My accidental pregnancy turned out to be the best thing I ever did

Much like Margo, the protagonist of my new novel, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, I got pregnant by accident, although I was 26 and in the novel Margo is only 19. Like Margo, I had no money (she turns to OnlyFans) and didn’t know what I was doing but went ahead with the pregnancy. I had no siblings or close cousins; I was the first of my friends to have children, and my own baby was the first newborn I ever held. My ideas of motherhood had come entirely through cultural osmosis, and so my expectation was that motherhood would be hard and boring. If anything, I pictured being transformed into the mom from some sitcom, a brown bob appearing on my head like the hair cap on a Lego figure.
But my desire to keep the baby was profound and physical, and so with the support of my family and baby daddy, I kept the pregnancy. “I need to know you’re all in,” I told Sam, and even though we had only known each other for three months he agreed to marry me. We planned the wedding in 30 days and braced for our lives to be transformed. We were wildly in love, but I do not know how we managed to be so stupidly brave. I thank God every day that we were.
I expected motherhood to be hard, and it was. My husband had just got a post-doc position at the University of Maryland, but we were living in California at the time. Being too scared to ask for more time, he left to begin this job seven days after I gave birth. Our baby wouldn’t be cleared for travel until he was four weeks old, so I stayed behind in California in my mother’s guest bedroom, using our pushchair as a bassinet. All of our belongings were in moving boxes. I had very few baby clothes, but it didn’t matter — it was so hot the baby couldn’t stand to wear any clothes anyway and kept getting heat rash unless I put him in the bathroom sink and ran cool water over his little body every few hours.
I’d had a pretty traumatic emergency C-section, and every time I picked the baby up the stitches in my abdominal wall hurt like crazy. Getting out of bed, sneezing, laughing and pooping were all very painful activities. I was also broke, so I was living on Lean Cuisine meals, just bouncing this inconsolable, heat rash-covered, sweating newborn on a yoga ball while burning the roof of my mouth on 200-calorie rigatoni. I was so sleep deprived I would cry five times a day. It was literally a nightmare. It was also the most magical time of my life.
I had always wanted to go on a grand adventure: to understand something about the world, become wise, have something to write about. I was not expecting motherhood to give me that. If anything, I had been told it would hold me back. But suddenly my heart was overflowing with love like a forgotten bathtub, my soul flooding every hour at the blinding beauty of my child.
Motherhood is one of those experiences that may very well be incommunicable. After I had babies, women with children would sometimes come up to me and shyly ask how I was liking it, awkwardly trying to find a way to ask: did you find the meaning of life in the shape of your baby’s upper lip? Did all of human history become clear to you as he fell asleep in your arms and you suddenly understood it was a woman who made every human who has ever lived, that civilisation, technology, Rome and rocketships all came out of a vagina? That nothing would be possible — nothing at all — without the hours upon hours of back-breaking work a woman puts into each and every single child?
For someone who had been worried that life was meaningless to find I was willing to die to protect this little creature was oddly steadying. It didn’t matter that people were maybe/always evil or that no one could love another person truly. I didn’t care if utopia was impossible and human civilisation was destined to collapse over and over. I wanted it anyway. I wanted to be alive and I wanted to keep this baby alive, and I wanted him to grow so that I could show him flowers and animals, let him taste fruit and smell rain.
When he was four weeks old, we moved to Maryland to join my husband, my mom and I driving cross country with baby Booker and my dog, Layla, a shepherd who loved my son instantly and used her shaggy body to sop up my anxiety like a sponge. In Maryland in our cosy basement apartment, Booker grew from an infant into a proper baby, sitting in his Bumbo seat, squealing when Layla licked his face. He loved the cold and would hoot when he felt wind on his face. He would stare into my eyes, thrilled to be alive, and I was thrilled to be alive with him. It was better than romantic love, sexual ecstasy, or intellectual epiphany, or art, or any pleasure I had known.
As Booker grew, motherhood just kept unfolding, and with each new stage there were uncharted delights. He was two when he told me his first joke. I was driving him to daycare, and he said, “Mommy, I have joke.” I didn’t even know he knew the word joke. “What is it?” I asked. “Penis,” he said, giving a little pause, “on car.” I barked, surprised and unsure if he meant a car having its own mechanical penis, or whether he imagined a human penis slapped down on the hood of a car, but either way I found it hilarious.
We had a second baby, another boy we named Gus, and for any woman who has trouble saying “no”, I recommend having two little boys. “No” soon flew out of my mouth with expert ease. I discovered I was the kind of woman who even corrected the children of strangers at the park, saying things like, “We don’t throw rocks,” imperiously. Motherhood gave me authority, which was the last thing I expected but is a gift I wear to every business meeting like an invisible crown.
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As they grew older, the pain of losing their baby selves was mitigated by the excitement of getting to know their big-kid selves, watching YouTube videos about quantum physics with Booker and talking about infinity in the yellow lamp glow of his bedroom. Gossiping with Gus and learning the latest slang, watching memes, discovering which rappers he loved and which he didn’t. Dance parties in the living room and endless games of keep-it-up with a balloon talking about Pokémon. Going to conveyor-belt sushi and understanding exactly how expensive feeding two teenage boys was soon going to be.
Was motherhood the hardest thing I’ve ever done? For sure. Did I probably have postpartum depression and would medication and better support systems have made my experience even better? Absolutely. Is the insane cost of childcare an indictment of our society? You bet. Is the inequity of gender roles in modern marriage the number-one reason my friends get divorced? One hundred per cent. I can and have written about all these things, but I’d never tried to write about how wonderful it all is before. I feared sounding sentimental and insipid, that the magic wouldn’t translate. But with Margo’s Got Money Troubles I knew I had to at least attempt to get some of the power down on paper.
Because when life gives you something so sacred, what can you do but stupidly, bravely, falteringly try? Motherhood taught me that.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe (Hodder & Stoughton £16.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members