Ten things they don’t warn you about before you get pregnant… #5
The Nesting Instinct
You may or may not have heard references to this phenomenon before. It’s described as an instinct that kicks in at some point during pregnancy, most commonly when birth is imminent.
There are whimsical references to it in books and in films, down the pub and during Ann Summers parties… this urge to clean obscure and bizarre places. But! It should never be underestimated. It is a very serious thing indeed.
I’m not talking about getting on your hands and knees to scrub yellowed pee and crusty puke from the dark corners of the no-man’s land behind the toilet, I’m not talking about risking life and limb to reach the waterproof covering on the bulb in the porch to extract the countless dead bodies of flies that have accumulated over the years (how the hell did they get in there in the first place?!?)
I’m talking about demon possession here.
One morning, you might wake up and decide that every floor surface in the entire house must be bleached to within an inch of its varnished life. Superhuman strength makes you lift the couch and drag heavy oak tables outside, even though you’re tired and hungry, you will not rest until it’s done. You’ll happily risk your life, your back, and your growing belly for the cause. It’s a very strange thing.
Today it happened to me, but I’m nowhere near my due date. At least I hope I’m not.
This is what it looked like at 9am this morning:
Twelve hours later, it looks like this:
I’m not sure how it happened, nor where all the junk went to – I blacked out for a while and may have eaten it all. All I know is that if somebody called to the door with a de-fibrillator right now, I’d happily have a go of it. Even blinking hurts.
So, if you have a room that needs de-cluttering, forget Kim and Aggie, all you have to do is get yourself up the duff. Most of the time, it works every time.
Soul stealers
You know the way ‘they’ say that some African tribes intensely dislike having their photographs taken for fear a bit of their souls are taken with them? I know exactly how they feel.
It’s a clever ploy that’s happened several times since Puppychild started school… professional photographers sneak into the building in the dead of lunchtime and snap a few quickies without warning, then they send a blackmail letter home with the kid later that day.
You have one week to pay the sum of €17.50 for a print of our photograph. If you want to see it alive, please view the school’s notice board.
I got a letter like this last week, and took the bait. Sure enough, there was a group photograph of Puppychild and her classmates, sitting angelically in a row outside the main door of the building.
It got to me that nobody had asked my permission to take that picture, or at least warned me about it so that I could have given her hair a pre-emptive brush. It suddenly struck me that if I didn’t pay for this photograph, somebody else would get at it and could potentially do strange and unimaginable things with it. I felt compelled to give these bastards my coal money, just to save my daughter’s soul.
It also occurs to me that there is now a negative somewhere in someone’s studio with my kid on it, and no amount of cash can get it back. I’m highly bloody un-nerved by this.
I will be giving these people an envelope containing €17.50 in exchange for my daughter’s soul. If they had asked for €190 for a print-off the size of a postage-stamp, I’d probably still consider paying for that, too. I feel invaded.
Clever soul stealers.
Valentine musings from the overworked and underpaid
Valentine’s day has always annoyed me a bit. As a late-blooming teenager I had always hoped that an anonymous card would find its way through my letterbox intented for my spotty four-eyed face, but it never did. One year an anonymous card did appear, but it was addressed to Billy Burn who lived at the other end of my road. A set up most likely… possibly by Billy himself, more likely by somebody else who wanted a cheap laugh. I can’t remember whether I delivered it or not, I hope in hindsight that I stuffed it into the exhaust-pipe of his dad’s car, but that’s unlikely.
Since starting on the sordid path of dating, it’s just gone from one extreme to the other… lavender-filled balloons and cheesy teddybears with crappy slogans like ‘You to me are like a spanner; every time I see you, my nuts tighten‘ were given to my by fellas who wanted to know what colour my knickers were, and when I finally hooked up with TAT, I got little or nothing. I prefer little or nothing by far.
This year, Laughingboy showed his love for me by producing a hefty dump in his nappy in the small hours of the morning. When I checked his schoolbag for baby-wipes, I found a sweet glitterish heart-shaped card with painty fingerprints all over it, and a wee bag of homemade chocolates. I let Puppychild show her love for her daddy by jumping on him violently at 5pm to wake him up for his night-time shift. TAT showed his love for me by reading me excerpts from Bill Bryson’s ‘The Lost Continent’ while I scraped eggy gunge from lunchtime kitchen saucepans, and I showed him my love for him by buying him an extremely violent Xbox game – ‘Army of Two, the 40th day’ – a shoot-em-up game that can only be played by in co-op with another. (What could be more romantic than annihalating things together over a glass of wine?)
I will be celebrating my love for myself tonight by lying on the wooden floor and listening to John Coltrane surrounded by candles for an hour or two before digging into a can of Guinness and a game of Assassin’s Creed.
Hallmark didn’t get a brass cent. Ha.
Snail Trail
As I bent over the bathroom sink scraping snot off Puppychild’s school jumper’s sleeve with a toothbrush (her own toothbrush – heh heh), it struck me that I was in a timeless club of parents who, since the birth of school uniforms, are cursed with the plight of snail-trail sleeves.
It also struck me that there is a sad lack of evolution in the school jumper trade. A row of buttons has foiled the snot wiping technique in blazers and shirts since what… the 20′s? Surely it snot too hard to find some sort of equivalent for jumpers and tracksuit tops?
And while they’re at it, what’s wrong with stitching a thumb-hole into school jumpers to save the wearer hours of labour trying to gouge one out with an overbitten thumb-nail? TAT bought a jumper recently from TK Maxx with such a thumb hole already stitched in… that impressed me no end, but then again I’m fierce easy to amuse these days…
El Duderino
The naming of the foetus is an epic task, especially when you haven’t met it yet. Of course there’s always the option of naming it after its zone of conception, but who wants to live their life with ‘Ballybunion’ for a moniker?
Baby name books are pointless, especially Irish baby name books. From Morrigan to Aoife to Siobhán, everyone has something mean to say about a name, (Siobhán your knickers, yer da’s on his way…) or somebody already knows a person by that name and doesn’t like them, or it rhymes with something rude… or maybe it’s just plain naff. Nah, if you ask me, the only way to choose a name is to scan the credits at the end of a film – this method always spews forth interesting possibilities.
Take my friend for instance… she’s due her babby in three weeks time, and she loves the name Charlie. She cannot name her kid Charlie, however, because her surname is Brown. Hell, Snoopy hasn’t been aired for years, if you ask me she’s on to a winner, but her family won’t let up nagging her into changing her mind.
Then there’s my other friend, who gave birth last month and named her baby girl ‘Kitty’. It’s not short for anything, Kitty is her name and Kitty is what she shall be called. I love it, but it’s undoubtedly quite an eccentric name, which beautifully mirrors a very eccentric family. My family is not eccentric, at least TAT’s side isn’t… I can imagine the multitudes of rolled eyeballs, the quick snide remarks directed towards the stoner family at the Christmas table. It’s just not worth it.
No, The Accidental Terrorist and I came up with an idea long ago, we had a flippant moment during a private viewing of The Big Lebowski:
Dude.
Why can’t I call my child Dude? “The Dude. His Dudeness… Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing” to quote The Dude himself.
Yeah, yeah, I know why I can’t call the child ‘Dude’, because someday he’ll grow up and will most likely want a job that doesn’t involve canvas or scripts, or burger flipping. Such is life. Or is it?!?! Such is the beauty of the Irish language perhaps… like the phrase ‘Mahogany Gaspipes’, the word ‘Dude’ could be Irish – all you have to do is add a fada and an ‘i’ somewhere, and the problem is solved, as follows:
-Duaid; short for Duaided, means ‘Evil Death’… who picks on a kid named Evil Death?!?
-Dúid; short for Dúidín, meaning ‘Pipe’. Grandad would be so proud.
-Dóid; meaning ‘Fist’… again, schoolyard politics are in favour of this one.
-Díud; short for Díthugad, meaning ‘Extermination’… a future in pest control perhaps?
-Diúd; short for Diúdán, meaning ‘Giddiness’, which is fitting.
-Duíd; a version of ‘David’, which my mother called me during the first three weeks of my confusing life.
But maybe the most fitting yet:
-Dúd… meaning ‘Mouth‘, because his would be one more to feed.
I do so hope it’s a boy!
