Stacey: My Story So Far Read online

  Stacey

  My Story So Far

  STACEY SOLOMON

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2011

  Copyright © Stacey Solomon, 2011

  See page 289 for a list of photo credits

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  ISBN: 978-0-71-815816-3

  To My Angel, My Saviour, My Zachary.

  Who is and always will be the love of my life. For ever and always. My Bubba. I love you to the moon and stars and back!!! X

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Illustrations

  Thank Yous

  Photo Credits

  Prologue

  22 March 2008, 1 a.m.

  ‘Grow up!’ the nurse snaps. ‘You’re a mother now. You can’t cry.’

  Tears stream down my face. I can’t stop sobbing. I feel so alone.

  I want my mum so much, but the nurse has sent her home, along with the rest of my family. ‘No visitors allowed at this time of night!’

  I have no one to talk to, no one to comfort me. I’m so unhappy. I’ve just been through the longest, most agonizing labour – hours and hours of pain, cramps and panic – during which the baby got stressed and I was told to push at the wrong moment. Is it any wonder I’m crying my eyes out? Why doesn’t the nurse have any sympathy for me? Would it be too much for her to give me a word or two of gentle reassurance?

  All around me, babies are wailing and crying. There isn’t a quiet baby on the whole ward. There’s something wriggling and screaming in a box next to my bed, but I have no idea what to do with it. I don’t know what to do with a baby. Am I supposed to feed it? I’m so tired and drained of energy, just completely overwhelmed by exhaustion. I’ve been awake and in pain for so long that it feels like my mind has left my body and is floating somewhere near the ceiling. If I had even an ounce of energy left, I would snatch up my baby, run out of this hospital and never, ever come back.

  Another nurse comes to see me. ‘Have you fed him?’ she asks curtly.

  I shake my head and start sobbing again. None of the nurses are being at all friendly. I feel as though they are looking at me disapprovingly. I’m sure I know what they’re thinking. To them I’m just another unmarried teenager having a baby, another statistic, a kid with a kid, a hopeless case. I know how they’re judging me because I also used to be judgmental about teenage mothers. I couldn’t understand why girls wanted to have babies so young when they had their whole lives ahead of them, especially if they weren’t properly settled in a relationship. How do you have a life? How do you go out? I thought when I saw them.

  But at least I felt sorry for them – unlike the nurses in this hospital, who purse their lips and stare at me with cold, old-fashioned eyes.

  ‘Why aren’t you feeding him?’ the nurse asks, her voice as sharp as a dagger.

  ‘Because I don’t know how to!’ I sob. No one has shown me what to do; no one has bothered to take the time to sit down with me and give me a lesson in breastfeeding.

  I reach down into the box and pick up my baby. My heart races in panic as I look at him. What do I do with him? How on earth am I going to cope? I raise his head up to my breast and bring his mouth close to my nipple. Nothing happens. I try to coax him to feed, but he doesn’t react. All he does is wail, his eyes scrunched up, his tiny fists balled, his face a picture of anger and frustration. Poor little thing. I start sobbing again and he cries even harder. He must be able to sense my sadness and I’m sure it’s making him sad, too.

  I’m so miserable and confused. It feels like my life is over. What is left for me now, apart from being a mother to the tiny screaming baby in my arms? All my hopes and ambitions have been destroyed. I can’t go to college any more; I’ll never fulfil my dreams of being a singer. I’ll never work in musical theatre, or go to university, or even become a teacher. I’m just a nothing now, a big zero, a teenage mum with a kid to look after. I’ve got no other role to play.

  Even worse, I’m only eighteen years old and while all my friends are going out and enjoying themselves, I’ll be stuck at home with a baby. Although I’ve got the best parents in the world and a really supportive family, this child is my responsibility. So I can’t ring up my girlfriends and say, ‘Hey, let’s all go to Ibiza!’ I can’t drop everything at a moment’s notice and rush off to a new club with my mates. I can’t even go to the pub for a few hours.

  This is it. My life’s over, I keep thinking. I’ll just be a mother and then I’ll die. No career, no boyfriend, no fun. Just duty, duty, duty.

  I have absolutely no idea how wrong I am – or how different everything will be in just a few months’ time. At my lowest point, at my most miserable and dejected, I can’t foresee that my baby Zach will turn out to be the greatest blessing I could ever have.

  Instead of my life being over, it’s just beginning. All the good things are about to come my way. My dreams will come true; I will fulfil my ambitions; and there will be a happy ending. And it’s all because of the little screaming thing I’m holding in my arms, my darling baby Zachary. But right now, I haven’t a clue about any of these things. How on earth could I possibly know?

  Chapter 1

  I’ve always had to do everything first, or so my mum says. I try everything too early; I do everything too soon. I was born prematurely, I grew up before my time, I had boobs before everyone else, I kissed a boy too young, I had a baby in my teens and I tried for The X Factor before I was ready. That’s me. Always in a rush! Mum says the one thing I definitely mustn’t do is die too early; everything else she can just about put up with.

  I was obviously in a real hurry to come into the world, because I was born six weeks premature. In fact, I tried to come out even earlier than that, although
no one realized it at the time. My mum started to bleed about two and a half months before I was due, but the doctors at Rush Green Hospital told her it was probably just a urine infection and advised her to go back to work.

  A couple of weeks later she started feeling a lot worse. When she got home from work one evening, it was like a tap had been turned on. But at the hospital, the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her. They did several scans, but it wasn’t clear what was going on or why she was bleeding. ‘We’re going to have to keep you in,’ they told her, shaking their heads.

  They gave her a bed in the delivery section of the labour ward and she wasn’t allowed to move from the bed; she couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. By now the bleeding was continuous, but they still couldn’t work out where it was coming from or what was wrong. She spent four whole weeks lying on that bed, surrounded by women screaming as they gave birth. It drove her insane. There were more scans, but still no diagnosis. Meanwhile the blood kept flowing and she became weaker and weaker.

  On 4 October 1989 everything went mad. Mum was really ill by now. She was losing blood by the bucketload, and when the doctors did a scan they saw me drowning in her blood inside the womb. ‘Caesarean, now!’ they yelled.

  Someone rushed at Mum, waving a consent form and a pen. ‘Sign this,’ he said. Then she was rushed into surgery with my dad following frantically behind.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Solomon, you can’t come any further,’ they told him when they arrived at the operating theatre.

  ‘But she’s my wife!’ Dad protested. Two sets of doors slammed in his face.

  He waited in agony, desperate to know what was going on. The ten minutes or so that my mum was in surgery were the longest ten minutes of his life. What on earth is happening? he wondered.

  Meanwhile, in the operating theatre, a surgeon quickly cut Mum open and took me out, along with a whole jumble of her organs. Then he stuffed all her insides back in again and stitched her up. We both nearly died in the process. It was touch and go whether we would survive. When they wheeled my mum out of surgery, she was grey, like a corpse. She looked so lifeless that my dad wasn’t sure if she was still alive.

  Me and my mum didn’t see each other again for nearly two weeks. I was whisked off to the special care ward, where I was put into an incubator, with tubes coming out of me, while Mum was on a permanent transfusion of just about everything they could give her.

  About five days after I was born, the nurses took a photograph of me so that Mum could see what I looked like. She was still completely out of it, though, so she could hardly register it. She was a lot better by the end of the second week and one of the nurses brought me in to her, so that she could see me in the flesh. But the nurse only rested me on her before taking me away again.

  We were in hospital for about four weeks before we went home – they had to make sure I was developing properly and Mum needed to be brought back to the living. We still weren’t seeing much of each other. Sometimes they were able to wheel her in to special care during the day, but I don’t think it was for very long.

  Finally the doctors found out why she’d bled so much. The placenta surrounding me had been tearing away from the womb lining for months. The chances of it happening were at least one in a million; it was really rare, which Mum said made me pretty special. It was so unusual that the doctors were able to assure her it wouldn’t happen again.

  So that was my dramatic arrival into the world. Sadly, I wasn’t a nice-looking baby, because like all premature babies, I had see-through skin. I weighed 4.4 pounds, roughly the same as two bags of sugar, and I was tiny. I could fit into my auntie’s hand, and my head was the length of her little finger.

  My dad used to come and see me in hospital, sometimes bringing my eighteen-month-old sister Jemma with him. Dad found it very upsetting that he wasn’t allowed to pick me up and cuddle me. The nurses would only let him hold my hand and stare at me adoringly, making gurgling noises. He says it was the strangest feeling. He’s a very affectionate parent, so it went against all his paternal instincts.

  I wouldn’t blame my sister if she resented me for crashing into her life – she can’t have been too pleased that I took her mum away from her for a whole eight weeks. Perhaps this planted the seed for the rivalry that sprang up between us in the years to come, which was always focused on how much attention we got from our mum and dad. Because I was so tiny and fragile, all eyes were often on me, and I grew up to be a real attention seeker – it’s obvious I still am, seeing what I do now!

  My sister was really sweet with me when me and Mum came out of hospital. Mum took a while to recover and she relied on Jemma to help her out, even though she was only a toddler. She would sit Jemma in the armchair at home, lay me on her lap and give her a bottle to feed me with. Apparently, my sister nursed me like a little mum. She often had me on her lap while my mum was washing up. Maybe that’s why she’s so good with children now: she’s training to be a children’s nurse, studying paediatrics at university.

  Premature babies often have quite serious health problems, but I thrived. I grew bigger and bigger and even ended up outgrowing my sister. The doctors said I would lag behind and that my organs would be small and might not develop very well. However, I’m the biggest girl in my family – I outgrew all my girl cousins in height – so I didn’t fit the premature profile at all.

  Because I was born so early, my mum was always telling me I was incredibly special, which probably gave me the confidence to go for the things I’ve gone for in life. ‘See, they all said you couldn’t, and you did,’ she was always saying. Mind you, she also used to say, ‘You were trouble even before you came out …’ so I suppose there are two sides to everything!

  I was really sporty too: when I grew older, I swam for Dagenham and Redbridge, I ran for the school and I was in the netball and rounders teams. I was also pretty bright, and I don’t mean that in a big-headed way. I didn’t want to be, but I was quite smart without even realizing. It makes you wonder what I would have been like if I’d stayed inside my mum for another six weeks. Superwoman, he he!

  Even though the doctors had told my mum to give her body a rest from having children for a while, just two years after my action-packed entry into the world, my younger brother Matthew arrived in 1991, making me the middle child. My earliest memory is a really random one from around the time he was born, when our next-door neighbour looked after me and my sister while our mum was in hospital. All I remember from that time is our neighbour’s pink slippers, which had fluffy bobbles on them. That’s my very first memory. Those slippers really must have made an impact on me! I always associate them with my brother now. Whenever I think of him, it’s the first thing I think of: slippers!

  Me and my brother and sister are all really close in age, which made life a little difficult when we were small, especially between me and my sister as we argued so much. It seemed like everything was so much better for her, because she was the oldest, and my brother was really spoiled, because he was the boy and the youngest. I thought I was really hard done by, even though I wasn’t.

  My mum says that after having my sister and me, she wouldn’t have stopped until she had a boy. So she was thrilled when she had my brother. Knowing that he was going to be her last child meant she treasured him even more, which made me and my sister think, What’s so good about him? As a result we were always fighting for attention.

  Me and my sister resented each other from very early on. There’s a family video of me in a bouncy chair, so young that I’m hardly alert, being given a present at Christmas. You can see Jemma reacting furiously, ‘No! Why is she getting that?’ The outrage is written all over her face. Her present was bigger than mine, but mine was the one she wanted.

  Mum told her to be nice to me and give me a kiss. ‘OK,’ she lisped, toddling over to me. Unfortunately, as she went to kiss me, she fell and whacked me in the face! That sums up our relationship as children, really.

  My dad used
to video everything, so we have films of us brushing our teeth all through childhood. He was always there with his camera; it was so embarrassing. In the Christmas videos that he made every year, you can see me and my sister looking daggers at each other as we open our presents. ‘Why has she got the Barbie house? It’s so unfair!’

  My favourite Christmas present ever was a plastic kitchen, which I was given when I was about five. I was so happy with it, that was a really good Christmas for me. The only problem was that Jemma kept putting her hamster in it, which drove me mad. ‘Stop! You’re making it dirty!’ I’d yell. I got really angry about it. But then I got used to it and started including the hamster in my play. My favourite trick was to put it in my toy frying pan and pretend to cook it.

  It was often possessions that caused Jemma and me to squabble. She’d get a hamster and I would think, Ugh! She got a hamster! I’d get a fiver from my dad and she’d think, Ugh! Why did she get a fiver? I was really jealous when she got a job. ‘I want a job!’ I said, but I wasn’t allowed to get one until I was fourteen, so I used to get money from my dad instead, and that just made Jemma think, Ugh! I’m working for my money! We really got on each other’s nerves.

  I was really competitive and I always wanted to win. When we played games in class, like who could do the crossword puzzle first, I’d make a huge effort to make sure it was me. I was really beastie in netball, too, being tall for my age. ‘We have to win!’ I’d tell the rest of the team. I was determined to come out on top.

  So it’s not surprising that I was always vying for the upper hand with my sister, as well as competing for space. We shared a room with my brother in the same house in Dagenham that my mum still lives in today. I don’t know how we all squeezed in, because there were five of us in a two-bedroom house, but it was home and I’m still very attached to it. It’s only two bedrooms, but a happy two bedrooms, and I found it very hard to leave when I finally moved out.