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.