The decision to start a family of my own was a huge one. Essentially I was afraid, would I be able to do the job well enough? My mum set an extraordinary example, and the paranoia surrounding the responsibly of raising a tiny human felt paralysing.
I’m also one of the lucky, having a job and career I still deeply cherish, making records from the age of 19 I fell in love with writing songs and working with great musicians, even the business side, the promo and the selling, I got addicted to the whole scene very early.
It’s no wonder I gave every part of myself to my job, coming from an immigrant family from Georgia we considered ourselves so lucky to be living in the West, we left a country in the shadows of the breakdown of the Soviet Union and there is always a low hum of guilt from having left, it meant each of us had to make good in Great Britain, me as a singer and mum as a mother.
As I became a teenager the thought of unexpectedly becoming pregnant terrified me, then as the years rushed on there were times in my first marriage where suddenly the lack of control went the other way, what if it never would work? Close family members back home had had fertility issues too.
I hadn’t pictured being 36, newly divorced, still peddling like mad with music and facing the prospect of not having the family I dreamt of.
A couple of summers ago I was introduced to someone. The pandemic sped a lot of things up for us, where I would have been traveling and getting to know him mostly via messages and video calls, we were meeting up almost daily and when the second lockdown was announced just three months in, our options were moving in together or meeting up illegally. So there was really only one option.
But even if one ‘pandemic year’ equates to two normal years I didn’t want my mid-30s pressure and fertility paranoia to dictate the course of our relationship and to freak him out, so I froze my eggs like so many women of my generation are choosing to do. It did the job of taking the pressure off. I knew I could now enjoy my time getting to know him and if it wasn’t gonna be right, well there’s always the sperm donor route at a later date, at least the eggs were frozen and safe.
I’d been upfront about my dilemma from the beginning but on a weekend trip to Dungeness a year in I took the leap and asked the big question, was he ready to start trying soon?
I hadn’t pictured being 36, newly divorced, still peddling like mad with music and facing the prospect of not having the family I dreamt of.
I’ve often been told that three months is a good time to spend on considering big decisions and three months after Dungeness in the kitchen while frying kale, he said he was ready to have a family. I felt a bit of panic, yes the pandemic gave me some breathing room from the traveling and careering but was my situation unselfish enough?
Towards the end of my egg freezing cycle my doctor had told me as I was 37 to give it a go for four months the ‘traditional' way and if it didn’t work that way we should consider starting the IVF process. Thankfully my partner always had the right angle of humour for these conversations or a perfectly timed hug.
Two months later in late February I was staring at a positive pregnancy test, as the weeks ticked on and the pregnancy became more and more viable this sense of certainty and peacefulness descended on me, all those worries and questions slowly dissolved belonging to another more anxious person from another time. Will I be able to do the job of mum well enough? It now seemed impossible not to.
The first walk outside the three of us took as a new family made everything look like I’d never seen it before, the light pulsed and the colours of everything were deeper, like I was seeing more detail of the world. My partner said it looked that way because of the pain medication from the C section and that I hadn’t been outside for 5 days. But despite his humour and pragmatism he also looked besotted.
Sandro is nearly nine weeks old and I’m writing this with him asleep in the next room, it is without a doubt frightening being fully responsible for a baby, but I’m so glad I listened to my mum. She said becoming mum would be the greatest thing that would ever happen to me. She was right. The haze of tiredness is huge but it’s nothing on the tender love that blows me away every time I hold him. It goes far deeper than the magic of a lyric and a tune.
Katie's new single Those Sweet Days is out now, her next album Love & Money is released 24 March