It takes guts

I'm drowning in a day-time TV soup of makeover shows and cookery programmes. The makeover shows make me feel fat and the cookery programmes are just making me fat. I've been so busy trying to claw my way out from underneath a mountain of poo-encrusted laundry, that I failed to notice when aliens came in the night and swapped my normal body for something much squidgier. I'm only 4 kilos over my other-lifetime weight, they just happen to be extremely wobbly kilos. And all evenly distributed around the area that I believe I used to refer to as a 'waist'. Sitting on the sofa learning how to make meringue isn't helping.

The real problem is that I have English TV, which is full of cookery programmes with promising titles like Baking Made Easy and Simple Suppers, as well as makeover shows like Hotter Than My Daughter. Mash and trash. I'm addicted. I have a vague idea that some pretty serious stuff is happening around the world right now, but I've fallen down the rabbit hole all the way to babyland, where the only things that matter are the number of oozing nappies I have to dispose of each day and which lip gloss is going to make me look skinny again. Weaning is in and the real world is out. Actually, this is the real world now - what a bizarre thought.

Of course, sometimes I venture out into the real real world (AKA outside), although I usually run into too many Corso Vercelli mums and end up getting all cross. They are the mums who haunt the streets near my house, mainly Corso Vercelli itself, and who have what I have baptised as Bulgari Babies. When you're pregnant you go through this whole my-bump's-bigger-than-your-bump business, ie: if you're the size of a combine harvester then your neighbour's daughter was the size of the hay barn. Then the baby's born and if you had 20 stitches then the woman in the bakery's sister gave birth to a herd of elephants and had to have her bottom sewn onto her head etc... Then, finally, you get pushchair envy. I swear there are women parading up and down Corso Vercelli with Ferarri pushchairs. There's a shop with a €135 Gucci babygrow in the window. It's plain white cotton. These women must all have teams of personal trainers, nannies, toe nail clippers and fake tan sprayers and are so irritatingly impecable that it makes me want to throw my baggy self under the number 16 tram.

Instead, I just hold my head high and push my second-hand mud-caked pushchair, wearing the only trousers that fit me since the alien body-swap. Like all mothers, especially new ones, I am safe in the knowledge that my baby is the most beautiful of all. Then I go home, wait for Isabel's nap time and watch Snog Marry Avoid with a plate of homemade muffins.