Some dates stay ingrained in the mind.
On Wednesday 20th September one year I had an antenatal appointment at the hospital. They told me they were not going to let me go all the way to full term because I was carrying a big first baby. They said I would go in on 7th October to be induced. I was OK about this as my baby was actually due on 13th October which I knew to be Margaret Thatcher's birthday. I did not want a child of mine to have anything in common with That Woman.
Then that afternoon I had an antenatal class. These are dreadful sessions in which one is patronised and poked and prodded by well meaning elderly health visitors, and in which one then has to perform absurd exercises for use in labour, which are sod all use when one is actually in labour, only they don't tell you that bit at the time. I was wearing white trousers.
With pregnancy comes guide books. They make quite hideous reading. As if reading about labour was not quite bad enough thank you ("I have got to do that???!!") one also learns that one is threatened with such undignified ailments as piles, thrush and incontinence. So when I was doing the 'pushing' exercise - in my white trousers -I was not entirely surprised, but nevertheless mortified, to realise I was leaking 'down below'. Oh bloody marvellous - I have developed incontinence. In public.
I got home and went for a lie down. Sod, sod and sod again. Still I leaked. An hour or so later I actually 'investigated' a bit more closely. After eight months of pregnancy I had mastered the act of collecting a sample of wee ( it is SO alright for men) - and did so now, only - humm - "What a funny colour wee you have Jane". I feared something was amiss and rang the hospital and they said I had better come in so they could check me out. I rang my husband who was working late and told him I had to go to hospital. "OK" he said, "What do you want me to do about it?" "I want you to bloody well get back here and take me." "Oh!" Anyway, we go to hospital, me wondering what I was going to do about cooking tea, and hoping we would get back in time for what was promised to be a particularly exciting episode of Brookside.
Cut to examination room.
"Whaddya mean I can't go home cos my waters have gone and I am going to have a baby in the next 24 hours??????"
I missed Brookside.
I hadn't bought so much as a toothbrush with me let alone anything for a baby - a nappy for example. It was the least prepared for anything I had ever been in my life. It had never ever occured to me my baby could come early. But come early he did. And although this story feels like it was only five minutes ago, as of tomorrow my first born child is legally old enough to drive. And that is SERIOUSLY scary.
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14 comments:
... and I thought my 15th anniversary last week was scary. We just are NOT old. I won't have it. I WILL NOT have it. I'm still young. I AM.
No crisis here.
I sympathise completeley JJ, nine months advance notice is never enough for me to organise anything either :-))though from hearing that story I think I'll just stick with a cat. Sorry to hear about brookside. I still miss my anna friel onmibus edition on a saturday afternoon.
I was watching University Challenge the other day and realised that I could be as many as 16 years older than the students on there!
But do I feel it? Of course not. Youthfulness is inside.
So, how big was the baby in the end?
My youngest was an unplanned birth, at home.
It still gives me the willies thinking about it now....
Old enough to drive? oh my.
Have you ever read Graham Chapman's autobiography? He was not only a member of the Monty Python troup, but a physician, and he had some very acrid things to say about the way women in labor were treated by the medical profession at that time. One of the funnier Python sketches from THE MEANING OF LIFE, in which a woman in labor is practically lost in an operating room filled with machinery ("Oh you ARE lucky! You have the machine that goes 'PING!') touches on his complaints.
Were you "too posh to push" or did you have a natural birth JJ?!!
Dare I ask a technical question? I saw a brief few seconds of some TV documentary the other day showing a lady giving birth - the brief few seconds were what it took to find the remote control 'Off' switch - and she appeared to be 'doing it' from a kneeling position! Is this usual? I know that with some native women, Ghurkha wives were fammous for it in the British Military Hospital in Singapore, give birth in the squatting position which always struck me as rather sensible. However, I had never heard of it being accomplished in the kneeling position before. To be fair, I must admit that my knowledge of lady's paraphernalia 'down there' has always been strictly limited, partly because I have never been that interested. I await your expert advice with baited breath.
How the years fly by... I mean, who would wear white trousers now? Just recently the FIFTH anniversary of the Twin Towers Tragedy. I mean - five years! No bloody way!
Oh my word! Was my belief that you'd already lost to Millwall a dream?? (I think it was 1.0)
I read on here and everything.
Brrrrr
Or have you played them in the cup or something?
Help!
Crisis - I happen to know that you are indeed young - you lucky lucky young person you.
Arthur, I liked the one who played Barry Grant myself.
Anxious, he was 8lbs 6ozs - large for three weeks early, but not as big as my other two who were both over 10lbs. Things I don't know how I did parts 1, 2 and 3.
Greavsie-
OH
MY
GOD!!!!!
Simon, I am undecided which is worse - bumping into your boss or missing Nirvana - but both truly terrible.
Joe - oh me!
The Moy, I haven't but it sounds like I need to. It sounds great!
Moo, I did it the old fashioned common way - god knows how!
David, I believe those mad hippy type women who favour natural birth to the extent of cooking up the placenta do advocate the kneeling position and no pain relief. Give me a nice lay down and hallucinagenic (spelling???)drugs any day.
YP, white trousers have been in and out a dozen times since those olden days.
Spunky - oh no - PLEASE don't tell me your dreams always come true? we haven't played them for years.
I wear white trousers but my daughter says they are a tad on the chav side. All that pain and torture and you give birth to something that talks to you like Trinny/susannah!! She's 23 and I still haven't forgiven her for the fact that she was born sucking her thumb. ouch!
Ouch Gill - she critises your clothes AND emerged into the world sucking her thumb - in fact -double ouch.
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