I’m pregnant. The señor and I are expecting a baby in February 2010. This revelation came as if the solving of a puzzle, a single name to give the clutch of symptoms that had been worrying me for a few weeks: low-level nausea, bursts of irrational worry, tiredness that no amount of sleep seemed to allay. I had assumed that it was depression knocking at my door, so was pleased indeed to put a positive name to it all.
There’s a fair amount of work to do on the house, but no major renovations, of which we are pleased. The dogs sense something’s up and flank me in their best pack formation each time I get up and walk. Our friends with children of their own speak with a single message: enjoy your sleep while you can. I am taking this seriously, even as I acknowledge that I have no sense of what that great loss of rest and leisure will be like.
I have an obstetrician but no midwife as yet. To work through the telephone list of names the specialist has supplied is my current challenge. I’m not used to communicating with people whose primary presence isn’t online, but I accept this is good practice for the irrevocably material world that’s coming our way. With respect, gentle readers, I hope not to enter into too much of a discussion of the politics of child-bearing here, except, perhaps, in my usual essaying fashion.
Most of you will know that it was not until I met the señor that any plan of this kind entered my mind, but I am open now to the change in path our lives are taking. I would not do it without a partner so invested in everything about it, reading about vegetarian diets and coming to appointments with me and drawing up lists of things to do. This gives me hope that we will keep, not lose, ourselves in this experience, even as I enjoy, for now, the sense of biological fatalism, the feeling that some things, at least are decided.
Least and most familiar of all, that eight-weeks-old fetus, its future starred in so many ways and yet in others unwritten, waits in limbo in the before-life dark. The tail that first it grew now shrinks; the eyelids close over the no-eyes; its webbed hands touch together below its looming head. No bigger than a bean and not to my mind yet human, it holds our hope in the balance, this new potential, this child, maybe, to be.
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{ 56 comments… read them below or add one }
yay, I’m so freaking mooney over babies at the moment that this brings a tear to my eye.
I’m pleased you’re taking the sleep comment well, I always resented it, it isn’t like you can store all the extra sleep up and tap into it later.
My only advice (well, I have mountains, but my only advice for now) is to enjoy all the shallow aspects of pre-babyness. Look at little clothes, and buy them, and drape them over your belly, and buy a nightlight and a chair and sit in the baby’s room sometimes imagining what it will be like, and buy wee socks and all those good things.
Yay yay yay.
The señor isn’t quite carrying around a colour chart for room-painting, but he’s not far off. Your nightlight comment is prescient: one of the señor’s aunts gave us her children’s baby night light earlier this year, while the baby-to-be was still a twinkle in our respective eyes.
It is also possible that at some point a future baby will be trapped under an avalanche of booties and socks, only some of which will be contributed by me.
I must admit that rather than the urge to cross-question you on whether you planned on going about this process the correct way (whatever that is), my first thought when I heard the news was woo! but my second thought was what impact it would have on your wedding dress plans.
Online friends: irredeemably shallow so you don’t have to be.
It is a valid and important question, and one asked by many! With my variable endocrinology and modestly advancing age we decided time was of the essence and figured on the possibility of a shotgun wedding (variations on which have included the brideswomen carrying shotguns as they walk in).
Given that I am round of form I shall be pleased to sport a socially legitimate bump, and be complimented on my cheery rondure rather than having been appropriately lashed by corsetry.
Good plan, and you’ll probably enjoy the day more anyway if your ribcage isn’t being squeezed into some sort of nasty rib confit.
What lovely news. Congratulations! I am very, very pleased for you and the señor.
You will perhaps pick the bump out in some fetching braid?
Perhaps the braid could be a series of arrows pointing to the bump, for an extra touch of class?
The only advice I’ve ever given to expectant friends is “stop throwing away your surplus plastic bags right now”. It may not seem very profound or important at first, but trust me on this: you’ll thank me in due course.
i listened to this sterling bit of advice.
and it has saved me many, many wanderings around the house looking for somewhere to safely leave a pooey nappy.
It was given to me when we started breeding our dogs and proved true and valuable, so I can well imagine at least some of its applications for human pups.
Congratulations,
One thing to bear in mind amongst all the nay saying of those around you, in the most part parenthood isn’t fatal. The joys far outweigh the pain [for men at least].
As a father to seven of the not so little buggers [four biologically, three by proxy] I wouldn’t change a thing, not even getting up in the middle of the night to bring them to the breast, nor holding the bucket whilst the relive being 18.
Have fun with the process. Even at this periphery I feel you’ll do a grand job you and the señor.
Fish
Thank you! At the señor’s grandfather’s funeral last year, one of his aunts recounted her father administering just such a late-night, post-party rescue, of which nothing further was ever said.
I’m pretty much ignorant of such things, but I hope it all turns out to be fabulous!
I too am operating from a position of pretty-much ignorance, which I hope will protect me from the worst vestiges of public dis/approval.
The señor was considering which names might preclude the child being teased at school. My take was to go in the opposite direction and call the baby Gaylord Manlove. Or maybe Gaylord Manlove St Timothy, for extra something-or-other.
I like Albatross.
my first wife taught a boy called Orson Cart.
I’d always wanted to call my first born bilbo, other names not to get past the family police were willow, sable and amber.
Nothing you think is original now will be original when they’re grown. cf I called my third daughter India, whilst not at the levels of Tony and Garry, it’s profligate these days
Small was initially called Entwhistle. But she grew out of it. If you have a hot summer, swimming pools are a life-saver.
I can remember my parents saying they referred to me as Horatio before I was born. Typically for young-me, I was affronted that they would choose a nickname that denied any of the gravity of my own importance.
congrats!
Thank you! ‘Tis a tale of the unexpected.
Pure unalloyed Joy, cap J Joy.
The moments of euphoria are strange in that they feel reliable. Normally when I feel really excited I assume I’ve misunderstood the situation. (Although, by the looks of Emma’s comment below, I may have!)
From the unsolicited advice department: it feels really weird but meeting face-to-face with midwives before you engage them is the only way to find out if you ‘gel’. don’t be afraid to spend ages interviewing someone and then say “no thanks”. I found it helpful to ask potential midwives about their own births (if they have kids) – often this will tell you more about their philosophy than anything else.
Enjoy this time of potential and dreaming – it can be magical to spend a while suspended between what is and what will be.
I have had some further guidance on my magic list from my GP and am girding my loins for the interview process. I’m hopeful that midwives are so busy anyway they might be quite pleased to be turned down by a potential client.
The last time I gave someone baby advice I freaked David Haywood out so much he swore. Then they had Bob. So I’m just keeping my mouth shut now.
I will say this: pregnancy and childbirth are the times in which, when someone says “vagina”, everyone present no longer responds with giggling or a dreamy expression.
Oh, really? I thought the vagina vanished to be replaced by a birth canal. (No gondolieri, apparently.)
wonderful!
I am hoping that some scraps of puppy breeding will have been good practice, but we shall see.
If you ever need no advice whatsoever, think of me. I am delighted for all of you.
Thank you. Iron and calcium are all very well, but I can’t help but feel that in the months to come, what I’m really going to need to keep up is my intake of aesthetics and ethics.
congratulations!!
my only advice… is be prepared for waaaay too much advice.
and to prove i am a hyprocrite, book them into childcare NOW. i booked chef du plunge in when he was 15weeks in utero. we got childcare about 2 weeks ago.
seriously.
I hear you. Assuming smooth sailing into the second trimester, we will then be applying to the campus provider (at which, coincidentally, the señor’s sister is an employee).
‘We to three’ – nice
Thank you! In all things, as you know, I strive to be not-twee.
Congrats indeed- the grand stepping off into the unknown.
Hope all goes well, the midwives are willing and sensitive (the Chch homebirth midwives were pretty amazing) and before you blink it’s summer!
Thank you–the passing of time certainly seems more pacey, somehow.
I really really hope you have a girl. As then you can fulfill this barren woman’s fantasy of naming your daughter Chardonnay.
I campaigned hard with Martha, but ’twas not to be.
I will only choose Chardonnay if it has a hard “Ch”, as pronounced by Kath & Kim.
Well, I hope this doesn’t count as unwanted unsolicited advice but…don’t rush into buying a book called “Raising Vegetarian Children: a Guide to Good Health and Family Harmony” because it’s not all that good. Mr MTNW bought it when I was pg but we didn’t find it much use. You are welcome to our copy, if you’d like though. I can bring it along if we manage a spring meet up
This raises an interesting question, readers: for those of you who have been given family advice, what turned out to be not all that good more generally, and why?
Someone told me not to get a sangenic nappy bin but on the advice of someone else I got one and it was fantastic. I’ve no doubt environmentally it wasn’t the best thing to do but it was the best thing for me since I have a very good sense of smell and lingering nappy odours made me gag.
Other advice that wasn’t helpful? A lot of advice that wasn’t necessarily wrong but which just didn’t really mesh with my personality and way of coping with things or with the sort of baby my kid turned out to be. What I found was there was a really steep learning curve and an overwhelming amount of conflicting advice to digest but gradually by trial and error we found our own way.
I remember the guy on Irony Central put it quite well somewhere when he said if all of the parenting books and professional advice says one thing then that’s worth attending to but there’s a whole lot of other stuff which is really just somebodies opinion
http://www.ironycentral.com/babymain.html
No advice from this old granny! Just a big, fat Congrats and appreciation for your thoughtful appraisal of the situation you find yourself in – looking forward to more missives re the minnow.
Thank you! I am as I write this considering my next writerly move instead of preparing the course materials I need for this evening.
Minnow! what a wonderful nic-name! or name, be it Mini-me…..I want to spew forth advice till it overflows, but I will rein it in until it is called upon….I fear too much can be said too soon, and therefore none to remember me by, for later…. love you 3 , from me xxx
I have been writing so many powerpoint shows for lectures of late that I tend to think all advice should be delivered in powerpoint form! What do you reckon?
Alright, after yet another pregnancy announcement this morning, I caved and wrote down the closest I can come to advice.
http://ghetsuhm.livejournal.com/151693.html
This strikes me as both lyrical and truthful. The señor and I have been opining thusly against the hypothetical “‘em” quite a bit already.
“I get a bit wary because I know it’s Not Done to scare pregnant women, but at the same time, the relentless rosy positivity of pregnancy advice freaks me out a bit, because I suspect it makes some women feel like it’s THEIR fault when everything doesn’t go to plan, or they feel sad and tired and shitty when everybody is expecting them to be happy.”
I think you’re right when it comes to advice, but then there’s the literature, and a good chunk of it seems designed to scare the beejesus out of you via the cunning plan of mentioning all the things that could possibly go wrong during the course of a pregnancy (“now we enter the third trimester, and alien forces may be attacking our planet”). We quite liked Up the Duff because it balanced nicely the humour of the autobiographical retelling with the sometimes anxiogenic info which is yet needed.
I don’t mind too much being scared, to be honest. The small part of my mind that still remains detached is perhaps fatally interested in the discourses around childbirth and child-rearing. Anne Enright’s Making Babies spooked me fairly thoroughly, although I loved the essay on alien invasions.
I’ve known for a long time now the psychic cost of attempting to conform to expectations in most things, and was raised on my mother’s tales of how the Plunket nurse continually told her off for my failing to hit the various physical developmental marks, but later failed to pick up on my brother’s serious visual and neurological problems. I figure that moments of terror are a fair response to the moral and emotional gravity of what we’ve set in train. This baby deserves parents who care enough about it to freak the f*ck out.
Congratulations!
oh yeah and I second che on the whole childcare thing. Do it NOW.
Thank you. I don’t think I really realised until now just what massive competition for these services there is, a combination, I suppose, of a lack of supply and the baby blip?
I don’t care how much everyone says you shouldn’t give advice, I’m totally giving some, because I didn’t know these things with my first baby, and I wish I had:
Lanolin cream makes breastfeeding in the early days a whole lot easier (available from the supermarket).
Pigeon breastpads are the only ones to use.
Now I’ll shut it.
I am considering creating a separate page on this blog for the giving of child-bearing-and-rearing advice. It could include fictional advice as well, of a fake folklore kind. This would at least save my gentle readers the imagined spectacle of everything going horribly wrong before they tell me how to fix it (although I am not accusing you of that, Ms. Martha).
Also, if you eat your greens you’ll get one of these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt4UNYUSPD4