When we left you last time I had been trying to master some pregnancy based Kuma Satra moves for a reluctant wife while also sourcing a chemical suit so my weak stomach could handle nappy changing. I’m starting to run out of time for both of these as the drop date is fast approaching as evidenced by the start of our intensive ‘formal’ pre-birth education. Hello antenatal classes – all 10hrs worth of them.
The fact that the first class clashed with a work colleague’s Bucks Day at Randwick Races just added to the anticipation. Who would even dream of trading a detailed discussion around the thickness and stickiness of a baby’s first poo with a group of strangers in a hospital conference room with standing in the sun at Randwick with a group of 40 guys sipping beer and watching the fillies go by? I know where I’d want to be – sitting right in that hospital conference room holding my wife’s hand (yes she reads these before I send them) and suggesting to the class that ‘baby’s first poo’ sounds just like my efforts after a night on Bundy and Coke finished off with a 3am falafel from the Cronulla Mall kebab shop (well you’ve got to keep the class interesting)……
But the main outcome from the classes……. well basically I am still traumatised. I have never seen anything like it – the videos of childbirth we were shown appeared to be nothing short of horrific. No amount of sweet mood music, soft lighting, or slow motion images of friendly massages could disguise the reality of ladies in terrible pain trying to breathe their way through forcing a mucus covered midget out of their (former) ‘happy place’. While those of a religious persuasion happily marvel at the amazing design of the human body, to me the whole process of childbirth shows that to be a complete furphy. Either that or God was out on the cans at the time he was meant to be designing the baby exit mechanism. I can see him now, getting pressured by Moses to knock off work early and hit the pub, and just saying ‘ah stuff it, I’ll just assume it can fit out of there’ before heading to Jerusalem’s version of JD’s Niteclub for a night chasing virgins (I realise there are probably many Biblical inaccuracies in that last sentence but scripture has never been a strong point of mine. Plus no Biblical inaccuracy could be as great as me putting ‘JD’s Niteclub’ and ‘virgin’ in the same sentence).
And just to add to the horror of the birthing process, the videos we were shown were from the 70’s, so were from a faraway time before the advent of ‘lady-scaping’. We were exposed to such broad thickets of downstairs hair that until the camera panned out I thought we were watching a documentary speculating on the whereabouts of an injured runaway yeti. I would suggest a refinement to the 70’s birthing process would be to commence with either a whipper-snipper or some hedge trimmers. While giving birth looks hard enough, trying to force a child out through an incredibly thick garden hedge seems to add an unnecessary complication.
As we get closer to game day, it seems the hormones are starting to cause some extra emotional days. Krys seems a little less stable as well. All it takes these days is a small critique of the quality of Krys’ parallel parking to cause a tirade of abuse followed by some tears (her abuse, my tears). And Krys’ last day of work saw plenty of tears from her too – although I think a large part of that was the realisation that her adult interaction will fall largely on my inadequate shoulders for the next year or so.
The ever expansion of Krys’ belly is also starting to cause some issues for her in the exercise stakes – her one piece swimming costume which used to be a comfortable and modest fit now resembles a more risqué version of what Pamela Anderson used to wear in Baywatch. Thankfully Krys’ grooming techniques are not in parallel with the ladies in the birth videos or the extreme high cut of the suit may convince the children in the pool that an overly hairy chipmunk was trying to escape from her swimming costume to chase them into the shallow end.
But the main issue we are working through over the next week or so is pain relief during childbirth. What we have found as we go through our ‘education’ is that the birthing process seems to focus on what is ‘natural’ under the guise of ‘women have been doing this for thousands of years’. This natural push seems to include a degree of resistance to planned pain relief, and instead an attitude of embracing the pain and seeing if you can get through it. I don’t really understand it – I’m sure if I came back from a shoulder operation with the claim ‘all I did for the pain was rotate on a fitball, take warm showers and listen to a tape of ‘sounds of the forest” people would look at me like I was an idiot (a look I am familiar with), not a hero. I thought I had Krys over the line for a planned epidural until she was shown the size of the epidural needle in class. My comforting words that it wasn’t a prick much bigger than the one that put the baby in there in the first place was met with a disappointed sigh rather than a smile of acknowledgement. If our pain relief is going to rely in part on my massage ability then I better get some new moves. I hardly think my current massage technique of a couple of out-of-time token shoulder rubs before I reach around to grope at her breasts is really going to be appropriate under a childbirth setting.
I’ve struggled putting a cot together, and feel like I’ve been vilified for my attitude to circumcision, but more on that later.
Trent, Krystal and Millie.
smallthoughts 