Returning to work as a cabinet minister five days after giving birth? Okay, it's impressive, but at least Rachida Dati didn't have to do an Uma Thurman dance in front of a live audience, writes Hilary Fannin
FRENCH JUSTICE MINISTER Rachida Dati was back at work this week, five days after giving birth, by Caesarean, to a baby girl named Zohra. Photographs depict a staggeringly composed woman, sashaying into the Elysée Palace in a pair of black stilettos (which matched) and a tailored velvet jacket, its composed little shoulder-puffs free from the gossamer trail of baby spittle, let alone the contents of a five-day-old's rubbery and volatile stomach.
Fair play, Rachida. It takes most of us five days before we can stumble as far as the fridge, and that's only to retrieve a half-remembered, medicinal rhubarb yogurt. To look like Rachida - glossy hair, skinny ankles, haughtily taut abdomen - is a remarkable achievement at any stage. To look like that less than a week after someone slices through your transverse muscles and hands you something furry and bawling is a ruddy miracle.
My eldest son was born by Caesarean in the bowels of Holles Street Hospital in Dublin. It was a bank holiday Monday in late summer and the sound of thunderous rainfall was so dramatic it wiped out the indignant groans from the adjacent birthing rooms. I'd had every drug in the cupboard, couldn't feel a thing and was quite enjoying a lull in activities when suddenly I was being rolled down the corridor towards surgery, and found myself informing the bemused obstetrician that as I hadn't actually read the chapter on Caesareans I didn't think this was such a good idea. Without batting a surgical face mask he told me that as he was the one about to carry out the procedure, my ignorance was entirely inconsequential.
A week or so later I was in a fitting room in RTÉ with a panic-stricken wardrobe mistress trying to shovel me and my accumulated stomachs into last season's costumes. At the time I was in a sitcom, Upwardly Mobile, playing the wealthy wife of a sock manufacturer. I was delighted when I was offered the gig. I was living in London, completely skint, doing a couple of waitressing shifts in Brixton by night and attempting to write a play by day. A phone call later and I was home.
While RTÉ was trawling Brown Thomas buying glamorous little numbers for my character, I was sitting around in make-up in big leather chairs, with fragrant ladies painting my gobsmacked face. And extraordinarily, almost uniquely in my experience, I was getting a weekly paycheque! Happy days - matter a damn about the script, mate, I was, most unexpectedly, in clover.
It wasn't that the producers were unhappy about my pregnancy, just a little shocked when just weeks before filming for the second season began, I bumped into one of them in town (literally bumped - I didn't see him coming, and with my accumulated girth I was in no position to dive into a shop doorway and pretend to examine breast-pumps).
I was a phenomenally large pregnant person. That's the thing about Rachida Dati and her chic, post-partum Parisian stomach: at full term (that's 40 whole weeks of falling asleep a lot, and serious eating), Dati looked like I do on your average Wednesday.
Anyway, the producer sensibly decided to ignore the fact that the person he had employed to play a well-groomed little gadabout had now doubled in size, and so, when hauling my rather large backside into the National Maternity Hospital (a friend had lent me a polka-dot jump-suit, which made me look like Bosco on helium) to relieve myself of my accumulated mass, I was aware that, within a week or so, I'd be filming in front of a live studio audience.
THE ONLY TIME I cried was when, returning from that spectacularly frosty costume fitting (a single thigh of mine was now my previous waist measurement), a taxi driver asked me when the baby was due. That baby was asleep in my flat, with his father, who, having arrived from London a few weeks before the birth, was going to stay home to mind him, before looking for a job when my contract expired.
It was a cold flat, with yellow walls and a great rolling garden. The baby slept in the middle of the bed with his hat on, and seemed unperturbed.
I don't know whose idea it was on my first week back at work to have my character knock back a couple of Babychams and perform Uma Thurman's dance from Pulp Fiction. It didn't go down in the annals of memorable TV moments, but although I'm pretty sure the stitches were out, it took me a long time to forget
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure I would have loved statutory maternity leave and to have been able to stay home all day and hang out with the hazel-eyed baby in my bed, but, you know, bar shaking my fecund bootie, my job really wasn't too taxing. The wardrobe ladies let out the seams, I stopped eating sausages, a foreboding summer turned into a sunny autumn, and mainly I was home in time to take the baby for walks in the crunching park. Some nice people in London decided to put on my play, and when a third series of the sitcom was on the table, my partner decided he wouldn't mind playing his new role for another season.
One day, with our son in his pram, he was crossing Leeson Street when a drunk came up to him and linked him in order to safely cross the busy road in his state of gentle inebriation.
"Always look for a man with a pram," he said. "It's yer only man, a man with a pram."
