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Twenty-two-year-old student Emily is pregnant and receives an email which shapes her future. From the baby’s father, it says: “enjoy your impending shitty, snotty, vomitty twenties”. It is the mid-2000s and Emily has choices. She decides to continue with the pregnancy but soon realises that she must leave her studies and her life in Manchester. Moving back in with her mother, she hides away in her childhood bedroom, and tentatively dips her toe into the prenatal world of online parenting chatrooms and hospital appointments. She is bombarded with information and is terrified by the expectations and sheer volume of things she is supposed to know. Now totally dependent on her mother, she feels frightened and alone. When the baby arrives, things are no better. Judgment appears at mother-and-baby groups, baby yoga and in the local park. Even her pram is judged. Emily attempts to rise above the stigma attached to “unmarried mothers” and wades through her shitty twenties with a child on her hip and with steadfast determination. A refreshingly honest account of single-motherhood and the realities facing young mothers today.
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