Margo à la Maude

The Perfessor speaks:

The nice part about pregnancy is that you have 40 weeks to get used to the idea of having a baby. You can talk to your parents about potential family traits that might get passed on. You talk to other parents to see what their experience was. Well-wishers give you advice. We heard a lot of similar comments, like "get your sleep now" (there will be plenty of time to sleep when I'm dead, and also between 1:00 and 7:00 a.m.), "don't feel guilty about going to movies and restaurants now" (waaay ahead of you) and even the more intimate warning of "it's the worst pain you will ever feel in your life" (having experienced it, Donna agrees, but we have a first-hand account that passing stones is more painful. And that new Jim Belushi show also looks pretty painful, but I haven't seen it yet.)

But there are also the things that no one mentions.

Dark secrets that parents keep from childless people, secrets that are insidious because so many people are in on it. I fully expect that by revealing these secrets, I will likely be dead by morning. Probably at the hands of the Masons or the good folks at the Priori of Scion. Before it's too late, Donna, I love you. And your Thai chicken risotto is really, really good. Make sure Margo joins a nunnery before she meets boys.

Melodrama. And I never even took an acting class!

There really are things that no one mentioned. And be warned that this is coming from a couple who have only had one child, so obviously, it doesn't apply to everybody.

the PREGNANCY
1. A lot of people talk about stretchmarks, and then most of your pregnancy goes by and you don't get them, and you think that you're in the clear. Wrong. They come very late in the game, like 38 weeks. When you hear about starlets who give birth at 37 weeks, odds are it was to avoid stretchmarks.

2. Your organs shift around. The first time that your stomach rumbles, and the sound comes from where your heart should normally be, it will be a little freaky.

3. Weird pickle-and-ice-cream cravings don't hit all pregnant women. This does not mean that through sheer willpower, a pregnant woman will not will herself to crave something that she already likes.

4. As a follow-up to No.3, you have better odds of winning the lottery than of going to a Dairy Queen in the Summer and NOT seeing a pregnant woman.

5. If you plan on having more than one child, think twice before revealing the sex of the baby, unless you're cool with your potential second-born son wearing hand-me-down dresses with unicorns or daisies or kittens on them. We were overwhelmed at how incredibly generous everyone has been.

6. Choosing a name can be like a 9-month long chess game, where mother and father, and occasionally extended family, lobby for their favourite choice.

7. Accidents happen. Small accidents. Your baby is probably fine. We were told after a fall that in utero babies are usually only in danger after the mother has been in a major car accident. So if you accidentally dropped a plate on your belly, you're okay. Go in to check if you want, but stay calm.

8. If you're an active woman, you can continue being active once you've conceived, but don't expect to start marathon training when you're 35 weeks if you've had a lapse in activity.

9. If you are timing when to have your baby, take allergy seasons into consideration. You can't take medication. If you do, your child will eventually become an adult who orders things from late-night infomercials. You've been warned.

10. Pregnant women are hot. Temperature hot. Well, they can be "ow, hot mama, where you been all my life" hot too, but their skin can feel like it's on fire. Don't put flammable things like paper too near to them.


the BIRTH (fyi, we had a midwife, so some things might not be universal)
1. No one told us that Donna would have to urinate before being discharged to prove that she was physically able to. If I understand this correctly, all the contractions and pushing can squeeze your bladder so hard that it doesn't rebound on its own.

2. When women explain how long their labour was, that's active labour, when the contractions are 3-4 minutes apart. The early labour stuff, when the contractions feel like cramps or are 4-15 minutes apart is not counted to the total. It's like telling a fishing story and underestimating the weight of the one that got away. Except that the fisherman would be in a lot of pain, and it's way more important than fishing.

3. On that same note, the entire labour can be long. If the pre-labour or early labour has started and it's too painful too get any sleep, you will look back and laugh at how easily you could have slept if you knew what was coming.

4. If you're ever going to simultaneously experience being chilled to the bone and overheating, it's during birth.

5. We (re: Donna) read a lot about the experience, and still were not able to commit the various phases to memory. When Donna was getting closer to the zero-hour pushing stage, we were asking the midwife when it would happen. The question was barely out of Donna's mouth when the first push came. Here's the thing: it's involuntary. Nobody told us. It's like vomiting or breathing, you can't not do it, but you can focus it a little. And apparently, it feels really good (comparatively). Books did tell us about that last little bit, but we didn't actually believe it.

6. The guy doesn't have to experience the contraction pain. That's a big, fat half-truth. It's pretty hard to watch someone you care for so much go through that, and when it's all over, the mother is holding the baby and thinking "wow, it was all so worth it," but the father is mentally curling up in a fetal position, the images of what she went through still pretty freakin' vivid in his mind. Another little note on this subject: trying to share the pain by inflicting pain on yourself, like ramming the nitrous oxyde canister into your nuts doesn't actually help share the pain, it just means that two people are hurting from different things. I didn't do this, but just a word to the wise.

7. Midwives get to know you pretty intimately during labour and pushing.

8. Excercise balls are pretty good for active labour contractions, and, surprisingly, toilets are pretty good for pushing. Well done, Sir John Harrington!

9. In terms of pain relief, apparently sterile water injections are pretty useful and way less debilitating than epidurals. I'm a little ashamed to say that we forgot to ask for them.

10. If there were no complications with the birth, you can go home mere hours after delivering your baby. A lot of people thought that we were crazy, but consider this:

• Where are you going to feel more comfortable, in your own bed or a single-sized hospital bed?
• If you can't get a private room, your birth partner has to go home to sleep, only to come back to see you, and then home again, and back, for as many days as you stay.
• Yes, food and cleaning services are provided for you at a hospital, but at the cost of privacy and boredom.
• I'm not sure where the baby sleeps when you stay in a hospital. At home, the baby sleeps in its new bed, a discarded laundry hamper with flax straw as a mattress. I'M KIDDING! Please don't call Family Services.

EARLY PARENTHOOD (like, we have a whopping 2 weeks of experience)
1. That "New Baby" smell comes from the fragrances that companies put in their products, like diapers. The organic New Baby smell is of the smell of rotting flesh as the cord falls off, and it's really, really rank.

2. As I mentioned in a previous post, there's a lot of sitting around and holding the baby. This means that all the muscles in your body begin to atrophy, with the exception of your arm and shoulder muscles, which become Herculean from constantly swinging a baby. It makes you look like fat truckers at an arm-wrestling meet.

3. In the first few days, there's always something more important to do than drink water. After 3 days without peeing, you may begin to notice that you've lost 2" of height from dehydration. Either that, or your partner will start slipping Listerine in your coffee and Clorets in your vitamins. It's not pretty.

4. Chiropractors' eyes are quickly replaced by dollar signs and "cha-ching" cash register sounds when you walk past their offices carrying your baby. It's ironic that the birth of my daughter signals another generation between home sapiens and homo erectus, and yet after bouncing her and swinging her after a particularly fussy mood, my back has started hunching and my knuckles are scraping the ground. This proves Darwin's less popular theory in his follow-up book: "Survival of the Fittest, Until the Fittest Have Children, At Which Point the New Parents Revert Back to Their Unfit Predecessors So Deal With It."

5. Contrary to popular belief, babies are not born knowing everything they need to know to survive. If they were, parents would start charging rent a lot earlier. Babies know how to feed, but they don't know how to do it efficiently or painlessly.

6. New mothers don't naturally know how to efficiently breastfeed either. It's okay. There are people around to help. And there may be blistering. Sorry.

7. New mothers who have gotten the hang of breastfeeding still don't like it when you sing Kelis' song Milkshake when the baby feeds. They don't like it the first time, and they still don't like it the 94th time.

8. Not all babies are quiet when they sleep. That's bad news when you're a light sleeper.

9. Baby's breath flowers are very pretty accent flower that helps bring out the beauty of roses. Human baby's breath smells like cream heated to 36.6 Celsius.

10. Eye colour takes weeks to finalize. What you see is not always what you get.


Sorry for the super long post, but the Truth had to be revealed.

- Michel

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 12:46 a.m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.