Katherine Ryan: Parenting is lovely – but I have no friends
Katherine Ryan had her fourth child, Holland, seven months ago. Since then, the 42-year-old comedian has written her book First Born Daughter, which will be published in October; had a facelift (we’re chatting over Zoom and her face looks incredible), as well as recording her podcast and appearing on television 10 days after giving birth.
She’s one of the most dizzyingly productive, highly capable and brilliantly funny women in the country, with four children: Violet, 16, Fred, almost five, Fenna, three, and baby Holland, yet even she is clear that “having it all” is a myth.
“I think I achieve attachment parenting along with having a career, but you can’t have it all at the same time,” she tells me. “So it just means that I get no sleep, and I have no friends. I respond to my children’s needs immediately; I breastfeed for as long as I can and I carry them in my arms as much as I can. I co-sleep with them.
“But it’s a weird paradox for me, because I’m also a working mum and I’ve done two national tours since we started having the smaller babies. It’s just been a stretch. It’s difficult to parent the way I want to and have a career the way I want.”
There’s something disarming about hearing her describe the reality of “survival mode” parenting very young children. “You’re just living day-to-day. And I’m very privileged: Bobby [Kootstra, her childhood sweetheart, who she got back together with after 20 years apart, father to her three youngest] stays home and we have a babysitter during the week. I know that I have help, but it is still bananas,” she says.
I wonder whether it’s tough to age-gap-parent an older teen and a baby, who have such different needs, simultaneously. “I think when they’re adults, they’ll all be very close. For the moment, Violet is both incredibly helpful but also incredibly annoyed by her brother and sisters,” she says. “She and her friends can’t be as loud as they could otherwise be and I feel a sense of regret because there are other houses she would rather go to, because it’s cool there: they have conversations with the adults late into the evening, over drinks and stuff, and Bobby and I are so knackered we’re in bed at 9pm. Again, you can’t have it all. But you can make it work. It has been difficult for me to be really close with my teenager and close with my babies, and I find myself really stretched in all areas. Overall, I think it’s a good thing, but it’s nuanced.”
She’s finding parenting this time round, knowing Holland is her final baby, different. “She is the loveliest baby. Maybe the older you are as a mother, [the more] you get these very relaxed geriatric babies,” she says.
Her own outlook has changed, too. “I’m really turning a page,” she says. “I’m starting to give baby clothes away and I’m looking to the future, making plans for my career. I’ve had the facelift, obviously, which was part of it, and I’m looking at our family now [and thinking]: what can we do next? I haven’t really been able to think about the future at all until now.”
The facelift. I suspect because almost every woman of my age admires Ryan – and wishes she’d be their funnier, braver friend who calls out bullsh** wherever she sees it – her £16,000 facelift eight weeks after having Holland caused controversy. Some women felt their wishful friend had betrayed them.
But Ryan didn’t undergo surgery to make a comment on other people’s life choices. “I think it’s a really beautiful thing when women age and they continue to recognise themselves in the mirror and don’t have any insecurities about the way they look and embrace it,” she believes. “For me, I’m a really confident person, but I’m also pretty self-aware and unapologetic about even the frivolous things that I want. I just noticed that through six pregnancies in five years, where I would gain weight was my neck. I’m very secure about all the other changes with my body, but I think because I use my face for work, I didn’t recognise myself in the mirror anymore,” she admits.
“I also had an element of curiosity about Hollywood actresses who have looked suspiciously very fresh lately. I thought the only way I’m going to be able to know what they’ve done is to do it myself. There are people spending thousands of pounds on Botox and filler. Filler will never lift. If you want to have your skin or your neck lifted, the clue is in the name: you just have to have a facelift. Should you? That’s not for me to say. But I’m really glad that I got one and I think the best thing is to be honest about it, and then people understand more and don’t have unrealistic expectations of how their own face should look.”
Ryan is currently finishing writing Firstborn Daughter. I tell her I, too, am a firstborn. “I know, I could tell,” she says. “I think we have a hyper-independence that can sometimes stand in our way, and we’ll be on autopilot a lot of the time. We don’t take correction very well, we see an end goal in sight and we just want to get to it, sometimes at our own peril. I’m learning about survival tactics of a firstborn daughter, and also compliance, because of the generation that we were raised in. My firstborn daughter is now certainly starting to exercise her own independence, and I have babies at home while I’m facing the prospect of her leaving the nest soon. It’s all very wild, but I’d rather be a firstborn daughter than not.”
I find Ryan’s honesty as refreshing as her humour. I’m chatting to her because Andrex toilet tissue has launched a campaign about women’s fears of doing a poo during labour, a concern for three-quarters of pregnant women, according to their research. Of course, they chose Ryan to break the silence: who else would take on the public service role of chatting about labour poo? “This is the last hurdle and I think that’s why women are scared, because it’s still not discussed,” she says.
She says that in her experience, the poo-when-pushing situation happens 50 per cent of the time, and she was far more concerned by what the obstetrician would think than Bobby. “My husband has already seen me deliver two children, but this doctor, you got to make an impression because you never know who your next husband will be.” She wants to reassure pregnant women that it’s OK to be scared of the labour poo, but equally, when it comes to it: “You will not care. Your partner will not care. Nobody will care, unless they’re a massive red flag. It really is the least exciting thing that happened that day: their child was born and the woman they love went through horrendous pain to get something wonderful.”
She wanted to be involved in the campaign because women have a rich history of being unsafe medically because of the things we don’t discuss. “If you’re going into labour really scared of this inconsequential element, and if you’re holding back in any way, I do think it could prolong labour. Anything to let you go into labour as empowered by information and as shame-free as you can be, to be able to advocate for yourself,” she says.
Ryan is a strong believer that women need to advocate in all medical settings. Last year, she urged her podcast listeners to take melanoma seriously after having to push for a cancerous mole to be removed. “There are, of course, men who also shy away from getting medical diagnoses, but I think we aren’t taken as seriously sometimes in a medical setting. I know my grandma, in the 90s, because she was glamorous, she would go to the doctor and say: ‘I think this is wrong’ and they would say: ‘No, you’re fine.’ She died that way.”
So when she was told that everything was “fine” with a mole on her arm, she initially felt “comforted, because that’s the answer you want”. Then she returned. “One private doctor said it wasn’t melanoma. I just knew that something was weird, so I went back to a different private doctor who still said it wasn’t melanoma, but said, ‘I’ll take it off for you if you want and send it for pathology.’ I don’t think it would have been removed with state healthcare, because it did not look like melanoma.”
I end our call thinking that – for the sake of all mothers, women and firstborns – if we didn’t have Katherine Ryan and her disarming honesty, we’d have to invent her.
