The One That Got Away

I’m very lucky. I don’t have a lot to be sad about. My life doesn’t tend to be filled with spectacular highs, but I take that, because it’s balanced with not having many of the terrible lows which so many other people seem to face.

But this post is about a time I was sad.

One of the first posts I ever wrote here was about finding out Mrs L was pregnant. It was a wonderful moment, an emotional moment.

Just a few weeks after that emotional moment, we had another one.

Mrs L was outside in the garden, while I was inside getting ready to go and play basketball. It was a pleasant, warm late summer evening and we were happy.

Then, Mrs L was walking through the house, very quickly, heading for the bathroom. I could see she wasn’t okay. This wasn’t a usual trip to the bathroom. The word I’d been fearing for the past six weeks was suddenly all I could think of.

Miscarriage.

I stopped getting ready and sat down, waiting to hear the bathroom door open again. Instead, I heard crying. Soft, persistent cries that seemed to offer nothing but confirmation of my fears. I ran up the stairs and found the bathroom door unlocked, I asked whether I could go in.

Sat, shaking, sobbing was my beautiful wife, face contorted into an expression of pure anguish. I’ve never seen a face so honest. I hope I never have to again. She had bled heavily. She still was in fact. She was apologising through the sobs, already trying to take the blame for something she could never have done anything to stop.

We sat there and hugged each other tight for what felt like a long time. I had never had occasion to be shellshocked before, but that’s how I felt. No tears for me. No tears. Just a feeling of loss, a feeling of emptiness. I tried to imagine how much more powerful those feelings must be for my wife, but I know I never could.

It was Mrs L who pulled herself together first. Began to take the first steps toward getting on with what we had to assume was a pregnancy free life. It was out of hours, so a call to NHS Direct got us redirected to an out of hours doctor. After hearing the events that doctor said that, yes, it was a miscarriage and to expect bleeding for a while and that would be that.

I’m as certain as I’ve ever been of anything that a man’s experience of miscarriage is nothing compared to a woman’s. Nevertheless, I felt completely numb. For weeks I wasn’t bothered about anything else. All I could think of was the little baby that no longer was. My little boy or little girl, gone before I’d ever had the chance to meet them.

We hadn’t even told anyone we were expecting a baby, deciding to wait until the twelve week milestone. All that meant to me was that I couldn’t talk to anyone about the miscarriage. That was hard. I’m a sharer where emotions are concerned, and I had no-one I felt it was okay to talk to about it, aside from the other person who already knew.

Another month passed and Mrs L was still experiencing all of the symptoms of a first trimester pregnancy. It seemed to us a cruel reminder of what could have been.

Actually it was because, whatever had happened, there was still a foetus in there. Our little Creature-to-be trying to tell us that not everything had been lost on that horrible day. A positive pregnancy test and a hastily arranged scan confirmed it.

We were told that it could have just been a bleed from the placenta, but there was a chance it had been one of a set of twins we lost.

I’m not sure why I’m so sure it was the latter. I am though.

I think about it a lot.

I couldn’t be more grateful for the beautiful baby boy we have now, but I will never ever forget the one who got away.

My thoughts go out to anyone who has ever experienced miscarriage. Every baby is a miracle, whether they make it or not.

Thanks for reading.

Uncomfortable

It's been a while coming.  Nearly thirty-nine weeks in fact.  She's done well, but now she's just about done.  It's just too much.  Too much weight.  Too much volume.  Too much circumference.  The bump is finally defeating my wife.  Wobbling around like some 50s b-movie monster attached to the front of her, the bump has begun to take its toll.

I've been amazed through this whole nine month process that there hasn't been more in the way of aches and pains.  The books all say a woman should expect to start hurting far earlier than one week prior to the due date, and I'm sure most do.  Mrs L has been toughing it out though, that or extremely lucky.

But not any more.

Every movement is accompanied with a breathless sigh.  A trip to the shops is akin to a major expedition to some hitherto undiscovered corner of the globe.  Even resting is no longer a rest, rendered unpleasant by the sheer size of that baby oven.

No combination of pillows, cushions, duvets and assorted other ephemera yields the comfort my wife so desperately craves.  Her anatomy is at the mercy of the baby, stomach squished up inside her so that she's never hungry, her hips, knees and ankles working under conditions that have their union rep threatening strike action, her feet swelling into caricatures of their normal selves.

Yet through all of this, there is hardly anything by way of complaint (there's certainly a lot less whinging than would be happening if I was carrying all that around).  Not once have the words "I just want this baby out of me" passed her lips.

She's bloody amazing, and I, in turn, am bloody amazed.

Names

I heard a story recently about names.  Part of me hopes it isn't true.  It went like this: a couple has three children.  The oldest is called Coco, the middle child Princess.  When the third child is born they register him with the name Dikenwe.  The registrar is a little surprised, so asks the parents how they decided on it:

"We named all our children after perfumes we like, Coco by Chanel, Princess by Vera Wang and now Dikenwe, you know, because we couldn't call him DKNY"

Oh dear.  What a terrible abuse of power.  Thankfully, he'll only have to live with it until he's sixteen, when he can change it via Deed Poll.  Or maybe he'll love it, it's certainly different.

But even without the benefit of having a parent who is clearly mental, many people end up with names they're not keen on.  We're keen to avoid that, which is why we've been having the name conversation now for nearly twenty weeks.  Because we want to like the name we give our baby.  We also want our baby to like his name, once he's old enough to have an opinion on it.

Meet my son, his name is Sexy.

It's difficult though, isn't it?  Without realising it, I've been going through my life marking names up with little tags: John is too common.  Luke, Leo and Liam would all be alliterative with the surname.  Isaac is already taken by a close member of family.  I was bullied at school by someone called Jason, and someone else called Antony.  Colin sounds too old.  Matthew is too biblical.

Mrs L has a separate list of names which she wouldn't want to bestow on the boy, some of which I quite liked.

We want something a bit different.  But not too different.  Something with no negative connotations from people we've known, or people from history (not too many Adolfs around these days, wonder why?)

The conversation isn't over.  Won't be over until the day we register the baby.  But we do have a short list now.  Eventually we realised there aren't going to be many names we can say, without any reservation, that we're 100% happy with, so we went for the closest we could get.  There are five names on the list, I'm not going to write them here, but I will write our concerns:

Options one, two and three: they're nice, safe, popular names.  But that's the problem, they're a bit dull.
Option four: is shared with a current politician, whose policies we don't like.  We'd like to avoid the inevitable "is he named after...?" questions.
Option five: is of French origin.  Neither of us is remotely French.  We're a bit worried that it might be a touch silly.

When the little guy does make an appearance though, I'm sure all our concerns will melt away.  We're not going to love the boy because of his name, but because of what he is.  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and a son by whatever name will be amazing.

Saturday is caption day - 31/03/12

My first go at Mammasaurus' SatCap linky:

You can find other photos awaiting your witty annotations by visiting Mammasaurus, click on the button below:

Labour

I was just watching an episode of Pramface on TV.  I quite like it, it's reasonably entertaining, and has the definite advantage of NOT being Hollyoaks or another repeat of Top Gear.

In this episode the boy who has got a (slightly older) girl pregnant is with her at an antenatal class and is doing a roleplay with the woman running it.  She's pretending to be in labour, he's actually shitting himself.

I laughed when the woman screamed at him: "I never want you to fucking touch me again", among other things.  Then I felt stupid for laughing.  It's probably actually going to be like that, isn't it?  

I've seen plenty of One Born Every Minute too, and most of the women featured clearly aren't in the mood to moderate their vocal output during labour.  I don't blame them.  There's no male equivalent of course, but I don't much fancy the idea of trying to pass a golf ball via my penis.  No.  The thought has made me feel a bit sick.

My wife's a gentle sort though; doesn't get angry with me often, lets me get away with my many indiscretions and is generally understanding of the fact that I'm a bit crap at a lot of stuff.  

So I wonder what my labouring wife want to tell me that has been kept inside through all the time we've been together, will the floodgates open and cover me in a tsunami of criticism, justified or otherwise?  Probably.  

But perhaps not.  I'm sure I'll let you all know once it's happened.

We can't afford to let the NHS go.

I'd better preface this post with the following disclaimer, in case it should be less than abso-fucking-lutely obvious: I do not think too highly of the ideologies of the Conservative party (or, for that matter, their Liberal Democrat whipping boys in the current "coalition".  Waste of my vote that was), their actions or their smug bastard faces.

One of the things I like the least about them is their drive to privatise everything they can, seemingly regardless of whether it is a good idea to do so.  The most offensive of these is the NHS.  "Oh no, we're not privatising the NHS" says Lansley.  But they are.  Surreptitiously.  Insidiously.  

I'm no expert on stuff like this.  I'm not really clever enough to understand all of what's going on.  The to and fro between commons and lords, the revisions, alterations and re-wordings which go into policy changes.  I watched the final of University Challenge this evening and didn't answer a single question.  Not one.  So I have no chance when it comes to politics.

But what I do know, is that there are a lot of people in this country who can't afford private healthcare.  I don't think I'm one of them, though I haven't looked into it.  I'm reasonably young, reasonably healthy, don't have a raft of "existing conditions" which an insurer could use to ramp up my premiums.  But I'm lucky.  I know people who would be laughed off the phone if they tried to get a quote for medical cover.

So what happens to those people?  Let's (briefly) drift onto the topic of parenting shall we?  Let's say that your medical insurance quote was prohibitively expensive and you had no choice but to hope you were lucky with your health.  Then you get pregnant.  A quick Google suggests that this is not something you should undertake unless you are the possessor of some pretty deep pockets:

So, in total, a private birth at a hospital such as the Portland could cost £7,500 to £10,000. 

Hmm.  Bargain.  That figure includes at least one night's stay in the hospital, at the meagre cost of £1,000.  Seriously.  I stayed in a private hospital for a night once (under NHS care, I'd been lucky enough to hit the end of the allowable waiting time, whereupon you are outsourced to a private facility) and it was not the plush-fest I'd been expecting.  They didn't even give me any bloody morphine.

I don't know.  Pregnancy probably isn't the best example of how bad it could be, but this is meant to be some kind of parenting blog.

I hate the idea of the UK moving toward a US style system, where hundreds of thousands of people are just one serious illness away from having to make a choice between bankruptcy and death.  In a world where there is a workable alternative to that situation, no matter how imperfect that alternative may be, surely that alternative (especially when it represents the status quo) MUST be the preferred option?

Apparently not if you're a Tory.

Three Weeks!

It’s not how long there is left of my wife’s pregnancy (I know, surprising to see me write about something else, right?)

It’s how long my HTC Sensation* has lasted so far.  That shouldn’t be remarkable, or blog-worthy, or even thought-worthy really.  But it is.  Because I’ve had three HTC Sensations now, and three weeks is the longest one has lasted.  This is because the HTC Sensation is SHIT.  You hear me HTC?  No, you don’t, because you’re using an HTC Sensation and you can’t hear me because it is SHIT and BROKEN.

I wouldn’t usually get annoyed by a phone being so unreliable.  I’d take it back to the shop.  I’d stand around looking impatient and tutting.  I’d get a new one under warranty and that one would be fine.  But (to return briefly to the pregnancy thing) right now I feel I need a phone which works.  Just in case someone needs to get in touch.  Y’know, to let me know that labour is happening and maybe I’d like to be there to see it/be shouted at.

My first Sensation lasted just under three weeks.  It was AMAZING for the first two weeks.  I wept in joy at the AMAZING camera which actually took pictures worth looking at.  My geek senses tingled at essentially having a miniature computer in my pocket, connecting me to the world with fuss-free efficiency.  Oh, yes, the honeymoon period was glorious.  Then, one day, the battery lasted just seven hours.  Frustrating.  One full charge later I was ready to forgive it and continue with our beautiful friendship.  Three hours later the battery ran out.  Fuckingfucksocks. 

A kind word here for Carphone Warehouse.  Replacing my phone with no questions asked, and no stupid suggestions as to how I might prolong the battery life.

Sensation number two started well.  All the good things were similarly good.  Then the power/sleep button stopped working.  Amazeballs.  I wondered whether this was a new feature, to improve the battery life.  It wasn’t.  It was just another example of the HTC Sensation being shit.

Back again to Carphone Warehouse (when oh when will you change your name?  There’s surely no such thing as a carphone in 2012 is there?) who dutifully apologised on behalf of HTC and provided me with HTC Sensation number three.  Well done Carphone Warehouse, especially as you could have told me I had to have a warranty repair this time.  Perhaps you were warned off this course by my burning red eyes and polite-but-clearly-somewhat-miffed demeanour.

Three weeks on, and Sensation Three is still functional.  But I spend at least a few minutes a day wondering when that will cease to be the case.  When I will have to waste ANOTHER hour of my time returning ANOTHER stupid broken phone to the lovely, patient souls of Carphone Warehouse. 

But, if it happens again, I’ll be trading it in.  Maybe for an iPhone. 

Or, if they have one, a sniper rifle, so I can go all “Sarah Connor visits Cyberdyne” and sort this out once and for all.

Me, if I was roughly 1000% more AWESOME (and Carphone Warehouse start selling military equipment)

In conclusion: if you need a phone that works, don’t buy an HTC Sensation.




*Also, now I think of it, stop giving your phones such stupid names.

Daddy Does Antenatal

Tomorrow afternoon we have our fourth and final antenatal class.  This is a shame for two reasons:

1.  I will have to stay at work all day on future Mondays, rather than sloping off early.
2.  I've actually been quite enjoying them, contrary to what all the men who had already attended them said.

I don't think antenatal classes are really designed around men (and rightly so, of course.  The only time that should change is if the premise of that Schwarzeneggar travesty 'Junior' ever comes true) but I wanted to go along.  As a man I've found that the best way for me to feel like I'm not completely fucking useless during the pregnancy is to be around for everything that I can, just in case it turns out I can be helpful.

Weeks one and two were about, respectively, labour and pain relief.  Most of week one was spent talking about that woman on TV recently who whipped up a tasty placenta smoothie following the birth.  No-one in our group was planning on doing anything similar, surprisingly.  Week two was primarily happy recollections of the psychotropic side effects of various pain meds.  Both these weeks there were more women than men, but a pretty good showing from the Y chromosome camp.  Not so in week three.

A Knitted Boob

Breast feeding!  You'd think the men would be (figuratively) all over that, no?  It's tits innit.  But there were only four guys this time.  Perhaps the midwife had put the rest off by mentioning that there would be ACTUAL BABIES coming along.  Luckily, as an expectant dad, I quite like babies, so I was looking forward to meeting them.  Maybe it was something else.  Had the men, like my wife, somehow misinterpreted "there'll be some new mums coming along to talk about it" as "there'll be some new mums coming along to give a demonstration of breastfeeding while you all sit, watch and take notes"?  I don't know but, whatever the reason, men were thin on the ground.

It's a shame, as I've found that the midwife running our classes has been informative, very good at putting people at ease and (importantly for me) keeping the men involved.  So all credit to her for being great.  Tomorrow is the final instalment; complicated labours.  I'll definitely be there, and I'll be as participative as I can, I really hope my fellow dads will be joining me.

What were your experiences of antenatal classes?  Were they useful?  Did you make friends?  We're being encouraged to go for coffee after the class, am I going to be the only man there?

The Waiting Game

Earlier in the week @motherventing blogged about how she can’t take a compliment.  It’s taken me this long to remember my answer to the question she posed at the bottom of said blog: “what was the last compliment you received?”

It was this: “you are a patient man”.  I rather liked that one, and I think I accepted it by mumbling something unintelligible and largely non-committal, probably including the word “thanks” but not a direct acknowledgement of the compliment.  Then I changed the subject.  I think it is fairly usual for us to be overcome with Britishness where compliments are concerned.  But, despite my none too eloquent acceptance speech (thank goodness I will never have to accept an Oscar) I was actually really rather pleased with the compliment.

Now I’ve gone and ruined it.  I don’t feel patient at all.  I feel fed up, and bored.  I don’t want there to be (probably) another five and a half weeks until the baby arrives.  More if he’s late. 

Of course I’m not suggesting I’d prefer him to be premature, as wonderful and special as those early arriving babies are.  I’d just like to wake tomorrow and find that the world had slipped into a convenient time warp during the night and left me with no more waiting.  Maybe it could be something to do with Dr Who.  Or a DeLorean.  Or Stephen Hawking.

I still enjoy the things I’ve been enjoying throughout the pregnancy; feeling the kicks and punches of the little guy as he enjoys his pre-birth aerobic classes, reading about what developments are going on as the weeks pass, acquiring all the teeny tiny clothes and, most of all, going to bed at night and knowing that the time I wake up will be dictated by my alarm clock and not the cries of a newborn. 

I’m still waiting, because I have no choice, but if someone says I’m a patient man before the birth I’ll be forced to disagree.  I just hope it’s a quality I regain once the baby is born!

On knowing nothing, and realising it...

I once heard the following quote, or something similar, being said to a non-parent who had just given a parent some advice on parenting. 

“Enjoy the time before you have kids, it’s the only time when you’ll have all the answers” – Someone cleverer than me.

If it is a quote from some clever and well known sort then I can’t remember who, sorry about that.  All I know is that it stuck with me.

Me and Mrs L have often found ourselves chatting about other people’s approaches to parenting, usually not long after their child has done something delightful, like kick me in the shin or drop a mobile phone into the hole at the back of a speaker, never to be seen again.  Why, we wonder, has the child not been taught that these things are UNACCEPTABLE?  Why, following the event, do the parents roll their eyes, adopt a facial expression which somehow speaks the words “C’est La Vie” and shrug in a manner which suggests utter defeat?  Why, why, why aren’t they seeing the obvious solution that we are discussing?

To a non-parent it all looks so simple!  We, the childless many, who can hand the baby back when it begins to cry (or, if we were feeling particularly brave/cocky and tried to console it, when we’ve worked out we don’t know how) are often at a loss to the reasons for this apparently shoddy and slapdash parenting.

Well, with seven weeks left until our baby is due to arrive I have finally shed my naivety.  The realisation has dawned: having a baby is not easy.  Having a child is going to be a challenge.  Parenting well will be the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do. 

I’ll be honest, I knew that anyway.  I’m a bit of a “head in the sand” sort of guy though, so I’ve been ignoring it.  But now the realisation has hit me, and I can’t un-realise it.  So I’m crapping myself.  Oh well, once the baby is with us I’ll probably be too busy dealing with him crapping himself to worry too much about it, right?  Maybe.  All I know now is that there’s another side to this adventure we’re about to embark on.

So tell me parents (not my parents, they’re not reading, I mean you), what jewel like snippets of advice would you give an expectant dad who is only just taking in the enormity of the task ahead?

Preparing the Nest

Another day, another coat of paint.  I've been off work all this week; I had grand ideas of decorating the baby's room in a couple of days, then doing lots of cycling (which everyone tells me will be out of the question once the baby is born), reading, relaxing.

This morning I put the second coat of blue paint (apparently I have no problem with a little gender stereotyping) on the "feature wall".  It still needs a third, as did the three other walls, which are "baby white", which isn't really white at all.  Decorating is not something I usually enjoy, quite the opposite in fact.  The seemingly endless hours of wallpaper stripping, of sanding down and filling in, of masking off and rollering on.  It's not my idea of fun.

One coat of blue, patchy and streaky wasn't the desired effect...

But this is different, this is decorating for our baby.  Our first born, our little boy.  I've loved doing it, I loved going to B&Q and picking out the colours with my wife, I've loved loading up the brushes and roller and the splatters of paint all over my clothes, loved watching Kate doing as much as the extra weight of a thirty week bump would allow.  As the room started to turn from a storage area/dumping ground I have pictured what it will look like with a cot in (being picked up on Tuesday, exciting!), with a selection of shiny new furniture (IKEA, today, nightmarish) and cute baby paraphernalia.  But most of all, I have imagined it having a baby in it, our baby, and I've loved that thought.

The great thing about our baby at the moment is how quiet he is, how perfectly behaved, and (with the exception of one particularly messy dream) how remarkably clean and poo free he is.  But as much as I'm loving the current, prospective, version of our baby, I truly can't wait to have the real thing in my arms, and decorating his room has been fantastic pre-birth bonding.

I'd love to hear how other dads-to-be have experienced nesting, or whether how I've found it is similar to all the mums out there, so leave a comment below!

9 Weeks and Counting…

We’re over three quarters of the way there!  Finding out my wife was pregnant seems like a long time ago, but it was only at the beginning of September last year.  I was driving home from work and my phone was ringing in my pocket, repeatedly.  I’m not in the habit of taking calls while driving, so was suffering that horrible feeling that accompanies an unanswered phone.  I sneaked a glance at the source of the missed calls when sat in a queue of traffic.  Three calls in the space of five minutes, all Mrs L.  Then a text message arrives wondering when I’ll be home.  It’s unusual because I’m not running late, and Mrs L isn’t one of those insane women who needs to know where I am every moment of every day. 

It was at this point that the obvious reason for the calls dawned on me – the tone of the text had implied impatience, rather than distress, so it wasn’t anything too urgent – clearly there was a spider which needed to be dealt with.

Five minutes later and I’m back at the house.  Confirming my suspicions I’m greeted by Mrs L shouting "oh good, there's a MASSIVE spider in the bathroom, go and get it!"

Up the stairs two at a time, bursting through the bathroom door expecting to be confronted by Shelob herself, I am disappointed to find that "MASSIVE spider" is nowhere to be seen.  My wife is behind me in the doorway now.  "There's no spider" I say, "Yeah, look, right on the edge of the bath" she replies.  Either I have developed spider blindness or my wife has lost her mind.  There is no spider...

Oh.  There is something else sat on the edge of the bath though...

The penny finally drops; there is no spider, but there is a pregnancy test!  Positive!  It's one of those moments where the right thing to say is hard to get hold of; I am massively surprised, but in a very good way.  I've known I wanted to have children for years, but the moment you find out you actually will be having one is amazing, I don't think anything could have prepared me for how happy I felt, or how nervous.