Article
Unplanned but not unwanted
Pregnancy was the last thing her unmarried mother needed, but Bethan Ryder was never made to feel like a mistake
A horrified friend once asked me how I felt about being a "mistake" baby. "No different from anyone else," I replied. "I'm loved and that's all that matters." It wasn't as if I rose every morning ashamed at my fate, or evangelically sang "Hallelujah, praise the lord" in thanks for my life.
Let's face it, the concept of planning babies is fairly nebulous. We all meet mistakes every day, indeed a third of the population is probably "a mistake". But marriage is usually the stamp of approval that brings a pregnancy into the realm of conventional respectability. And "little mistakes" happen within ready-made families: the purse strings are tightened and the high chair is dusted down for a final repeat performance - the only eyebrows raised are those of the other children who are embarrassed that their parents are still "doing it".
I suppose that what my friend was really asking was: "How do you feel as an illegitimate child raised by a single parent who discovered that far from being the twinkle in your daddy's eye, the prospect of you was a major pain in the neck? How do you feel knowing that he wanted you terminated and your mum weighed up her options?" Well, I may have been unplanned but, certainly where my mum is concerned, I've never felt unwanted.
Her decision to keep me was based on emotional and practical considerations. Having an abortion is a nasty business, but the risk of creating two miserable lives should not be understated. Luckily for me, my mum was financially able to go it alone, so she voted to keep the baby. But it was not easy. (Five years later, pregnant again, she made a different decision.)
My start in life was in 1971, when Mum, a 31-year-old art lecturer at a college of further education, met my dad through friends. It is bizarre to imagine them together now, but if I allow myself to romanticise it, I imagine there was the political (as well as the physical) frisson - my socialist mother who strongly believed education was the way forward and my dad, a 26-year-old LSE postgraduate with more than a penchant for Marx. They shared a few dinners, and no doubt a few drinks, and then, one night, my dad stayed over and I was the result of unprotected sex during what Mum thought was the "safe period" of her monthly cycle. But the body plays tricks and I was the star turn.
She was panicky at first. "I started to feel ill about two months after and went for a check-up and found I was pregnant, but really I already I knew I was," she recalls. The doctor's reaction was very much of the time. "She was a funny old biddy who wanted to have you adopted. She said, 'Ooh, I know somebody who'll have this baby!' I said, 'I don't think that would be a good idea so, no thanks.'"
Mum said that my dad didn't want her to have the baby. "While I can understand more now that he was young and was not ready for fatherhood, my answer is that you have to protect yourself from it, and that if you don't, then you can't blame other people for making such decisions. It wasn't his body and it wasn't affecting him in the same way."
Despite the bad start, my dad has always been in my life. He has been an irregular, pillow-fighting weekend dad who did fun trips to London zoo and the Notting Hill carnival. He has never contributed financially to my upbringing, yet has the annoying tendency to offer advice. He is the daddy cool who bought the Live Aid tickets, with whom I wrote songs, who took me (under-age) to 24-hour drinking dens. He is ridiculously irresponsible, irritatingly analytical and viciously critical - if I had lived with him, I could have become an anorexic, stuttering freak with the self-confidence of a dormouse. Some parents are better kept at arm's length.
Mum's employment contract entitled her to a total of 18 weeks' maternity leave, with just one caveat - she had to be married. "I went to see the college principal to find out my position and said, 'I'm not going to have a baby in poverty, so if I can keep my job then I keep my baby.'" Luckily he was sympathetic to her plight. A Catholic family man, he had gone through a similar experience with his wife; they had almost illegally aborted their fourth child but, at the last minute, could not go through with it - a decision they had never regretted. "He phoned the chief education officer on the spot and he said, 'We treat everyone the same way.'"
My grandmother was stunned by the news. "She didn't really know what to say," remembers Mum. "Lots of women had babies without being married, but they were usually about 15, not in their 30s." If my nan had ever had any doubts, they evaporated when she first set eyes on me. We lived with her in Newport for a short time when we were homeless; I maintained an extremely close relationship with her and still miss her today. When I was about seven, I confessed to my mother that I did not know who I loved more, her or nan (as if I had to choose).
My birth did not sound much fun. At the hospital, Mum suffered some abrasive remarks from a few caustic nurses but, most of the time, she was oblivious to it all thanks to the pethidine. "I was huge," she remembers. "Every time I moved, I was sick and there was no one around. I was knocked out one minute and coming round the next. It was very strange." Conveniently, I arrived at half term. Being a lecturer suited single-parenthood considerably better than it would some other professions; she worked part-time and holidays were never a problem.
Childcare, though, was more problematic. Mum could not bring herself to leave me at a nursery among half a dozen cots and a ton of toddlers. Instead, the next-door-neighbour, who had a small brood of her own, took me in. When I was one, we moved to Glastonbury to live on a craft commune. At the time, it seemed an ideal solution: mum could teach and practice her pottery while I was in the creche. The Dove Centre, as it was called, was useful because mum worked where we lived and there were other families there. We were part of a small community. My memories of the Dove are faint, although I am a bit of a hippy at heart and like to think the experience made me more sociable and open to other people than perhaps I might have been as a child in a self-contained nuclear family.
Like many 70s communities, however, the Dove did not work out. The finances were not balancing, so we left and, after six months with my nan, ended up back in the south-east, in a Romford council flat. It was not a great environment for kids: ball games were prohibited, my hamster should have been renamed Houdini for all the times he escaped and I dug deep into my imagination to create a Tardis out of a stinking, foul dustbin shed. I went from having apple-rosy cheeks and the ability to identify bird songs to a pallid, urban complexion and estuarial vowels overnight.
Mum had landed a position as head of art in a local secondary school, but we soon had nowhere to live. As mum remembers: "The local authority was prepared to give me a new flat - but only for 10 months, until I got myself sorted out." I at least had a free nursery place during the day. These things made a huge difference to our ability to survive.
Eventually, with a little help from her friends (and the local authority), mum managed to get a mortgage and we moved into a new house when I was about six.
I suppose the phrase "with a little help from our friends" sums up the experience of my upbringing. We had holidays in Somerset, Cornwall and the south of France with various friends, who were, more often than not, traditional two-parent families. We were very close to the Lobleys: the sons, Luke and Dom, remain like brothers to me. Their dad, Bill, taught me how to ride my bike - and how not to bake cakes. One of Mum's friends, a New York-born baseball fan named Kevin, gave me the limitless hours of over-arm throwing practice that got me into the rounders team. An author, albeit of anthropology books, he may be the reason my main ambition was to be a novelist. This one still eludes me, but I did produce a design book earlier this year, with another on the way.
If any of this sounds smug or boastful, forgive me, but sometimes I feel the urge - on my mother's behalf. Single parenthood itself does not have to be a problem (and is much more common now than it was 30 years ago); it is poverty that is the problem. But for all advantages of the perfectly planned nuclear family, I can honestly say I would never change a thing about the way my mother brought me up.