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.

What to expect when you're reading about pregnancy

I've had a relapse on the bad back front, which essentially means I'm living the dream of being off work without feeling particularly ill. Only the dream doesn't really account for the fact that you can't go anywhere or do anything. For the first time in about fifteen years, I'm bored.

Sky Sports News can only hold my attention for a finite length of time. And the sports pages of the various newspaper websites have become more than sufficiently populated with my opinions on UEFA's incompetence. Even the late, great J.G. Ballard's compendium of short stories has diminishing appeal now that I'm over 500 pages in.

For these reasons, and also because my wife bought it a long time ago and has read it several times over and probably knows it off by heart and really feels that I should make some sort of effort, I read a bit of What to Expect When You're Expecting yesterday. It's the book that parents to be always read in films about parents to be. It's sold ten million copies. It's widely regarded as something of a bible on the subject. My outstanding impression - admittedly after reading only one chapter (the one about the third month of pregnancy) - is this:

It hedges its bets.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. The format is very clever - the book adopts a sympathetic, I'm-your-friend-not-your-doctor tone by covering each issue in the form of frequently asked questions. So pregnant women concerned about blockages can turn to the section headed "I've been terribly constipated for the past few weeks. Is this common?" to be comforted by subsequent assurances that yes, it's perfectly normal, try eating some fibre. This is reassuring and informative.

But immediately after this comes the section headed "All my pregnant friends seem to have problems with constipation. I don't; in fact, I've remained very regular. Is my system working right?" This is of course followed by assurances that yes, it's perfectly normal. Having read both sections, I'm left wondering why the issue needs to be mentioned at all if it's no problem either way. This seems to be the standard pattern.

I don't mean to write off a book which has successfully comforted and informed ten million expectant couples. I was just surprised to find that there was more emphasis on the comforting than on the informing.

Although I suppose that's what we all need really. Maybe that's why I'm contriving to write scathing reviews of internationally bestselling books: I'm not bored; I'm nervous. If only someone would write a book to comfort nervous parents to be.