What do babies dream about?
NotHeidi is not always sleeping, but he gets his fair share. He has his ways and little by little you start to know his idiosyncracies. Some are fairly universal, he'll cry when he's got air needing to escape, the exit strategy appears to be immaterial in this regard. He cries in a slightly different way to alert anyone who is lactating in the immediate vicinity that he'd like to do business and... somewhat more unusually when he likes to do the other kind of business I find it is best to wait until he's had 3 audible movements unless you want to bear witness to something I assure you you do not. He'll spend the remaining non-sleeping hours curiously contemplating the world for long stretches as he exercises his fingers, arms legs and toes all at the same time in a transcendent dance that captures your entire attention and sucks the time straight out of the universe. It would surely become the next gym craze if you could somehow formalise the movements.
Finally he will sleep for long stretches, usually after a food coma has been induced and the burps taken care of. He will sleep in the bassinet at night and during the day he will variously use the baby bouncer/rocker or the chest of either parent. On the occasions he uses me as a mattress I note various levels of sleep including what I would assume his dream sleep. His eyes are too pudgy (and slightly gunky) when closed to really discern REM but he does the same thing that cats do as they sleep and dream which is to make weird face twitchy movements and periodic jittering of arms and legs.
So the question is... if he's dreaming, what's he dreaming about? His total life experience is less than 2 weeks. His life is a bewildering blur of boobs, people and having his undercarriage cleaned I shudder to think what kind of dream you might contrive from these limited experiences. He's met a few people, and when I say "met" I mean has been held, stroked, cooed at, smiled at and prodded by the kind of people we can afford to associate with. This includes random grannies who spontaneously burst into tears when looking at something so sweet and innocent and the man at Centrelink/Medicare who, when we revealed Centrelink was his first post-homecoming excursion, said "well young man, I hope you won't make a habit of coming here".
You might wonder why you would need a Medicare number when aged barely 1 week but rest assured that bureaucracy does not discriminate based on age. When we went to get his referral ultrasound to check on a condition discovered in-utero we struck 2 problems. One, his name was not on the referral slip because at the time he didn't have a name. Two, we were advised when making the appointment that unless he, not us, had a medicare number we would have to pay the full amount of the service.
To tackle the first problem the referral was re-issued by fax (finally I understand why this technology still exists). The second was a bit trickier. After an initial interchange upon our arrival I felt I might have burned all my bridges. Still, I managed to return when it came to pay and remain cordial enough for the receptionist to offer to look NotHeidi up on "the system". Lo, he was there with Medicare number that was shared for my future use and I did not have to pay $170. Sometimes things work out.
He's been shopping with us and did not pester us for chocolate, chips or soft drinks and on the checkout we had no need for the school sports dockets. I don't know which of those things are more evil but I hope it's not chocolate.
He has also partaken in the greatest of all Aussie pastimes, the Bunnings sausage sizzle. It was for the local Rotary club, they used hotdog buns, which I feel is not traditional, but they were fresh and the sausages were above average so I'd rate it a 7/10 sizzle. Side note - to get a 10/10 I have to really be on board with the charity in question, so a 7 is pretty good.
So if I had to construct a dream from that... maybe stuck in a Bunnings with shelf upon shelf of boobs while hungry for breast milk but unable to buy any because he doesn't have the right card all while being chased by a sonographer. Or maybe stuck in a car with your parents while boring 80's music is playing and all you can see is trees running away from you. As of last night he has the ultimate nightmare of seeing the Sydney FC ladies team losing the grand final. I tried to turn his bouncer away before full time... his football team will have plenty of opportunity to disappoint him in future.
Though am I coddling him by sparing him painful truths? Should I show him the matches from the 2008/09 season?
Sunday 18 February 2018
Sunday 11 February 2018
Coming home
Some words are absolute.
Either you are pregnant or you are not. You cannot be a little bit pregnant. Either something is real or it is not. You might have a nice argument about what "real" actually means and did just that in my first year at University but today things got more real.
We came home.
Hospital is never a nice place to visit, very few have tripadvisor ratings (although in checking this i came upon the UK's NHS site which appears to do just that) and if they did you might expect some sharp criticisms. "Food was average at best", "people kept walking into our room and jabbed me in places I'd rather not be jabbed", "the view was rubbish"... that sort of thing. Also you will go batshit bonkers insane staying in a small room with only some hallways to walk for exercise. However when you've just had a child, particularly when it was delivered by what was variously called the vaginal bypass or via the sunroof, there is something very reassuring by having a rotating shift of experienced staff advise and monitor you.
Even with the wealth of experience aiding you you can get a surprise because you are not told everything (eg did you know you get the shakes when colostrum gives way to milk production, we didn't but if I'd known I would have worked harder to contrive a milkshake joke out of it). Also you are sometimes faced with advise that doesn't exactly align with that of the practitioner on the previous shift. You're left to navigate that advice and pick and choose a path for yourself. But mostly there's always someone on hand to pick up the baby and have it go instantly silent when you've spent an hour trying every which way to settle him down, to deliver some formula, some pain relief or another tray of food that sounded a lot better on the menu than it looks in real life.
Then you go home. You fill out the paperwork, sign off that you're a responsible human in charge of someone else's life and you're on your merry way. Think of it as a slightly less complicated process then getting some Codeine from the Chemist before you needed a prescritption. We didn't exactly expect a lineup of nurses high-fiving you as you exit but if you think about it when you buy an iPhone on release day that's exactly what you get. For a phone. For humans... critically less enthusiasm. I fear that as a race we may have lost sight of what's important because while both are very similar only one will last more than a few years. You stare at them for hours on end, they interrupt you with calls when you're busy with something else and they both cost a bomb. We three left the hospital alone, down the corridor and into the lift unseen by so many eyes that until barely an hour before had known more about your toilet habits than anyone, ever, including yourself.
You then spend 10 minutes getting the capsule properly hooked up and speed off at 10km/h... in a 60km/h zone. You inherently feel you may be travelling too fast but you've seen too many dashcam videos to risk slowing any further. I bought a new carton of eggs the previous night and in retrospect I feel I might as well have been doing the Dakar rally in comparison to what was going on with a child in the back. Apparently this too is common.
On the bright side he slept through the entire trip home.
Then you get home and ... stop. There's nobody here, you've got to do it all yourself and it all just gets more real. Wife and I are a team, we will do it... we're not always convinced how and we largely keep those doubts to ourselves because it really helps to think the other person has it covered. It's the socially acceptable lie where we each know we're faking it but in the absence of any admission of that fact we are willing to deceive ourselves into believing we'll be fine for the common good.
Meanwhile the cats, much like when a new student is introduced into the classroom, quickly scrambled to claim their spots as theirs just so the new arrival doesn't get any funny ideas about that space in the bouncer or the bed or basically any spot in the house except for the laundry where the noisy machines live that really harsh their mellow. NotHeidi took it in good humour and continued to lie in the detachable capsule with his head at a comfortable right angle to the rest of his body. I mentally note that next time we should try to find something that wedges his head a little less comfortably into position.
Fortunately the rhythms of the hospital are somewhat replicable. Feeding, burping, sleeping and then we set about unstrapping NotHeidi and doing the same to him. There's beautiful moments captured on camera and shared with family and slowly rhythm of the day winds down and you ready yourself to start working through the riches of frozen bolognese that were handily prepared for this time where not much is available to prepare meals.
You notice that home is a far more quiet place than the hospital. There are no beeps, hallway conversations, doors opening and closing (this will no doubt bite us in the bum when NotHeidi becomes mobile) in short the tension you've built up over the past few days slowly cakes off and gives way to a sense of calm. Inside you fervently hope it rubs off on the little one.
As with most parents you are convinced he's very advanced. He can lift his head, he can push his body along the ground if he has something to brace his feet against and the eyes already appear to be taking in his surroundings. Quietly judging his new surroundings and after a look that says "This'll do... for now" he drifts back into sleep and you wonder how you will ever give him all that his potential deserves.
Either you are pregnant or you are not. You cannot be a little bit pregnant. Either something is real or it is not. You might have a nice argument about what "real" actually means and did just that in my first year at University but today things got more real.
We came home.
Hospital is never a nice place to visit, very few have tripadvisor ratings (although in checking this i came upon the UK's NHS site which appears to do just that) and if they did you might expect some sharp criticisms. "Food was average at best", "people kept walking into our room and jabbed me in places I'd rather not be jabbed", "the view was rubbish"... that sort of thing. Also you will go batshit bonkers insane staying in a small room with only some hallways to walk for exercise. However when you've just had a child, particularly when it was delivered by what was variously called the vaginal bypass or via the sunroof, there is something very reassuring by having a rotating shift of experienced staff advise and monitor you.
Even with the wealth of experience aiding you you can get a surprise because you are not told everything (eg did you know you get the shakes when colostrum gives way to milk production, we didn't but if I'd known I would have worked harder to contrive a milkshake joke out of it). Also you are sometimes faced with advise that doesn't exactly align with that of the practitioner on the previous shift. You're left to navigate that advice and pick and choose a path for yourself. But mostly there's always someone on hand to pick up the baby and have it go instantly silent when you've spent an hour trying every which way to settle him down, to deliver some formula, some pain relief or another tray of food that sounded a lot better on the menu than it looks in real life.
Then you go home. You fill out the paperwork, sign off that you're a responsible human in charge of someone else's life and you're on your merry way. Think of it as a slightly less complicated process then getting some Codeine from the Chemist before you needed a prescritption. We didn't exactly expect a lineup of nurses high-fiving you as you exit but if you think about it when you buy an iPhone on release day that's exactly what you get. For a phone. For humans... critically less enthusiasm. I fear that as a race we may have lost sight of what's important because while both are very similar only one will last more than a few years. You stare at them for hours on end, they interrupt you with calls when you're busy with something else and they both cost a bomb. We three left the hospital alone, down the corridor and into the lift unseen by so many eyes that until barely an hour before had known more about your toilet habits than anyone, ever, including yourself.
You then spend 10 minutes getting the capsule properly hooked up and speed off at 10km/h... in a 60km/h zone. You inherently feel you may be travelling too fast but you've seen too many dashcam videos to risk slowing any further. I bought a new carton of eggs the previous night and in retrospect I feel I might as well have been doing the Dakar rally in comparison to what was going on with a child in the back. Apparently this too is common.
On the bright side he slept through the entire trip home.
Then you get home and ... stop. There's nobody here, you've got to do it all yourself and it all just gets more real. Wife and I are a team, we will do it... we're not always convinced how and we largely keep those doubts to ourselves because it really helps to think the other person has it covered. It's the socially acceptable lie where we each know we're faking it but in the absence of any admission of that fact we are willing to deceive ourselves into believing we'll be fine for the common good.
Meanwhile the cats, much like when a new student is introduced into the classroom, quickly scrambled to claim their spots as theirs just so the new arrival doesn't get any funny ideas about that space in the bouncer or the bed or basically any spot in the house except for the laundry where the noisy machines live that really harsh their mellow. NotHeidi took it in good humour and continued to lie in the detachable capsule with his head at a comfortable right angle to the rest of his body. I mentally note that next time we should try to find something that wedges his head a little less comfortably into position.
Fortunately the rhythms of the hospital are somewhat replicable. Feeding, burping, sleeping and then we set about unstrapping NotHeidi and doing the same to him. There's beautiful moments captured on camera and shared with family and slowly rhythm of the day winds down and you ready yourself to start working through the riches of frozen bolognese that were handily prepared for this time where not much is available to prepare meals.
You notice that home is a far more quiet place than the hospital. There are no beeps, hallway conversations, doors opening and closing (this will no doubt bite us in the bum when NotHeidi becomes mobile) in short the tension you've built up over the past few days slowly cakes off and gives way to a sense of calm. Inside you fervently hope it rubs off on the little one.
As with most parents you are convinced he's very advanced. He can lift his head, he can push his body along the ground if he has something to brace his feet against and the eyes already appear to be taking in his surroundings. Quietly judging his new surroundings and after a look that says "This'll do... for now" he drifts back into sleep and you wonder how you will ever give him all that his potential deserves.
Friday 9 February 2018
NotHeidi's arrival
One of the most emphasised points the antenatal class (both the hospital one and the more woo-woo one) was not to listen to other people's birth stories. I think I understand why. So let me tell you about ours.
We planned to induce and when the hospital asked the obstetrician why she replied "Patient sick of being pregnant". The pregnancy had gone full term, it just wasn't looking like it was going to end. So we booked in, arrived and kicked it off with some synthetic hormones to simulate the process of labour. After a night of waiting the labour finally came and we started off with our carefully practised pain management breathing techniques, then started the massage, went with the water and then the gas. The nursing staff assured us that the gas isn't really considered a drug and given we managed to go several hours that was a pretty good effort. I say "we" but really I mean "her". At any rate whomever we were trying to impress would really have been.
Things escalated quickly from there. After making the request for the epidural the on duty nurse said something that I'm pretty sure would have meant the birth would have been a zero-sum change to the population. She suggested that perhaps it was too late to administer, we explicitly stated we wanted a window of opportunity to be communicated to us before there was no more epidural option.
Thankfully the midwife was a bit more understanding and the call went out to all the anaesthetists and administered some pethidine as a stop gap measure because the gap was widening faster than the divide between rich and poor. The call was answered remarkably quickly and much to mother-in-laws delight there was a handsome young man with a ready smile and the power to ease her daughters suffering at the door very quickly.
I like to think I am relatively self-confident and while I know I am very far from perfect I'm not particularly bothered by stronger, smarter or better looking men. Even in combination those qualities are still just nature's way of reminding you that there's always a new model coming and it has more horsepower, gets more mileage, is more reliable and generally nicer to drive. However if a man is all those things and on top of that can stick a needle into your wife's spine, feed a tube through and then wash fentanyl into it to make all the speaking-in-tongues-inducing pain go away while you're pathetically rubbing shoulders and incanting assurance statements... well I felt like less of a man at that moment.
On the bright side the wife had her back to him for most of the time.
I'd like to end the story here and say it was all smooth sailing from there on in. It wasn't.
While the pain was now eminently manageable and the contractions continuing on their merry way NotHeidi was not enjoying the ride and after an assessment by the obstetrician the call was made to go for the cesarean to prevent any further distress or complications. This was not part of the plan. I am infact now firmly convinced the making of a birth plan serves mainly as a means to have you research and understand the process, but not to affect it in any way. It's as if there is a midwife at the door as you enter who Z-snaps you as she says "you in my world now bi-atch" and proceeds to tear up your plan while unblinkingly staring at you, daring you to react.
In many ways the neck snapping speed at which the events hereafter unfolded were a blessing as overthinking the process would certainly just have served to raise anxiety levels for no real benefit. Turns out while an epidural takes away most of the pain it does nothing to remove fear.
So after 8pm in a theatre staffed by enough people to fill the other kind of theatre we listened to our wedding playlist as a doctor cut open my wife and took out a child. If that wasn't enough the doctor was standing on a footstool. There were people pushing on wifes stomach to make the baby pop out and finally the forceps came out to complete the task. It appears the parallels to his father include not just a passable resemblance but NotHeidi has the same forceps bruises almost half a century later.
The whole thing was quite a growing-up exercise. I survived my squeamishness, and I have to say I needed to. I didn't look over the curtain but there was ample blood on the floor and the gowns that made me wonder if, infact, this was Rosemary's baby. However I'm not quite rid of the juvenile in me yet as I looked at my son and may or may not have said out loud "his junk is bigger than mine!".
However I am glossing over the most powerful part. That is the moment the baby is alive and breathing of his own accord and shown to you and you hold him. Made of the very essence of yourself and the person you love and imbued with life, yours to pass on your wisdom and foibles but also a stranger you will spend the next few years meeting. The moment you join the most inner workings of nature itself and replicate and, hopefully, improve the human race. You feel utterly insignificant and at the same time inconquerably powerful. I can make my own people.
Before you know it everyone files out of the room, surgical masks are removed, colleagues quiz each other on plans for the rest of the night and you've forgotten to pass on the message from the retired anaesthetist you met while getting changed as he tells you girls destroy your brain and boys destroy your house. He has 3 girls, so I guess he has no need for alcohol... and a nice house to not keep it in.
Wife and I spend just under an hour in the eerily dark and empty recovery ward making sure she doesn't suddenly explode and that NotHeidi has recovered from his rude entrance to the world. The wife is parched and downs ice water like it's a race to save the oceans. We eventually return, spent, to the waiting grandmothers who have endured a too-long day to be a part of the process but sadly missed out on the money moment. There's a lot of love in the room but there is very little energy in the tank. The goodbyes said the machine swings into action and observation checks and weighings and immunisations all replace one another in turn until finally we get our first chance at sleep well into the small hours of the new day.
Wife has a bed she is confined to until at least the next morning. I get a recliner that does not live up to its name and endure the most uncomfortable nights sleep I've had since I slept on a table by an open window after a day of 46C in a house with no air conditioning.
All in all the process of becoming a father has its benefits and drawbacks, it's not for everyone and I was convinced for many years it was also not for me. Now comes the hard part... because as the coffee mug I once gifted to a man who proved the point said
"Any man can become a father, it takes someone special to be a Dad"
We planned to induce and when the hospital asked the obstetrician why she replied "Patient sick of being pregnant". The pregnancy had gone full term, it just wasn't looking like it was going to end. So we booked in, arrived and kicked it off with some synthetic hormones to simulate the process of labour. After a night of waiting the labour finally came and we started off with our carefully practised pain management breathing techniques, then started the massage, went with the water and then the gas. The nursing staff assured us that the gas isn't really considered a drug and given we managed to go several hours that was a pretty good effort. I say "we" but really I mean "her". At any rate whomever we were trying to impress would really have been.
Things escalated quickly from there. After making the request for the epidural the on duty nurse said something that I'm pretty sure would have meant the birth would have been a zero-sum change to the population. She suggested that perhaps it was too late to administer, we explicitly stated we wanted a window of opportunity to be communicated to us before there was no more epidural option.
Thankfully the midwife was a bit more understanding and the call went out to all the anaesthetists and administered some pethidine as a stop gap measure because the gap was widening faster than the divide between rich and poor. The call was answered remarkably quickly and much to mother-in-laws delight there was a handsome young man with a ready smile and the power to ease her daughters suffering at the door very quickly.
I like to think I am relatively self-confident and while I know I am very far from perfect I'm not particularly bothered by stronger, smarter or better looking men. Even in combination those qualities are still just nature's way of reminding you that there's always a new model coming and it has more horsepower, gets more mileage, is more reliable and generally nicer to drive. However if a man is all those things and on top of that can stick a needle into your wife's spine, feed a tube through and then wash fentanyl into it to make all the speaking-in-tongues-inducing pain go away while you're pathetically rubbing shoulders and incanting assurance statements... well I felt like less of a man at that moment.
On the bright side the wife had her back to him for most of the time.
I'd like to end the story here and say it was all smooth sailing from there on in. It wasn't.
While the pain was now eminently manageable and the contractions continuing on their merry way NotHeidi was not enjoying the ride and after an assessment by the obstetrician the call was made to go for the cesarean to prevent any further distress or complications. This was not part of the plan. I am infact now firmly convinced the making of a birth plan serves mainly as a means to have you research and understand the process, but not to affect it in any way. It's as if there is a midwife at the door as you enter who Z-snaps you as she says "you in my world now bi-atch" and proceeds to tear up your plan while unblinkingly staring at you, daring you to react.
In many ways the neck snapping speed at which the events hereafter unfolded were a blessing as overthinking the process would certainly just have served to raise anxiety levels for no real benefit. Turns out while an epidural takes away most of the pain it does nothing to remove fear.
So after 8pm in a theatre staffed by enough people to fill the other kind of theatre we listened to our wedding playlist as a doctor cut open my wife and took out a child. If that wasn't enough the doctor was standing on a footstool. There were people pushing on wifes stomach to make the baby pop out and finally the forceps came out to complete the task. It appears the parallels to his father include not just a passable resemblance but NotHeidi has the same forceps bruises almost half a century later.
The whole thing was quite a growing-up exercise. I survived my squeamishness, and I have to say I needed to. I didn't look over the curtain but there was ample blood on the floor and the gowns that made me wonder if, infact, this was Rosemary's baby. However I'm not quite rid of the juvenile in me yet as I looked at my son and may or may not have said out loud "his junk is bigger than mine!".
However I am glossing over the most powerful part. That is the moment the baby is alive and breathing of his own accord and shown to you and you hold him. Made of the very essence of yourself and the person you love and imbued with life, yours to pass on your wisdom and foibles but also a stranger you will spend the next few years meeting. The moment you join the most inner workings of nature itself and replicate and, hopefully, improve the human race. You feel utterly insignificant and at the same time inconquerably powerful. I can make my own people.
Before you know it everyone files out of the room, surgical masks are removed, colleagues quiz each other on plans for the rest of the night and you've forgotten to pass on the message from the retired anaesthetist you met while getting changed as he tells you girls destroy your brain and boys destroy your house. He has 3 girls, so I guess he has no need for alcohol... and a nice house to not keep it in.
Wife and I spend just under an hour in the eerily dark and empty recovery ward making sure she doesn't suddenly explode and that NotHeidi has recovered from his rude entrance to the world. The wife is parched and downs ice water like it's a race to save the oceans. We eventually return, spent, to the waiting grandmothers who have endured a too-long day to be a part of the process but sadly missed out on the money moment. There's a lot of love in the room but there is very little energy in the tank. The goodbyes said the machine swings into action and observation checks and weighings and immunisations all replace one another in turn until finally we get our first chance at sleep well into the small hours of the new day.
Wife has a bed she is confined to until at least the next morning. I get a recliner that does not live up to its name and endure the most uncomfortable nights sleep I've had since I slept on a table by an open window after a day of 46C in a house with no air conditioning.
All in all the process of becoming a father has its benefits and drawbacks, it's not for everyone and I was convinced for many years it was also not for me. Now comes the hard part... because as the coffee mug I once gifted to a man who proved the point said
"Any man can become a father, it takes someone special to be a Dad"
I'm married to Kane
There's something deeply unsettling about watching your wife's stomach move because there is something inside it that's alive. Your mind inevitably snaps to that scene in Alien. I'm not proud of what I said the last time I saw this happen but I want you to understand that as a human I am constantly watching the world and wondering what might be, could be and should be. Right there and then seeing it move I wondered what it else it could do... in a moment that my inside voice should have kept for itself I idly wondered "Imagine if it started screaming while it was still inside you".
I'm not sure what damage I did to my stomach muscles from laughing but I'm sure she was reconsidering her choice of partner in between gulping mouthfuls of air. Nothing you do while pregnant is graceful anymore. To underline that point wife managed to fracture her pinkie toe in the final weeks of pregnancy. Partially because she can no longer see where her feet are and partially because the cats make you change direction when you're not ready to. The upshot was that she now sports a waddling limp where once there was a confident stride.
The changes in the body of a pregnant woman are numerous and as an interested observer I am sure I am missing the bulk of the changes. Relocating organs, a mix of hormones that even a gym junkie would baulk at, loss of grip, baby-brain and an ever expanding wardrobe to accommodate a similarly expanding body. If men had to bear children the human race would die out. I know it's not the first time those words have been strung together but it's true. But for a cameo role in the first few moments the level of participation is skewed heavily towards the pregnant party. When it comes to the bacon and egg roll the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. I am the chicken and the wife is... umm, no, that's not right. Where is the delete key?
The point is that for one reason or another the pregnant party is building a bond with the unborn child that will ultimately never be matched by the partner and when it comes to how we perceive the world, the value of a life and the importance of compassion and sacrifice women have it all over us men. We hate it when they remind us, and deny it's true... but it is.
Ask me what I'd give up for the continued existence of humans. Go on...
Sugar? Cinnamon? Ice-Cream?
Nope, hell no and you've met me, right?
How about Football, earning money or the internet?
Now you're just being silly.
I might... and I say "might" be persuaded to give up alcohol but even then I'm really just a very casual drinker and would instantly break that promise if someone were to put a beer in front of me.
Maybe the human race would die out even if men did willingly bear children because they'd all be stupid from the effects of alcohol. There'd be a planet of Bam Margera's which would certainly test the limits of anyone's will to live.
Not long to go now...
I'm not sure what damage I did to my stomach muscles from laughing but I'm sure she was reconsidering her choice of partner in between gulping mouthfuls of air. Nothing you do while pregnant is graceful anymore. To underline that point wife managed to fracture her pinkie toe in the final weeks of pregnancy. Partially because she can no longer see where her feet are and partially because the cats make you change direction when you're not ready to. The upshot was that she now sports a waddling limp where once there was a confident stride.
The changes in the body of a pregnant woman are numerous and as an interested observer I am sure I am missing the bulk of the changes. Relocating organs, a mix of hormones that even a gym junkie would baulk at, loss of grip, baby-brain and an ever expanding wardrobe to accommodate a similarly expanding body. If men had to bear children the human race would die out. I know it's not the first time those words have been strung together but it's true. But for a cameo role in the first few moments the level of participation is skewed heavily towards the pregnant party. When it comes to the bacon and egg roll the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. I am the chicken and the wife is... umm, no, that's not right. Where is the delete key?
The point is that for one reason or another the pregnant party is building a bond with the unborn child that will ultimately never be matched by the partner and when it comes to how we perceive the world, the value of a life and the importance of compassion and sacrifice women have it all over us men. We hate it when they remind us, and deny it's true... but it is.
Ask me what I'd give up for the continued existence of humans. Go on...
Sugar? Cinnamon? Ice-Cream?
Nope, hell no and you've met me, right?
How about Football, earning money or the internet?
Now you're just being silly.
I might... and I say "might" be persuaded to give up alcohol but even then I'm really just a very casual drinker and would instantly break that promise if someone were to put a beer in front of me.
Maybe the human race would die out even if men did willingly bear children because they'd all be stupid from the effects of alcohol. There'd be a planet of Bam Margera's which would certainly test the limits of anyone's will to live.
Not long to go now...
Friday 2 February 2018
Future Fears
NotHeidi is definitely not in a rush to appear in this world, which bothers his mother a little more every day. Nevermind that neither her calculated due date, let alone the Doctors, has yet passed there is a growing sense of restless expectation. This has made the day to day movements of everyday life a little more tense.
Should I have a shower now, should we go watch Star Wars, should we go out to eat... each question comes with the implicit rider of "What if we go into labour while we are doing this?". That kind of thinking definitely improves the chances of us doing nothing when labour does arrive but we both know that not everything changes at the first contraction and we could easily do whatever we pleased safe in the knowledge we have time to react. Of particular benefit is breaking waters into a movie theatre seat or a restaurant chair where, as terrible as this may sound, you don't have to clean it up. Anyway there will likely be much time before we actually depart to the hospital and get into the serious business of bringing a new person into the world.
The most stressful thing will be ensuring that those who need or want to be notified when the process begins are indeed notified. Neglecting to do so can be the start of decades of misgivings and emnity. I expect the Montagues and Capulets were close friends until one of them forgot to ask the other how their Christmas was.
The other fear stems mostly from me being myself. Among the plethora of pieces of advice coming my way was to ensure I not fall asleep while notHeidi was being born. It sounded odd until further probing revealed that this was exactly what happened to said advice giver. Given that the result of this labour was now a family man in his own right it seems clear that some actions are hard to live down.
At this juncture I am reminded of a joke that is not appropriate to retell here but missteps can be a minefield of consequence, particularly in a birthing suite.
Forewarned is forearmed and if you can learn from other people's mistakes instead of committing them yourself so much the better. I have learned to be a dab hand with eye shadow and makeup and painted some passable eyes onto my eyelids so that I won't have to use the old "I was just resting my eyes!" excuse.
On the other hand I may have to explain the unblinking stare I was giving to everyone in the room and assure the recipients it resulted neither from maniacal belligerence nor from grave suspicion.
Other pieces of advice include ensuring there's lots of water (both frozen and liquid) on hand for the process and to have some sugary snacks for energy boosts when needed. We've tried to combine these suggestions and bought a packet of zooper-doopers. The last time I had one I bought them off an enterprising pre-teen in Hunters Hill (if you wonder how the rich stay rich...here's a clue) on an ill-advised 7 Bridges Walk on a hot day. I found them refreshing and energising. Also I learnt something about opportunity cost because at $1 each I feel I might have been ripped off when I can have a pack of 24 for single digit multiples of that from a major supermarket chain. To be fair the young entrepreneur also had a pair of scissors on hand to facilitate consumption.
The most bizarre piece of advice in an array of suggestions that had already set the bar very high was to bring a can opener. Quizzed on why, the response was a knowing look accompanying the words "you'll see". It smelt distinctly of the kind of pranks played on young apprentices to go to the hardware store to buy a left handed screwdriver. Yet there's a small part of me that is intrigued enough to ponder the possible uses.
In all these, often unprompted, discussions about imminent fatherhood I also noticed two distinct points being made. Like the preceding paragraphs many are about the immediate future, the birth, the name, the trip to the hospital and the bloody mess of entrails and fluids I am determined to avert my gaze from. The other theme that emerges is from the other extreme. "Make sure he puts you in a good home" and "you'll be glad when he finally moves out". It is tempting to re-fashion the DISC assessment (or any of the other personality tests) and base it on your opinions, fears and presumptions about birth, parenthood and your general disposition towards can-openers.
When NotHeidi finally does arrive I have no doubt that many of the plans and preparations will be for nought in much the same way as the playing instructions for a football team are wiped by crossing the sideline as mentioned in the previous article. What I hope is that the process is unhindered by misfortune and misstep and if I ever find out why a can-opener might be useful I promise to share that with you.
PS. "NotHeidi" comes up in the spellcheck as "monotheist". Now I have a whole other lot of things to worry about.
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