What a modern phenomenon this is: family planning, Insta-style. The life of a social media influencer is often glossy and glamorous – and always meticulously showcased. Intricate preparation is key, agrees Emily Blackwell, one-time star of Made In Chelsea and now a ‘brand’ in her own right.
When Emily, 28, was laying the groundwork to introduce her first child to the world, she followed all the new rules. In September last year there was a carefully curated announcement on Instagram – alongside a ‘paid partnership’ with the pregnancy test brand Clearblue, no less.
There followed reels and posts about the joyous events unfolding – images of Emily cradling her growing bump, and with partner Jordan Oldershaw, who runs a recruitment company, making heart shapes with their fingers over her belly.
Over on her mum Rachel’s Instagram page there was a video of the moment she learned she was to be a grandmother for the first time – when opening a gift bag containing tiny booties.
Scan pictures flooded in next. As did the obligatory video of the gender reveal. The much-wanted baby was a girl so everything went pink.
The casual viewer – and since she has nearly 400,000 followers on Instagram, there are plenty of them – might have wondered why Emily’s account went quieter than normal around the end of last year. But since she was still uploading some content (often endorsements for beauty brands or even cars but mostly for baby products) alarm bells did not ring.
As she sits in our photo studio today, breastfeeding baby Eva, she reflects on the horror that was unfolding behind those seemingly perfect images.
Emily cradling her growing bump, with partner Jordan Oldershaw and a Deepblue pregnancy testing kit
Unable to share the reality, Emily Blackwell posted this while daughter Eva was in hospital
For at the time the Insta updates were posted, all through November and December, Emily was not gleefully test-driving a new pram, or sailing around a branch of Mamas & Papas, picking out tiny hooded sleep-suits, in preparation for the beautiful birth, as her Instagram account suggested.
The birth had already happened, kept hidden from her followers – and at that point her tiny baby, who had arrived in the world ten weeks early, was fighting for her life in hospital.
Emily had gone into labour prematurely, without warning. So when she posted footage of herself examining baby baths, full of wide smiles, on November 14, telling fans she was picking up ‘everything we needed for baba’, this was not the sad reality.
‘Baba’ was at that very moment being fed by tube and a tearful Emily was desperately expressing breast milk to facilitate the process. But 2,092 fans liked that post and wrote about their own excitement that the birth was imminent.
Ditto on November 29, when Emily posted about having chosen her pram (biscuit coloured; goes with everything, she trilled).
Not as it seemed. On that day, the colour of the pram would probably have been the absolute last thing on her mind.
It’s extraordinary really to look at her Instagram account now, aware of the disconnect between what was being played out here, and the reality.
Never has Instagram – or the role of the influencer, dependent on delivering pre-agreed content – felt so at odds.
The overriding feeling for Emily’s position, though, is sympathy.
All carefully curated planning had gone out the window, leaving this new mum with a terrible dilemma: should she go public about what had happened and put a carefully-worded message on social media, effectively asking fans to keep her family in their thoughts, or even to pray for them? Tearful today even recalling that time, she tells me she simply couldn’t face that.
‘I could have announced her arrival, but then I’d have had people saying “congratulations”, meaning I’d have to say: “Hold the congratulations for now.” ’
Once she had confirmed to the world that baby Eva had arrived, her fans would have expected regular health updates, too.
‘With everything we were dealing with at the time – all the machines, the blood tests, even the brain scans – I just wasn’t in a place where I could do that,’ she says.
‘I could barely think. And at the back of my mind, I kept thinking: “What if…”’
It is not a part of the job description many influencers think about when they start sharing every cough and spit of their lives.
It certainly put Emily in an impossible position. This is a young woman who first started living her adult life in the glare of the public gaze back in 2016 when she joined the cast of Made In Chelsea. Only now can she reveal the brutal reality of those 52 days sitting by her baby’s side in a paediatric special care unit, with little Eva hooked up to machines and fed by a tube. She tells me she was barely able to breathe herself, such was the terror that comes with having a premature baby.
‘I was being hospital mum for most of the time, but leaving to go and film content and unbox things,’ says Emily
‘I hated it. It felt fake, putting stuff on social media, because no one had a clue what was really going on’
Emily gave updates about shopping for Eva while her baby lay in intensive care
‘The whole thing feels like an out-of-body experience now,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t even think of how to address it on social media…’
Up to a point, she defends the charade. ‘But at the same time, I was having to work, to film content. I am self-employed. I was contracted to certain brands, so I was being hospital mum for most of the time, but leaving to go and film content and unbox things.
‘I felt I was leading a double life. I hated it. It felt fake, putting stuff on social media, because no one had a clue what was really going on.’
She clearly feels a little silly now, sharing the details of how all the orchestrated plans for an Insta-friendly birth – which seem so trivial and flippant now – went out the window.
‘What I’ve learned from this is that you can’t plan anything to do with babies,’ she says, managing a laugh. ‘Eva was supposed to arrive on January 16. I’d planned a C-section for that day. My hospital offers the choice and I’d said I wanted a C-section.
‘It was a planning thing. I’d know the date in advance, and while the recovery would be bad, it would be over in 40 minutes. I could mentally prepare.’
She’d gone further than mentally preparing the baby shower, too. It was fully sorted.
‘The baby shower was supposed to happen on December 1. The venue was booked. The balloons were ordered. All the gift bags for guests had even been made up.
‘There was makeup in them, beauty products, candles. I remember thinking: “We will have the baby shower, I’ll put some content from that up.” Then in January I’d be able to clear the decks and have some time off, in the baby bubble.’ Well, no. She’d barely made it into November when Emily had what she describes as ‘a small bleed’. She and her partner Jordan immediately went to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital – by chance their local hospital, but also one where some of the tiniest premature babies in the country are transferred to be treated.
She was kept in for 24 hours and monitored, but all seemed fine ‘and there were no contractions’, so she was happy to be discharged.
That night, however, the pains started. ‘I thought it was backache and I did manage to get some sleep so it never occurred to me that I was in labour. In the films, women in labour are always screaming. I didn’t think you could sleep through it.’
The pain intensified and when she returned to the hospital, examinations revealed that she was ‘three centimetres dilated and going into pre-term birth’.
Then it was panic stations – at least for Emily, if not the staff.
‘I said: “She can’t come out. She’s too small!” But the midwife assured me that 29 weeks was a decent gestational age.
‘It all happened so quickly that I didn’t have time even to call my mum. The midwife said to me: “So have you been to your antenatal classes?” I said, “I haven’t even had a baby shower.” I hadn’t done any of the breathing, nothing. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but she showed me and I just did it.
‘There was no time for pain relief or anything. I think I was in labour for three hours. It was painful, but it was short.’
Her distress was high, though. ‘I didn’t know if she was even going to come out alive,’ she recalls.
Eva’s lungs may not have been fully formed, but the cry she managed at birth was reassuringly loud.
She weighed just under 3lbs – a good weight, actually, for that gestational period – but terrifyingly tiny to Emily.
‘She fitted in the palm of my hand,’ she says, cupping her free hand to show me.
‘I got to hold her for a short time. They did the delayed cord clamping which is normal with premature births and they’d warned me in advance that when she came out they’d have to put her in a plastic bag, which wouldn’t look nice but it would keep her warm. They put her on me, just for a few minutes, but I was able to have that time. Then they wheeled her away in the incubator to the neonatal intensive care unit [NICU].’
So began the most difficult journey of Emily’s life. ‘Even talking about it now, I remember feeling: “Is this real? Am I dreaming?” There was a sense of being robbed of that whole birth experience I’d planned, but over it all was just this sense of relief.
‘She is breathing. She is alive. Nothing else matters.’
Emily’s mum Rachel has accompanied her to our interview today, delighted to be ‘babysitter-in-chief’. They both shake their heads remembering the hellish early weeks as ‘home’ became the NICU.
Although Emily herself was discharged within a couple of days and would sleep at home for two months, every day she would troop back into the unit to sit by Eva’s side. Jordan would join her when he could, often trying to run his business from the hospital or the café opposite it. ‘He was my rock,’ she says.
Yes, there were smaller, and much more ill, babies in that unit, but ‘in a way that made it worse’, says Emily, recalling the hugeness of the machines compared to the tininess of the babies.
‘It’s a very scary place to be when you aren’t used to it. Noisy too, with all the machines. But you very quickly become dependent on the machines. Your life becomes about sitting watching her heartbeat and oxygen levels. The machine screams at you if anything drops. I lived on my nerves for weeks.’
She doesn’t want to suggest that Eva’s life was at risk, but at the same time ‘they [the medical staff] can’t promise anything’.
‘It’s a journey, in the NICU. It’s a rollercoaster really. There are good days and bad, good weeks and bad, and there are always things to worry about – infections going around, blood results coming back funny.
‘There were brain scans to see how she was doing, which always meant a lot of anxiety.’
She knows all the jargon now, explaining medical terms like ‘bradycardia’ and ‘apnea’. The latter was ‘one of the scariest things we had to deal with’.
‘It’s when premature babies just forget to breathe. It’s quite normal, and you just have to stimulate them to wake them up again, but when it happens it’s just terrifying and sickening. The nurses don’t panic though. They are the most incredible people, doing the most amazing job.
‘They do 12-hour shifts and they are so, so kind. They weren’t just looking after Eva. They were looking after me, too.’
Thanks to that expert care, Eva made it. The latest Made In Chelsea baby was allowed to go home on Boxing Day, ‘which made it the best Christmas ever’.
Emily gazes at her today as if she can’t quite believe what has happened. ‘She should really only have been coming into the world last week,’ she points out.
And the name Eva? ‘We’d been thinking about it before, but when she arrived we were looking at the name again and read that it means “life”. So we knew it was perfect.’
Eva made her Instagram debut last week – Emily finally feeling comfortable enough to be honest. Normal ‘glossy’ service has been resumed, although I suspect there will be a flurry of posts about appreciating the NHS, and what angels nurses are.
What happened to the gift bags that had been filled for the baby shower? ‘We handed them round to all the nurses in the NICU unit on Christmas Day,’ says Emily. ‘We wouldn’t be celebrating anything without them.’
