One of the reasons we get excited, and soppy, about the royals having babies is that it brings them into the realm of common human experience. It was hard not to look at the photos from Saturday and see, simply, a balding dad and a new mum, radiant on hormones and adrenalin, with a baby who disrupted the principle that all newborns look like Winston Churchill, by looking just like the queen. (Specifically, the queen’s one-is-not-amused resting face.) Even the anti-Monarchists among us thought ah; that’s nice.
It is nice, and the carping that followed the birth of Princess Charlotte was mainly good-natured, made up of women pointing out, as they had after the birth of her brother Prince George, the discrepancy between the way Kate looked mere hours after delivering a baby and the way the rest of us did – roughly: with bits of our anatomy still hanging out that should rightfully have been soundly stuffed in. The army of airbrushers who went to the hospital to spiff up the Duchess before she appeared before the world was not something anyone could begrudge the poor woman. Who, in her position, would do otherwise?
It’s what happens next that is where the real gap falls, a breach in circumstance between them and us so profound as to mock the very idea of universal experience. As with the joke about the queen wondering why every room she goes into smells of fresh paint, Kate’s experience of motherhood will be stripped of 99% of the things that, to other women – particularly those women who have more than one child – constitute the very of heart of the condition and that can be summed up in two of the most dispiriting words in the English language: “double stroller”.
I should mention at this point that I have four-month-old twin girls and spend a large part of each day figuring out how to leave the house without mimicking an Edwardian expedition to the Amazon, minus the imperialist zeal and the army of bag carriers.
Of course, we don’t know the particulars. Kate, who is not an aristocrat, may be going about motherhood in as normal a way as her situation permits. Perhaps she will get up three times in the night to breastfeed Princess Charlotte. Perhaps, in spite of having all the help she might need, she will avail herself of the latest twin pram, to push her children solo around the gardens of one palace or another.
She may even browse the Harrods website to compare and contrast the relative motor abilities of, say, the Bugaboo Donkey, the iCandy Peach 3 and the new UppaBaby Vista 2015 that everyone is trading in their 2013 models for and has the kind of traction that would be perfect for Balmoral.
What she won’t be doing, we can be fairly confident, is figuring out ahead of time which supermarkets she can and can’t go to because the aisles are too narrow for the stroller to fit down. She won’t be wondering how long she’ll have to wait before someone opens the door for her, nor calculating when to cross the street to avoid the five-inch kerb that you can’t hoik two children up.
If she wants to visit a friend, I think we are safe in assuming that she she won’t be studying a map of the London Underground for the nearest station to their house with an elevator. (Although in London, she can take the bus, which is kind to mothers. London buses have a lot of floorspace for buggies. In New York, she can forget about it; they make you fold up the stroller before boarding. What you are supposed to do with your baby while doing this – hand it to the driver? – is one of those enduring New York mysteries, right up their with where the steam in the street comes from and where the pigeons go at night.)
Above all, she won’t be figuring out which of her two children to stick in the lower tier of the stadium-style push chair for the many hours they will end up spending there. (Although if she ever did do this, one assumes it wouldn’t be the future King George VII who got stuffed into the basement seat, affording him an unrestricted view of his sister’s bald head).
You could argue that all of these things are the trivial aspects of having a baby, mere flotsam on the surface of an impossibly deep experience. And there are some features of new motherhood that are probably standard; the fact that, rich or poor, royal or pleb, you feel reduced to a set of biological functions in a way that is both thrilling and terrifying. Frivolities you’ve spent decades perfecting evaporate in the heat of the furnace so that, in the first few months, your personality runs on an emergency generator and you have nothing to say when people come round.
Kate may not be spared this. On the other hand, no one values the royal family for their sparkling personalities, so perhaps it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the line of succession. (On which note, the fame of her baby ensures she will never get defensive when a stranger leans in and says of the princess: “What a sweet little boy!”)
And, of course, she doesn’t have to return to work. Just a hunch, this, but four months down the line, when in America at least most mothers are struggling to transition back to some semblance of normality, I don’t see Kate struck by the realization that the most stable relationship in her life is with her breast pump.
Most of all, the Duchess of Cambridge will not have to worry about becoming invisible, the pram the most distinctive thing about her.
That’s OK. There is a trade off for all these anxieties – and I don’t mean what happens to your heart when the baby smiles, although there is that. But figuring out how to earn a living while looking after your baby, to enjoy your friends and take the bus across town, are sufficiently hard as to saturate your every waking moment with what the gurus of the day would call mindfulness. If it’s too stressful to be called happiness, exactly, it is at least alertness to every quiver of being alive. I would settle for that.
And we, the non-royals, are relieved of one dreadful burden: when you’re half-mad with sleep deprivation, unwashed, leaking dairy – when you haven’t brushed your hair this side of New Year – can you imagine anything worse than what befalls Kate this weekend: being made to have the queen round for tea?
