Before we decided to have a baby, I thought a lot about what being a mother would be like, but there were some respects in which my imagination failed me. Both are related to my living environment. I live in a first-floor flat with quite a few steps leading up to the front door from street level, and it did not occur to me that this would be what might politely be termed a “complete and utter ball-ache”, both in respect of getting myself and the baby outside, but also his many effects, meaning it requires at least two trips and, unless I am using the Babyzen Yoyo, which is extremely light, the assistance of my husband or sometimes my very kind neighbour. Without that pram and someone there to assist, I’d basically be housebound, which makes me feel pathetic and a tad vulnerable. (For a while I could pop the baby on a blanket in the communal hall while lugging the pram down the steps, but now that he is mobile he’s on a kamikaze mission to go headfirst after me.)
The other was toys. For some reason, I had not realised that there would be so many toys, and that not tripping over those toys in the dark at 3.55am when retrieving a bottle would become quite key.
So when a friend falls pregnant now, I tend to gently highlight these two things, especially the former, so that she can be prepared. Although what tends to happen is that her housing situation comes with its own issues, as in the case of the friend who moved to a ground floor apartment in preparation, but has found the neighbourhood outside it to feel crime-ridden and lacking in green space. Having a baby changes your approach to housing, both in a practical and an emotional sense. The way you use space changes, as does the way that you feel within that space. It’s all for someone else, now, and so your home’s shortcomings feel more depressing and distressing than ever.
I write this as a renter in an area that has gentrified so completely in the past decade that any former resident who comes to see you spends at least the first 10 minutes swearing in disbelief. As such, it’s been a lovely place in which to have a baby, and there is still a feeling of community here. On the other hand, it can be quite fatiguing being surrounded by millionaires, and now that I’m a parent, the absurdity of the wealth divide in my borough hits even harder. That there should be babies in beautifully appointed nurseries in Victorian townhouses, all decorated in various shades of sad beige (the satirical term used to describe the way upper-middle class parents eschew colour in pursuit of a Scandi aesthetic), a stone’s throw from children living in appalling cramped conditions: it breaks my heart.
It’s not that I begrudge the friends and acquaintances who have made it on to the property ladder (most of them), usually with huge cash injections from family. They are admirably candid about this. But living side-by-side with them at times makes that lifestyle feel achievable, when in fact you might as well wish that you had won the lottery. So successful has been the media manipulation around the housing crisis that to be renting at my age and stage of life feels like a personal failure, even though I know objectively that it isn’t. At one point a few years ago buying a house somewhere else in the UK started to look possibly achievable, though relocation work-wise would have been a challenge, and then Liz Truss happened.
There are many thousands of others in the same boat, or worse off, and many thousands of others living with mortgage terror, working multiple jobs in fear of losing their homes. The social contract in terms of being able to provide an affordable, comfortable home for your family by working hard has completely broken down. The landlord class continues to leech off the younger and the poorer. I think about the parents who are waiting to have the lift repaired for the seventh time, the ones who already have too many children in too little space, or who have decided that they can’t have another despite desperately wanting one because there’s nowhere to put them.
I think a lot about Awaab Ishak, the two-year-old boy who died because of a respiratory condition caused by exposure to mould at his Rochdale home. Especially last winter, when the black mould bloomed on our own windowsills, and while my husband scrubbed and scrubbed, I sobbed and sobbed because our son had needed help to breathe when he was born early, and I was scared for his tiny lungs. I couldn’t write about it at the time. I felt ashamed. Because how could someone with all my privileges, someone writing a parenting column for a national newspaper, be in such a situation?
I consider myself lucky. I have a landlord, Clarion Housing, that will eventually replace the windows, though it took two years for them to fix the crumbling brickwork that made my son’s room so damp, and they are yet to make the collapsing wall in the back garden safe, or provide an outside tap for a paddling pool, or fix the hob in the kitchen. But it’s better than what most tenants get (the bar is very low).
If you’re reading this in your beautiful, secure home, you are one of the fortunate ones - there are millions of parents out there who are not. I suppose I want them to feel seen. Because it used to be taken for granted that you could give your children a better life than you yourself had, and in the past decade we’ve lost that principle. I don’t know how we find it again.
What’s working
Colin and Zach, the paramedics who took my son to hospital last weekend, and were so kind to us (the baby is now on the mend). You joked that I’d write about you in the Guardian, so here I am doing it. Thank you. I couldn’t be more grateful for you and our NHS.
What’s not
My husband has noticed an alarming number of viral “funny kid” videos in which parents deliberately make their children cry. I feel queasy enough about putting children on social media without their consent, but to upset them and then film it seems doubly cruel. If someone treated their pet in such a way, for the cynical reason of simply getting likes, people would rightly be outraged.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist