Week 7, Day 4 (Turncoats and turnarounds)

The Klingons say ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’. Now I believe I understand. Wayne and I used to play a game, “Reason Number (insert three digit random number) Not To Have Kids”. This was trotted out when we passed a hapless parent with a screaming tot in a supermarket, or saw young Skinheads in a cluster of stubble and assumed toughness, or any other reason that indicated that parenthood was far from a bed of roses.

How smug we were. How terribly secure in our superiority.

The most common reason to play the “Reason Number” game was when we would witness evidence of parenthood destroying your common sense. Look around – you see it all the time. Like the story Billy Connolly quoted in his “World Famous Tour of NZ” when a woman got far too close to a shark that was eating a dead whale (she actually took her son and stepped on to the whale’s back, pointed downwards and said “Look! See the shark?”), some people are truly stupid. Admittedly that’s an extreme example – no one would believe it if she hadn’t been caught on tape. We had absolutely no impirical evidence to suggest that parenthood killed braincells, we just assumed.

I can now prove that that assumption (in my case anyway) is proving correct.

The first indication was the week preceeding the “discovery” when I did a number of completely brain-dead things. Like pouring myself a glass of water, carefully adding lime juice, then taking the lime juice bottle into the lounge and going to put it away inside the fan (which, might I add, was going full force at the time). Or Wayne finding I’d stashed the butter in the cutlery drawer. Or putting shoes on the wrong feet. Naturally when we found out I was indeed up the duff, it made a kind of dumb sense. Wayne laughed his socks off, and I kind of laughed too but it brought me down to earth with a thump. Don’t get me wrong, I have always been capable of great ditzhood but the auto pilot was definitely malfunctioning in new and bizarre ways.

The pregnancy books do not warn you about that.

The other thing the books do not warn you about is the sudden and complete lack of verbal control exhibited by your partner. As I’m a bit clumsy with pregnancies, we agreed that we would keep it pretty much under wraps until the most significant danger period was past. Tell the parents, and almost no one else (exceptions obviously being health care professionals!)

Just keep Wayne away from a loud hailer, okay? He’s told every client he’s visited since then, plus a couple of mine, and some distant acquaintances. It’s easy to know who he’s told because the next time they encounter me, their eyes swivel straight down to my belly. Dead giveaway guys! If there was any doubt remaining, they ask in the most solicitous terms “And how ARE you today, dear?”

When he agrees it’s MY turn to tell someone, he forces me into sharing the news within nanoseconds of speaking to that person, not allowing me to tell in my own way in my own time. “We’ve got news!” he announces, grinning like a lunatic. “Tell them, Karl!” It’s a pretty dense individual who doesn’t almost immediately guess.

This, gentle readers, is the same guy who has renounced parenthood loud and strong to anyone in earshot, the whole time I’ve known him. “Kids!” he would shudder, “No thanks, you’d have to be mad. Horrible little buggers!”

In fact such was his obvious revulsion that when it was his turn to play Santa at the Riding Club’s annual Xmas fun day, he told me flat he’d resign from the club if we tried to strong arm him into it. He meant it too. (We found someone else).

But give the turncoat his due – he’s being a marvelous impending Dad. If I’m too ill or tired to make tea, he cheerfully jumps up and cooks whatever it is I feel I could keep down. He doesn’t get annoyed or impatient when I slope off for naps in the afternoon, and he isn’t being too much of a pain in the ass about my slow but determined efforts to give up smoking. (Down to 10 a day now in a bit of a holding pattern but while the morning sickness is this bad, I have no intentions of going much lower. Don’t give me grief – Mr Richard says that’s quite acceptable, so there! Naturally no nicotine is better than some, but better a calm woman than a mood-swingy addict in withdrawal, especially over the next six dangerous weeks).

Now if I could just get back a little more energy…