Monday, 22 February 2010

Trepidation

We're getting really close to the big day now. And - like on the morning of our wedding, when I woke up at 5 o'clock in the morning with diarrhoea - the tension is mounting. There's an almost tangible sense of excitement and trepidation in the air, the two of them battling for the honour of being our overriding collective emotion.

We've both been growing more impatient for a while now. Firstly because we're rather looking forward to seeing our daughter who, as a direct descendent of my favourite person and my wife's favourite person - decide for yourselves whether we are narcissists or a loving couple (it's the latter) - is bound to be worth meeting.

Secondly, my wife's adverse symptoms are piling up. The swelling is almost permanent, and affecting every extremity (by which I mean her hands and feet rather than anything untoward). Her SPD (extreme hip ache) is relentless in punishing her for any attempt to stand up for more than about five minutes a day. She has also developed carpal tunnel, which basically means her hands are constantly midway between numbness and the pins and needles which immediately follow numbness. And, as a result of our daughter being a typical girl and demanding a lot of space, and the consequent repositioning of my wife's stomach, acid indigestion is an almost constant foe.

All of which seems to get even worse at night, which means that sleep has been very hard to come by for my wife. And, despite her best efforts, my sweet dreams have also been disturbed. We keep telling ourselves with a kind of self-congratulatory irony that this is good practice for the inevitable sleepless nights to come. But a part of me thinks that it would be nice to get in as much slumber as possible now, to build up some sort of sleep credit, as it were. I'm not sure if it works like that, but I guess we'll never know.

Anyway, last night trumped all previous efforts. It seems that our daughter is making preparations to leave, and has made a move towards the exit. In real terms, this means acute lower backache for my wife, as well as various other symptoms which politeness prevents me from describing, but all of which can be grouped together under one general heading: labour pains.

Time and the cold light of day have revealed that they were not labour pains. The nice lady at the hospital has revealed (over the phone - we didn't actually go there) that they do, however, indicate that we can expect labour pains soon. That's not entirely accurate: they reveal that my wife can expect labour pains soon. Either way, the whole experience made it all seem very real and looming. And flippin' scary.

Also very exciting, of course. But trepidation is edging it at the moment.

Saturday, 6 February 2010

Don't panic.

Up until the last couple of weeks I've found the pregnancy/impending parenthood combo surprisingly ineffective in the face of my calm, dignified and frankly quite enviably self-assured persona. "Easy for you to say, man," reply, doubtlessly, any mothers or feminists reading. Probably all of the women, actually. And the more reasonable men.

And you're quite right. If there's one cliche which the experience thus far has confirmed - and I hope my musings have reflected this, even though I am fairly confident that they haven't - it's that it's all much easier for nearly-Dad than it is for nearly-Mum.

But so heavy now is the burden on my wife, that even my cracks are beginning to show, so to speak. The last week or so has seen her fluid content increase dramatically, resulting in hands, ankles and feet that look a little bit more like those of the humans in Wall-E than they used to. I'm allowed to use that comparison because my wife came up with it.

Also, her midwife this week revealed some minor anomalies in her protein levels. I'm still resistant to panic, but it seems that she is now only a nasty headache away from pre-eclampsia. For those who don't know, pre-eclampsia can lead to eclampsia, which can be as terminally serious as it gets. I should stress that everybody else is quite relaxed about this possibility, precisely because it is a very small one, but I found myself in the unusual position of being the one who allowed paranoia take hold of my sense of reason for a day or two.

I have now been convinced that your wife's midwife mentioning the name of a condition is not the same as your wife having the condition. Sensible serenity has been restored. But I think the doubt will linger in the corner, occasionally waving frantically in my peripheral vision, until our daughter is born and I can tell it that it is no longer needed, thank you.


Strangely, I was a bit disappointed at remaining much calmer than I would have expected when, this morning, my wife believes she had her first braxton hicks contraction (a false alarm contraction, basically). The first I knew of it was when she interrupted QI (which we had recorded the night before because you go to bed very early when your wife is 33 weeks pregnant) by saying "I think I just had a braxton hicks contraction" in the same tone of voice as she would usually use to tell me what she wanted for lunch, for example.

I suppose my calmness was a reflection of hers. But I'm quite retrospectively excited about it now. To my simple man-mind (a phrase which hopefully will get the feminists back on side), this represents the precursor to the beginning of the beginning of the end which immediately precedes the actual beginning. Which, when you think about it, is really very important.