The Hello Effect

It's the heatwave of 2003, and I've just had baby D. I'm reading Hello magazine. The more I look at the celebrity older parent, the more I spot the difference. These are the very people us mere mortals should ignore, especially when we've just come home from the maternity unit.We all like to think we’re imbued with a special Madonna-esque quality when pregnant or just given birth (that’s not the pop star but Madonna as in the mother of God, who was a teenager when she had Jesus). But celebrities are hoisted onto a whole other plane. The media gushes like Old Faithful when someone famous has a baby (unless they’re Britney Spears who suffers ridicule throughout) but if that person is in her forties then her condition is akin to an immaculate conception.I nod to myself as I read beauty editors and nutritionists and medical experts abandoning their dire warnings about risk and lowered fertility levels and birth rates and rush to marvel at how good I - sorry, the celebrity mum - looks for her age, considering her condition.In Cherie Blair’s case, I muse, I don’t remember much being said about how good she was looking. There was more comment in her case about the pre-menopausal rush of fertility, with no doubt a bit of nudging and winking about the potency of her husband’s power and prestige thrown in.Anyway, this was all in my face when I had D at 42 but somehow Madonna (the pop star), Elle McPherson, Holly Hunter – they’ were all my sisters under the skin.But who am I kidding? These celebrity mothers aren’t old bats in tracksuits and frayed sundresses. At least we rarely, if ever, see them like that. We can ignore their age, because here they are still meeting our demands to look gorgeous, sexy, fertile but most of all - young!I'm in the garden. I can't leave R out of this role model hunt, and call him off the play mat to take a look. So who’s the daddy in the older parent story? Here we are. David Jason, Des O’Connor, John ‘scoring a try during injury time’ Simpson, anyone? Phil Collins, Bruce Forsyth. Gorgeous, sexy, young? I don’t think so. Fertile? Obviously. Er, Rod ‘plenty more tunes on the violin’ Stewart? Cute enough, but away already with the high-waisted blue jeans.
Celebrity or no, in looks (a little light face lifting aside) and age these daddies reflect real life in all its wrinkly glory. Where’s the big deal, the effort, the beauty treatments, for them? For a man to have a baby he can be a cheerful, pot-bellied, white haired old git (my husband’s phrase, not mine), so long as he has a working todger. Let’s go further. Technically, he doesn’t even need still-working parts. He could actually have the last laugh on behalf of his sex and become a father when he’s dead.My R isn’t so amused by that, even if he is a damned sight better looking that David Jason. Come to think of it, he points out, with egg donation and cloning and so on, soon it will be possible for a woman to be dead, and still be a mother?But far from being insulted, I trace my fingers over my sore scar and see the bright side. Babies with no pregnancy? I feel a futuristic thriller full of men in white coats coming on – preferably starring Clive Owen….R frowns at the Dr Seuss’s ABC book he’s gluing together and bridles at the mention of Clive Owen. And I admit that we’ve strayed from the topic of older daddies now, because Clive is most certainly not one of our number. So I jab at the photos of thin-haired guys with rumpled faces cuddling the fruit of their loins who also have, er, thinning hair and rumpled faces. Look, they’re just like us, I tell him. And you’re lucky, because it doesn’t matter how the daddy looks, celebrity or no, or how he did it. But there’s still something sexy about you. Show me a woman who’s not the teeniest bit curious about what any daddy is like in the sack, I say, and I’ll show you a liar.R adds the Dr Seuss to a pile of repaired Beatrix Potters, hands me a hungry baby, and sighs. Just because celebrities can do it, he says, stopping D rolling off the swing seat onto the patio as I wrestle with my maternity bra, doesn’t always mean you have to. Have to what? I ask, wincing as D latches on.Become an older parent, he explains. He grabs the magazine, flips to the recipe pages, and licks his lips at a picture of garlicky mussels. But I’ve become one now, I tell him, and so have you. Well, he continues, remarking that we need an egg poacher, you don’t have to have plastic surgery, multiple marriages, go on reality TV, publish books you haven’t even written, or release albums of tired Sinatra covers, he says, just because celebrities do.No, we don’t have to do all those things, I agree. I must say one thing that really does get easier with age is breast feeding. But we can to the parent thing just as well as Madonna.That’s where you’re wrong! R cries, taking E on to his knee to buckle on what he calls his ‘light saver’. You’re a celebrity addict. You should know this by now. Celebrity older parents are a breed apart precisely because they’re celebrities. Their parenthood is feted because they have proved that they are potent and virile and given us yet another reason to read about them. But don’t think for a moment that parenthood will ever be the same for them as it is for us. Oh, no. Parenthood, for them, will be better.Impossible, I protest, noticing as E scampers off how the squared-off hairline at the nape of his neck is exactly like his dad’s. How could it possibly be better?R comes outside again with beer. Stella for him. Guinness for me. Because celebrities will be photographed every step of the way, he says, at least until they reach the gates of The Priory. They will have sexier, browner bumps, groovier maternity clothes, more beautiful babies, they will jet between premiers and overseas locations and still be human enough to give the Malaysian nanny an hour off while they writhe about on their hands and knees until their PR person reminds them that no this isn’t a porn sorry pop video, they’re on their hands and knees because they’re playing with their kids, just like a 'civilian'.Some don’t even bother to pretend they’re ordinary, even if they come from Basingstoke, I’m forced to add, thumping D’s back until a triumphant burp comes.R fires up the enormous barbeque he’s bought in readiness for a fortnight’s visit from my in-laws who are about to descend from Montreal. There’s only two of them, but this monstrous barbie could feed the five thousand.I rest my case, cries R, brandishing the tongs and sounding like the lawyer he is. Even those who aren’t too posh to push may join the sisterhood for a brief, painful and bloody period. But unlike you, my darling, they’ll be receiving several grand to tell Hello magazine all about every dab of Echinacea, every grunt, every trickle of sweat.Easy, tiger. At least they pushed, I grumble, picking up the makeshift megaphone fashioned from baked bean tins to summon G for his burger.Yes, but pick up your magazine five minutes after the birth, says R, spreading mayonnaise all over his bun, and you’ll see Angelina, and Geri, and Davina, all dressed in the sort of pure white shirt no real parent would ever dare wear. I mean, look. Ketchup. Chocolate – the menu for the last three weeks is written all over your kaftan.By now the recipe page has disappeared to be stored in the ‘dinner parties R us’ file and the holiday pages, all azure skies and swaying hammocks, are being cut out and stuck into E’s rather wishful ‘all about me’ book.It’s not a kaftan. It’s the pussy bow blouse which I used to wear for work. You won’t find India hunched in the corner while her family hogs the sofa to watch EastEnders, will you? I warm to R’s theme, stuffing Pringles into my mouth and noting how pristine his shirt still looks. Oh no. She’ll be reclining in a cavernous nursery in a colonial mansion groaning with oversized teddy bears and four-poster cots. Her long, extended hair will be teased into girlish tendrils, her ‘look I’m an earth mother really’ bare feet will be pedicured to perfection and sinking into lush carpeting/tropically green lawns/soft sand.They will cradle the baby in a rocking chair/sumptuous bed/while perched perilously on the edge of a pristine kitchen worktop which has never seen an upside down Marmite sandwich. They’ll tell the Marquesa how marvellous their husband/partner/co-star/somebody else’s husband/already discarded boyfriend was at the birth.And apart from the odd shot of them sashaying through Heathrow airport weighed down with a 4 oz Avent bottle and a pair of sunglasses while Mick Jagger or whoever the father is staggers behind laden with a mink-lined sling, adds R, peeling a peach and watching E try to eat it with a spoon, you will never see the children again because their faces will henceforth be pixellated beyond recognition until they’re precocious teenagers springing into the limelight, fully formed, like Medusa’s warriors.Or like Peaches Geldof, mutters G, negotiating his size 12 Converses over D’s bouncy chair.Oh, when will I, will I be famous? I moan, reaching for another can of iron-rich Guinness.It’s all a mirage. You see? It’s a puppet! cries R. Take a look at our own little photo shoot, five minutes after the baby was born. No army of nannies and make-up artists just out of shot doing all the hard graft, the late night feeds, the washing, the school run, the homework etc. No picture assistant hunched over a computer airbrushing you to within an inch of your life, so that you look like you did twenty years ago – show her, G –‘…I scratch with un-manicured nails at the milk encrusting what used to be see-through chiffon as G lines up our hastily assembled clip frames, dusty from the window sills. They contain snaps of the happy event chaotically composed and evilly lit with all the subtlety of a dirty old man’s Polaroid. The unflattering glare of the fluorescent lighting highlights the scene with vile pink cellular blankets sliding off splayed knees, vast yellow bins in the background overflowing with ‘hospital waste’, sinister blood stains on the pillow and populated with puffy featured, jaundiced people with no hair, slitty eyes, fists bunched up as if begging for mercy and the pursed lips of an affronted dowager –- and that’s just the parents, says G.