I feel the first beads of sweat start to form on my upper lip. The air I try to breath feels so thick I start to gasp, and feel light headed as I struggle to get enough into my lungs. And then my heart starts…. thump thump, thump thump, thump thump…. it gets ever quicker and louder until it is the only sound I can hear, completely filling my ears. ‘Be calm’ I tell myself, knowing that to panic would mean I may never get out of here. But it isn’t easy – this place is terrifying – I am trapped and can see no way out. I slump against the wall and cover my face, accepting my fate but not wanting to see it coming. Then I feel it – a foot jabbing me sharply in the ribs. I squint through my hands, and make out the outline of Krys, standing with a defiant hand on her hip and staring down at me, a mix of disappointment and disdain on her face. ‘Get up you fool’ she barks. ‘Baby Kingdom on a Thursday night is not that scary and you need to help me pick a pram’.
So that’s where we find ourselves. Buried in a labyrinth of baby products searching for that key staple of Babydom – a pram. And who would have thought the concept of a basket on 4 wheels would have reached such a mind bending degree of complexity. 1 or 2 kids? 3 wheels or 4? Basket forward or back? Cup holder? Key clip? Rain cover? Adjustable handle?….. I was waiting for the lady to ask whether we wanted the ability for the pram to fly itself home solo, ET style. I can now see why NASA had to scale back their space exploration program; all of their key engineers had been seconded to the incredibly critical task of constructing a baby carrier that can handle the rigours of cobblestones while carrying a full load of groceries and not spill a drop of a soy latte. And all this within a price range that a kidney plus 3 months on a street corner could just cover (I am calculating my street corner earnings at $5 a pop and limited client numbers. I can’t imagine that demand for me would be very high, plus I’d have to finish by 10.30pm as I get tired after dark).
But we got there in the end and selected a ‘Mountain Buggy’. Actually to be more accurate, Krys did. I had proven to be even more useless than normal due to a ‘Master Plan’ going horribly wrong. I had been apprehensive about the pending shopping epic so had snuck downstairs to a work function before we left to have a couple of wines to ‘take the edge off’. But all that achieved was to take the edge off the part of my brain capable of following the combination of button pushes, handle swings and section clicks required to effectively operate the assortment of prams we were demonstrated. So when Krys turned to me and said ‘in terms of operating, I like the Mountain Buggy – do you’ all I could do was mumble a confused and tentative ‘yes’ while trying to remember where in the garage I left the occy staps that I’ll need as a work-around to hold our child securely in place.
Apart from pram shopping, recent weeks have also seen us start our first tentative steps around ‘birth planning’. Personally I thought I had already looked after my side of the event. I had decided I would be at Northies, with a Monte Cristo cigar on the left side of the table, a Glenfiddich scotch on the right, and my phone in the middle waiting for an SMS that would let me know that the baby had arrived. This would trigger 2 days of Shire based celebrations that would take in such glorious establishments as JD’s, Fusion, and of course the Vinyl Room. On the 3rd day I would wander into the hospital to help Krys gather her things and come home.
So it was a bit surprising to hear the stark difference in how Krys saw the event unfolding, and disappointing that she would not even consider trying to merge our varying plans together. It was obviously going to be difficult for me to hold her hand and mop her brow while simultanteously dancing drunkenly on a podium but if we set aside the back corner of The Vinyl Room dance floor as a ‘birthing station’ I think it could at least be partially achieved. And seeing a woman give birth while a man did ‘the worm’ beside her to a classic Meatloaf tune would not even make the Top 5 most unusual things I’ve seen in that place. But Krys made it pretty clear that my plan was just ridiculous in her eyes – she wouldn’t even hear me out regarding my contingency plan involving the back seat of the Shire Courtesy Bus if her labour didn’t beat 3am shutdown.
So we were back to square 1 with a starting point of the birth being in a ‘controlled environment’, I had to be sober, and Meatloaf was nowhere to be heard (although after seeing him perform in the Hunter Valley 2yrs ago I think the child birthing noises will be roughly similar anyway). And the issues we had to work through were whether the birth was caesarean or natural, with drugs or without, and whether I was going to stand at 1st slip or mid-off when the baby started to make an appearance. For this I thought I could only genuinely contribute if I could somehow place myself in her situation; to try and imagine feeling the intensity and duration of the pain and discomfort she was going to have to go through.
Thankfully I feel I did go through something similar about 18months ago when 2 days straight of aeroplane food on the back of a month of eating nothing but South American meat and drinking red wine had me so backed up I felt like I was carrying around a house brick in my abdomen. I would have given anything for the option of a drugged up caesarean to remove the blockage back then rather than the traumatic ‘natural birth’ I had to endure. So after regaling Krys with a long winded story about a constricted colon and a 1kg tub of Metamusil, I was encouraging to the point of pleading with her to try and avoid the trauma I suffered – she should hit the drugs hard and early, and have the baby come out of the ‘sunroof’. Again I think my story and input was politely noted but largely ignored…..
There have also been discussions around breast feeding, and pregnancy make-out sessions are throwing up some interesting hurdles, but I’ll leave that till another time.
Trent, Krystal and Zuzu
smallthoughts 