Not Much Happening Here

It is the day after Lynne's due date. The bag is packed for the hospital, we are ready to go, mentally prepared and so on, but nothing else is happening. Lynne has the odd twinge, she reckons that's her cervix is thinning, but nothing that could be described as a contraction. Right now she is asleep.

I don't know what to do with myself. Waiting is always the hardest part. The doctor told Lynne on Wednesday that he thought the baby would come before the weekend, but the weekend is here and there is no sign of it. What the hell does he know, he's only a GP. The only other useful thing that he said was to smuggle some gin and tonic into the hospital, because it would be nice to know it was there.

Our parents are phoning excitedly everyday. Lynne has finally convinced her mother that we do not need to put sterilizing fluid in the steam sterilizer. This has been a long running arguement, conducted mostly out of my hearing, but which Lynne assures me has been going on since we got the sterilizer 3 months ago. Lynne's mum said she was sorry, she is just worried.

Aren't we all. My dad rang up yesterday morning, purely to see if there was any news, but somehow we managed to get into a huge arguement about immigration. My dad is an old-school bigot and self-confessed Little Englander. We ended up yelling at each other and I told him what he was saying was pathetic. Just when I thought we were on the point of saying things to each other that there was no coming back from, he said, 'Well, thats the world set to rights then. Just phoning to see that the pair of you were alright. Bye.' Then he hung up, leaving me wrung out and wondering what had happened.

Maternity Leave Starts

Lynne doesn’t really know what to do any more; instead she looks confused until she starts to giggle. She had her last day at work last Friday, which is just as well because it seems that all her energy is being directed to her womb and starving her brain of blood, or oxygen, or whatever it is that the brain uses to think about stuff. This new vagueness isn’t annoying; it’s a nice change. It used to be that we only went to the supermarket together so that she could shout at me in front of other people, but now she follows me around as meek as a lamb and I decide what goes in the trolley. I decide! On the down side, I have to carry all the shopping home.

She hasn’t quite adjusted to not having to go to work yet. I let her sleep in and she says she feels guilty for being in bed at noon. She doesn’t get up though, so I suspect its all talk. I say she needs plenty of rest to cook up the baby.

She is going to the doctor’s every two weeks, but now the hospital want to see her every two weeks as well. It alternates, like the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games. This seemed an important new development, so I went along too. We were at the Queen Mum’s at 9am, quite a feat to be out of bed so early when you’ve been unemployed for as long as I have, and we saw a tiny, almost inaudible doctor from Manchester. It’s her first day, we were her first patients, and she didn’t know where anything was. She takes Lynne’s blood pressure. She checks Lynne’s urine sample on the windowsill by the sink. She puts a device on Lynne’s belly that makes the baby’s heartbeat sound like overhearing Aphex Twin played too loud on someone else’s iPod. Everything is normal.

The doctor says something.
What was that?
She wants to know if we have discussed our birth plan with the community midwife. We tell her that we haven’t seen a community midwife yet. She doesn’t seem bothered by this.
This is normal too.

Ante Natal

Ante natal classes get a bit samey after a while. Each class is split into two parts, an hour with a midwife pushing dolls through plastic pelvises, and an hour with a physiotherapist who talks about breathing. We put ourselves down for the evening classes so that Lynne doesn’t have to take afternoons off work. They run from 6 to 8 on Tuesdays. The midwife keeps telling us that if we are coming straight from work we should bring sandwiches. The hospital provides horrible juice and custard creams. I haven’t seen custard creams for years. They probably buy them especially to fit in with the Queen Mum’s seventies idiom.

Don’t get me wrong; the Queen Mum’s is good. Everyone is nice and the place is clean. But the truth is that they are running it down. They were going to sell it, merge it with the Southern General, knock the building down and build flats, but then the bottom fell out of the economy. Now it just sits on Yorkhill, desperate for some love and attention. There are blue and brown walls and scuffed orange lino floors, single pane windows rattling in their peeling frames, dingy corridors lit by grainy yellow bulbs, cheap plastic seats worn white by years of arses. The ultrasound machine looks as out of its time as a spaceship in an Egyptian tomb. The place is a maze and it echoes as if it is already dead.

There is life on the maternity ward. At the fourth class we are taken on a tour of the wards. Everyone keeps telling us it’s hot in there, and they are right, it is hot. We queue up at a bright green antibacterial hand rub dispenser on the way in. Women in labour shuffled about in dressing gowns, hands on the small of their backs. A nurse smiles from behind a desk. We take turns to peer through a glass door a newborn baby, 45 minutes old, pink, tiny, sleeping. This is all starting to seem pretty real now.

Pain Is Coming

At the ante natal classes the main impression is that everyone is terrified. How much will it hurt? Will I be able to stand it? What’s going to happen to my body? It’s all right for me. The guys all just sit there, not saying anything. There’s nothing growing inside us, pushing our organs aside, softening our pelvises and altering our centre of gravity.

Pain relief. This is important. There are several methods from the full-on epidural through ‘gas and air’, down to simple controlled breathing. The midwife shows us a fuzzy video explaining it. I think the vertical hold on the telly has gone. Keith Chegwin is presenting the video, and it’s so old that he is still with Maggie Philbin in it. I know this because she’s in it too. They aren’t having the baby; they leer over some woman who is sweaty with labour, inhaling from a facemask. The expectant father has a fine moustache.

The upshot seems to be that if you don’t put ‘ I want an epidural’ down in your birth plan, you aren’t getting one. This is because they are such a pain in the arse to set up, what with a tube going into your spinal column and what-have-you, that if you leave it to the day to decide, then, by the time you’ve made up your mind it will be too late to put it in. They don’t say this of course. Epidurals are brutal anyway, and Lynne says she doesn’t want one. Well, that’s what she’s saying for now. Maybe I should write ‘no epidural’ in the birth plan, in pen just to make sure.

‘Gas and air’ is actually stuff called Entenox, which could more properly be called ‘gas and oxygen’ and seems good and harmless. You can also get a shot of morphine, which sounds good to me, but they are a bit nervous about this because it can make the baby come out all woozy. Moving away from the chemicals, a TENS machine works by putting an electric current through pads attached to your back. The hospital used to have some, but they lent them all out and nobody gave them back. We are going to get one from someone at Lynne’s work.

Still, all the girls still seem terrified. Looking around the other people at the class Lynne and I make up little stories about them, making guesses about their lives. The tall, glamourous girl in the good boots sits next to this big pudding with a shaved scalp and sloping forehead. Surely that’s just her friend...? No, look, they’ve both got wedding rings on. No way! The ginger girl next to the guy in the suit. They sit there grimly and later on I see them arguing in whispers beside the door. The next class, she’s there on her own. Oh-oh. The third class and he’s back again, wearing a t-shirt and jeans. They both look happier. See, it’s all there for you. It’s like a soap opera.

Slightly worrying, they keep talking about things we should say to the community midwife, but we haven’t seen one yet.

20 Week Scan

Tuesday 16 Jne 2009.

We have just been to the hospital for Lynne's 20 week scan. Like the previous scan, the screen was filled with vague grey blobs, while occassionally something recognisable would flash into view. The skull, with the faint butterfly of the brain inside it, a wee pair of legs, and what the nurses described as a 'beautiful spine'. I think thats the only time anyone is ever going to say a thing like that about your backbone, but it was good to see. Lynne said she thought it looked like a sardine, while I was reminded of the chicken-spine curries that old Indian woman used to bring into the shop for Sam.

But the upshot is that the Mark II is going to be a fully functioning human being, with the right number of hands and feet and everything. Hurray!

So thats it. We are halfway through the pregnancy and I still don't have a job. I'm not even worried about it any more, I've been through that and out the other side. It'll help if we are both there when the baby arrives. I don't think Lynne is that worried either, though she does spend her time buying maternity dresses off Ebay by the thousand. Maybe compulsive shopping is a symptom of inner trauma. It could be. In my limited experience of women I have noticed that their worries are a tree-like tangle of 'what ifs' branching off in infinite regress. Then again, maybe she just wants to look nice.

Family Planning

I quit my job in the middle of 2008 to try and do something better with my life. Then the bottom fell of the global economy. Who would have thought that would happen? I have applied for hundreds of jobs, most of the time not even getting a rejection letter, you know the story. I have done bits and pieces of work here and there, but nothing permanent has turned up, and increasingly I have been staring out of the window with a cup of cold coffee in front of me, and talking to myself as I do the housework.

It’s not all bad. Being unemployed is a lot like being on holiday, only a holiday where you never see anything new or have any money to do anything. We are not totally skint though, my wife Lynne has a good job and she is happy to have a househusband because she hates doing the dishes. However, I draw the line at dusting. Dusting is for girls.

We have talked for years about having a baby, but never really thought too much about how it would actually work. Lynne is really happy with her career and I used to work pretty long hours and most weekends, so we let the subject slide by. But after a few months of joblessness we thought, fuck it, if I was going to be in the house doing nothing anyway, I could bring up the baby.

There was no method, no scheduled couplings, calendar watching or maths involved. We are both in our early thirties (though Lynne tells people she is twenty-six), and pretty healthy (though I am struggling to quit smoking). Lynne was pregnant in no time. There was a miscarriage, which I don’t really want to go into. It happens more often than you think, one in three early pregnancies miscarry, but lets just say the difference between relief, disappointment and grief seems to be about a week and a half.

When Lynne was pregnant again, we kept it quiet until after the twenty week scan.