It’s no wonder Peaches wants another baby so quickly . . .
By Sandra Parsons|
My first reaction to the news that Peaches Geldof is pregnant again was to wince and do some rapid mental arithmetic.
Her baby son, Astala, is seven months old, and Peaches is three-and-a-half months’ pregnant. Even with youth on her side — she’s only 23 — that seems painfully fast to me, and not just because of what she’s putting her body through.
Far more daunting than the actual birth is the immense emotional, mental and physical challenge of caring simultaneously for a new-born and a toddler who’ll be just over a year old when his baby brother is born.
Maternal: With her baby son, Astala, just seven months old, Peaches is now three-and-a-half months' pregnant, aged only 23
So yes, I worry for Peaches, and her children. But I understand exactly why she wants another baby: she’s desperately trying to recreate the idyllic childhood that she briefly enjoyed before it was so tragically cut short.
Peaches and her sisters were initially given an ‘Enid Blyton’ childhood in rural Kent by her mother Paula Yates, who provided them with picnics, pony rides and plenty of playtime.
The idyll came to an abrupt halt in 1995, when Paula left her husband Bob Geldof for INXS singer Michael Hutchence. Peaches was seven — in her own words, ‘very much old enough to see what was going on’ — when her parents went through what she says was a ‘bitter’ divorce a year later.
The following year Hutchence was found hanged in a Sydney hotel room, and Peaches witnessed her mother’s transition from a perfect parent who’d once written books about mothering, to what she describes in the latest issue of Elle magazine as ‘this heartbroken shell of a woman who was just medicating to get through the day’.
Memories: Peaches is desperately trying to recreate the idyllic childhood that she briefly enjoyed
‘It was like living on a permanent seesaw and very scary and sad.’
Paula was found dead from a heroin overdose when Peaches was just 11. No wonder she wants to draw a line in the sand and start again. And that’s perfectly normal: we all try, with varying degrees of success, to avoid the mistakes we feel our own mothers made.
Until she self-destructed, Paula Yates had tried to be an ideal, cake-baking, apron-wearing, stay-at-home mother. You don’t need to be a psychologist to see that this was a reaction to the deficiencies of her own mother, novelist Heller Torren, a glamorous former starlet who left Paula’s care largely to nannies.
Now Peaches, in her turn, wants to avoid the mistakes that Paula made.
Of her parents’ divorce, she says: ‘It really affected the rest of my life . . . I want Astala to have a mummy and daddy together for ever. It’s a commitment. I want to be a good wife, a good mother, a good person.’
It’s impossible not to be profoundly moved by her words, and looking at the photograph of her with her husband Thomas (who looks about 16) and baby Astala, my heart goes out to her.
It’s a tall order to break the negative pattern of two generations, but the sheer passion and naivety of youth can also be its strength. Who knows — Peaches may just make it.
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