Wind of change

My wife is now over seven months pregnant. Even my own forgetfulness is now helpless in the face of the overwhelming evidence of impending baby. The bump has, in recent weeks, dramatically increased its protrusion, into both the space immediately in front of its host, and our collective awareness. And my wife is forced to withstand increasing discomfort. She is now less mobile, and suffers from extreme fatigue and aching whenever she attempts to overcome this. She is relentlessly pounded from within by an ominously active daughter-to-be, who seems to have run out of space in there, and demonstrates this with sharp, angry elbows. She often chooses to do so throughout the night, which would hinder anybody's sleep.

None of these symptoms are unusual in the latter stages of pregnancy. Indeed, my sunny (and, potentially, slightly insensitive) outlook leads me to conclude that my wife's suffering is slightly less than while she was incubating our first daughter. Slightly.

One less common consequence of this gestation has been the terrifying magnification of my wife's sense of smell. Under normal circumstances she can give a police dog an olfactory run for its money, able as she is to identify any given scent at a hundred paces. I have often marvelled at this sensory skill, but now it has become tinged with an uneasy tension. For if I so much as break wind in the same continent, I know that I have caused in my beloved an unpleasant nausea, which will more-or-less ruin her day.

Let me be clear: my wife is very much the victim of this phenomenon; I am the wrongdoer. But with each such occurrence I cannot help but feel that I would have got away with it, if it wasn't for those pesky nostrils.

So I must learn to restrict the odours I create, which means restraining my liberal attitude to flatulence. Such are the myriad ways in which parenthood can change you.