On Babies

PLEASE READ CAREFULLY BEFORE GOING FURTHER:

What follows is mostly the On Writing Blog that I planned for this week.  Those of you who know me well and know what has happened this week may feel what follows is inappropriate.  Fair enough.  What follows is extremely personal. Writing it, and completing it the way I have, has been part of dealing with my own issues.  No doubt reading it will not be for everyone.

Firstly, please understand that most of the initial drafts of the post, except the Post Script, was written before this week.  Hence, the first portion is written in a very light-hearted manner. Some may find this somewhat tasteless.  But, like Steve Hindalong once said, “There’s something funny about a lot of sad things”.

Secondly, I did discuss this with my dear, precious wife.  When I asked her if she thought I should post it or keep it to myself she said yes I should.  When i asked why, she simply said “I like how you write”.  So perhaps it is part of both of our coping.

If you’re not sure whether or not to read on, do both yourself and I a favour - skip this week.  It’s OK.  Come back to the On Writing Blog next week.  I’ll try my best to make it worth your while.

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“Baby baby, I’m taken with the notion

To love you with the sweetest of devotion...

...And ever since the day you put my heart in motion

Baby I realize that there’s just no getting over you”

~ ‘Baby Baby’, by Amy Grant & Keith Thomas

from the Amy Grant album “Heart In Motion”, 1991

I had a day off one perfectly pleasant Monday in late March this year, and spent the early morning snuggled in bed as no pressing concerns demanded my attention.  My wife, my amazing WonderWoman, was up before me and emerged from the en suite bathroom with a warm grin and dancing eyes.  She had apparently just spent a few moments peeing on a little stick, whose double lines confirmed the news we had been hoping and praying for for some months:  She was carrying our first child.  I think those little sticks must be magic.

We had spent the best part of a year trying to conceive, and while the trying was quite an enjoyable experience, we had begun to wonder if it was ever going to happen for us.  We had gone so far as to procure a pathology request slip with which the agility and motility of my ‘little swimmers’ could be ascertained.  I was not actually present at the appointment with the doctor who provided the request, so I was unable to enquire as to the logistics of such a test.  Did one produce the ‘sample’ at the pathology office, or transport it from home?  After several mildly embarrassing phone calls  (several because the pathology company had recently moved premises and changed phone numbers, so it took multiple avenues of inquiry to track them down), I found out what I needed to know to organise the ‘sample’.  I procrastinated a bit, until that day the lines appeared on the magic stick, whereby the swimmers were saved from scrutiny and I was relieved.

No doubt you find your head filled with images you neither wanted nor knew you were to receive today.  I’ll move right along shall I?

The first priority we had was to work out when exactly our lives were to be turned upside down.  There was, I was told, a simple way of working out the approximate due date.  WonderWoman launched into what sounded like an overly complex algorithm of dates and calculations and I was quickly lost.  She came upon a date.

“Is that correct?” I asked, in a mild haze.

“I think so. Mostly” she replied.

Maybe it was the hour and the lingering sleep I had only recently emerged from, but surely, surely, something like giving birth, an activity that humans have been quietly attending to since humans first existed would be fairly well defined by now.

I tried working it out myself.  The start point is apparently the first day of the woman’s last period.  I was immediately stumped.  My understanding of human biology was sufficient enough to know that at this time, and likely the next fortnight, was clearly a period when you are definitively not pregnant.  When I ventured some thought to the idea of 40 weeks of pregnancy that woman experience, I also realised that this did not equate to the 9 months I had equally been led to believe was the appropriate gestation period.

I applied the relevant calculations and decided that our baby was due either this November, last November, Stardate 7412.6, or sometime in the late 1960’s. 

What I needed to do, I decided, was to consult the considered writing of experts, of studied and learned individuals who longed to pass on their hard earned knowledge to us. We had an appropriately weighty book on pregnancy and babies and suchlike on the bookshelf.  I turned to a page that described the various weeks of development of the foetus.  Under a heading entitled WEEK 5 (which I was told we were up to) it stated boldly “Your baby is now 3 weeks old”.

No help at all from the experts then.

We’ve been debating baby names for a while now, and we have not quite reached a consensus.  The names WonderWoman loves I’m only cool on.  The names I adore she simply can’t stand.  After protracted discussions, we have rejected the names Wednesday, Adelaide, Chardonnay, 99, Zeus, Mongo, Buster, Buddy, Geraldo, Maximillian, Blackbeard, Frodo, Tiberius, Cosmo, Luigi, Optimus Prime, Apple, Wall*E, Adolf, Willis, Fozzy, Darth, Captain America, and The Admiral.  Mind you, they are only rejected if it’s a girl.

In the meantime, while in utero, the baby has been given the name Jellybean.

It’s going to be a ride, no doubt. An exciting one, and I will not hesitate in regaling you with tales of nausea, doctor’s appointments, ill-fitting clothes, naming rights debates, and bloating.  I will bore you and you will pretend that what I am saying doesn’t fit into the category of ‘too much information’.  Exciting times!

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Post Script:

Many will already be aware that as of right now, this story, sadly, does not end well.

On Monday evening, 25th of April, my wife discovered some blood spots after going to the toilet.  We consulted a doctor late that night at an all-night bulk billing clinic that was open on due to a public holiday.  He ran some cursory tests and told us to visit our regular doctor as soon as we could to organise an ultrasound.  He smiled encouragingly as we left.  He said that it was not necessarily worst case scenario we were dreading, but it was best to be sure.  We went to our trusted GP shortly after and he organised the relevant scans.

A thoroughly professional and sympathetic sonographer, whose name I missed in the stressful anxiety of the day, confirmed what we feared.  We had lost our Jellybean.

God willing, WonderWoman and I will have another chance at parenthood soon.  I very much look forward to sharing with you when that time comes.