought about it. He was, I have realised, quite simply wrong.

A couple of Saturdays ago I was late to a friend’s baby’s first birthday party here in Helsinki. I explained my truthful reason for lateness, that my baby had been wild-eyed and screaming for 24 hours since a bad flight from London – but I was touched to find people ask me in reply if I had been able to watch the Royal Wedding, as if gently allowing me to reveal the truth behind a little white lie, making space for my Britishness.  And I had indeed watched the wedding on my phone on the tram, sobbing a little at Meghan Markle’s beauty as she entered the church, weeping quite freely on public transport during Bishop Curry’s rousing address about how love could change our world.  I’m sentimental about weddings anyway, but I’m sure that there was something about the Britishness that pulled me in.  The beautiful spring weather, the arches of flowers over the antique stone chapel, Britain coming face to face with our new bi-racial campaigning feminist American actress Duchess, revealed from under her magnificent veil which had been embroidered with symbols of all the countries of the Commonwealth – and a Californian poppy, for her.  We didn’t know before now that the Queen’s Prebendary is a black woman – the Church of England has been changing for a long time but now the world knows.  When I became British I had to swear loyalty to the Queen and her heirs, and I’ve never been sure what that meant.  But when I read the next day that Piers Morgan in the Daily Mail was warning Meghan off from talking about feminism from the palace, because she has servants there (as if he ever cared about intersectionality before) I felt a call inside, saying “find me my sword of words, I must fight with my Duchess!”.   Britishness evolves, and will continue to.  It’s a thing of wonder, complex and rich.  A few weeks later I lay on a hot afternoon in a hidden little corner of a Finnish forest against a smooth granite rock, amid birches and rowan blossom and the white flower called Solomon’s Seal.  It made me think of Bishop Curry’s words about love at the wedding from the Song of Solomon: “Place me like a seal upon your heart”.  I felt drenched in sunshine and love and language, and extraordinarily happy.

Tomorrow I start to leave Harris.  He goes to daycare, to the ‘soft start’ where I watch him play and hope that he seems normal and acceptable to the nursery staff and his peers.  By the end of the week he will be spending hours  without me.  The nursery think this will be traumatic for him and me, but largely they are wrong.  He will mind, a bit, but he’s a happy child who likes socialising, he will find rewards in his new days. For me, well – I have been a fiercely loving but ambivalent mother.  The real me was in many ways at work: Essi was in the analysis and the balanced decisions, she was perhaps sometimes hard-to-like but fair, and effective, people said nice words like ‘integrity’ and ‘high-performing teams’. Motherhood swamped me in the ceaselessness of its demands, the emotional whirlpool of unconditional love and curiosity and concern and boredom and loss.  Loss of friends, whose friend Party-Essi had gone underground and not in the underground party way.  Loss of faith in the world of work from everyday sexism such as the interviews at the Climate Group where they asked me twice how I would manage the (risible) travel demands of the job while having a young family.  Loss of interestingness – moving to Finland and our new friends asking my husband what he did at work, whereas my role was obvious, nappy-filled and devoid of potential.

I cannot wait to hand my beloved child over to near strangers and find myself again, to write up the presentations I have promised various people, to write as many letters as it takes to convince someone to pay me again for being work-Essi and to develop my Finnish past this language I acquired as a child based on my grandmother and things my mother remembered and puolukka, juolukka, mustikka, berries, ask me anything about berries and I will reply in Finnish.

I am now up against the State for a while, as my motherhood grant ends and I apply for jobseeker’s allowance, a much more questionable and suspicious being in the eyes of the State.  Mater certa, Jobseeker incerta.  Am I really a jobseeker or a lazy-ass scrounger determined to find a way to freeride and freeload and cause anarchy in this place that depends on a fine balance of work to create its welfare.  The kinds of job I can do don’t even feature on the drop-down menu.  I do not know forestry or asbestos clearance nor am I a teacher or a technology manager.  The 10 digit me that is my personal identification code is in 1996 again, being told by a temp agency hack that ‘the trouble with you is, you’ve got no skills.’  And the one person in the world who is completely and blithely assured of my value who cries for me the way he cries for reasons as fundamental as hunger or loneliness, has no say.  Think of the reference he could provide for me.

The indomitable food provider, forbidder of bins, gatekeeper of the noisy saucepans and wayfinder in the great outdoors.  Plus of course all the roles he does not see, the Listmaker, Button sewer, shopper and parcel collector, medicine remembrancer and hygiene monitor, social support seeker and offeror, place-maker and family activity resource, walking google map for child-friendly toilets. He does not know what will happen this week.  The closest relationship he has ever known, the relationship which overwhelms all others in his need for our closeness, our staring into each other’s eyes, joint exploration of a cardboard box, is changing.  He wouldn’t want it to, although nobody has asked him, and I am ambivalent.  That’s my cardinal quality, ambivalence.  And he has no ambivalence – he wants, or he doesn’t want.  And tomorrow, he doesn’t know what it will bring but I do.  Tomorrow.

Christmas this year really began with listening to my very talented friend Chris singing on the South Bank with his choir Urban Voices, followed by mulled wine with Victoria and Karen. Walking home past the London Eye and trees lit with little blue fairy lights I felt very lucky to be a Londoner and to have the friends I do. Then Jamie and I shopped at Borough Market, and bought our guinea fowl from a butcher who jointed it for me according to the instructions in my Jamie Oliver cook book, despite threatening to charge more because Jamie Oliver is now too much of a big cheese to pass the time of day with him. Then he wouldn’t let me over-tip him for the Christmas box.

Christmas proper started with a plate of cheese and preparing a jelly for the next day, then a li’l glass of Prosecco. Jamie and I went to Midnight Mass in St John’s at Bethnal Green. I’m not used to a C of E service and so the intoning was a surprise and I found myself flapping desperately through the little blue booklet trying to work out – was it the creed? The eucharist? But it was a very jolly C of E sermon, exhorting us not to feel guilty for not coming to worship more often, telling us to celebrate the birth of Christ by having a good time – though not overdoing it. Rather different to the Quaker meeting I attended recently where people had ministered happily on a new child born to a single mother who is part of the meeting, and in a more conflicted spirit on a concern for the homeless, an anger against consumerism, and a plain refusal to believe a literal truth of the poetry sung in carols. There is a principled facing of the truth with Quakers that I value, but sometimes I do wish that we could just take it easy too.

Today Jamie and I cycled through town in defiance of the rain – and as often happens when you face up to an enemy, the rain melted away. Jamie led, and his confident presence helped me conquer my nerves about tackling the roads. We cycled past a working mans’ club in Bethnal Green, adorned by a Banksy graffiti and some cheery teenagers who wished us a happy Christmas, through quiet squares at the back of Kings’ Cross, through a sedate Bloomsbury and then Seven Dials in Covent Garden which was decorated with Christmas Lights arranged in the form of Candelabra. From there we went up the sandy path on the Mall, skirted the Queen’s home, past the palace of Westminster, and through Whitehall and Piccadilly. We clicked our heels together three times and said There’s no place like Soho (not really, but Jamie gave me a Wizard of Oz mug for a present and it was in my mind). As always in Soho we saw the strangest things – a woman walking down the street, oblivious to the twinkling lights of the strip joints and revue bar, with her two toddler-ish sons, who were both wearing toy police-man’s helmets; and then a moment later outside Village Soho, a small, localised glitter tornado. Some fragments of the journey were completely new to me, some (Iike Lambs Conduit Street) had impressed me ten years ago and then I had lost them, and some turnings were ingrained in the very movements of my body, places I had worked or met people at, or danced in. Then home, and then we ate a feast, from Jamie Oliver’s recipes, with some amendments from our own Jamie. We both worried some about the people we had seen who seemed homeless, or alone, or simply caught in the rain when they wanted to be somewhere else. When we were eating our home-made jelly made with berries, elderflower cordial and prosecco I was so content I could barely form words. Christmas was all I had hoped it would be – calm, luxuriant without obscene consumerism, full of laughter and friendship. It’s a good feast to wind down the year. Many thanks to Jamie for making it such a wonderful day. It’s never quite easy to decide how much it is fair to enjoy yourself when others do not have the things they most need – companionship, shelter, nourishment of all kinds. But I suppose we too need some leisure and easy time – with an old and dear friend – I think so.