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.
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!
Ten things they don’t warn you about before you get pregnant… #4
PAIN
It’s the one question that everyone asks; when the subject of babies crops up, the look of fear on their faces is unmistakable. They wonder why I’d willingly offer up my body to excruciating hell like that, and tell me they’d go the ‘too posh to push’ way if it came down to them. I can see why they’d say that, but I can also see how vastly misled they are. It’s the film industry… they love the gushing bloodiness, the portrayal of the sweaty monster screaming and cursing at its husband… they make the whole ordeal seem so vulgar and hellish, it’s no wonder so many women opt for the cesarean section.
THE MYTH
In truth, childbirth is not the most painful thing that can happen to a body. Childbirth is about endurance, not about pain. Pain is what happens when you break your leg, or suffer from an abscess. It’s something that involves destruction or infection, something that happens to let your brain know that there’s something wrong. Childbirth is entirely different, so it’s really not fair to taint it with the same brush.
Childbirth is all about creation, and as such it feels different. Yes, the pressure hurts a lot, but it comes and goes, that’s the beauty of it. You get a two-minute rest in between contractions, even in the thick of it, and these two minutes are pure bliss because the void is so beautifully apparent. And, what’s even more amazing, is that once the whole ordeal is over, the pain is over, completely forgotten in the blink of an eye. There are no splints, no metal plates to be inserted, no antibiotics (unless there are complications of course), the pain just… goes away.
One woman I spoke to even told me that she had a pretty amazing orgasm while giving birth once. She has four children with another on the way, and there’s not a chance you’d entice her into a cesarean section if she had a choice. Nor is she particularly masochistic I might add, as I noticed once when she caught her finger in the car door. A bigger whiner you wouldn’t find – yet the concept of labour excites her no end! Go figure.
Of course, there’s the part where one is required to squeeze something the size of a large bag of spuds out of an opening the size of a postage-stamp… surely that’s got to hurt just a tad? It does, no kidding, but here’s where Mother Nature shows her infinite kindness. When… um… things are stretched beyond a certain point, the nerve endings in the area shut down so that in reality, you only have about ten seconds worth of screaming agony. Okay, so it’s a pretty long ten seconds, but it’s not the five hours they portray on television, not by a long shot.
Me? I’ve never had an orgasm while giving birth, I chose the way of the epidural, the drug that is so amazing, you really don’t care that it takes a syringe the size of the Empire State Building to administer it. I would have happily stabbed my spinal cord repetitively with the syringe myself, if there hadn’t been an anaesthesiologist around to do it for me. It makes you want to vomit, it makes your thighs itch uncontrollably, but it gives you a clear enough brain to enjoy the experience. I too was a woman who swore she’d be able to give birth without pain relief, but as a midwife once asked me in the throes of things; “Do you think you’re getting a feckin’ medal for this or something?” She was right. There are no medals for martyrs, that’s the whole point.
THE TRUTH
Pethidine is the Devil’s drug. It hurts. It doesn’t stop labour from hurting. It leaves a numb-spot on your ass for months afterwards and leaves your baby more stoned than Woody Harrelson. Don’t be fooled.
Nitrous Oxide is great craic, especially when the midwife leaves the room and your birth partner gets to have a go and the midwife returns to find everyone gasping in hysterics because there’s a crack in one of the ceiling tiles. It’s that much fun, it should be illegal. Its only downfall is that after a while it feels like you’re swimming in mercury and you end up in the horrors, so less is most definitely more, but very very very funny with it.
Tens machines are only good for the people who get to watch you jump every ten seconds from the electric jolt. They find it hilarious, but you won’t. Yes, it distracts you from the pain a little bit, but frankly what is far more entertaining, is placing one charge on each one of the testicles of your loved one, and then zapping him while he sleeps. Laughter is an excellent pain reliever, especially the evil type.
Last but not least; Yes, you will most likely crap yourself while in labour. As foul as that sounds, it’s the last thing that’ll be on your mind at the time, so why give a shit*?
Bizarro jewellery… you know you want it.
*Did you come all the way down here to see if that was an intended pun? Don’t you know me by now!?!?
Ten things they don’t warn you about before you get pregnant… #2
The ‘outie’ phenomenon.
Apologies to all Omphalophobics out there… you may want to look away.
It comes as a terrible shock to one day look down at your navel to find that it has turned itself inside-out. It’s an even greater shock to stick your pinkie finger in there to find there’s a hole that leads to somewhere possibly very intriguing. Offering to have other people stick their fingers in there is not a good idea… the resulting scream of “EW!!” tends to make the foetus jump, which is a high price to pay for personal sadism.
It makes one realise that there are certain things one shouldn’t do if they ever intend to be pregnant;
- Navel Piercing: I had my belly button pierced during a rosemantic getaway with my fella once… I did it to soften the pain of his tongue piercing. I never really wore jewellery in there, it kept getting hooked onto my belt buckle which is not to be sneezed at. I let the hole close, which never really happens with a belly-button piercing, especially if you get yourself in trouble. I remember being in labour with my first child, and sharing a room with a young male midwife who almost passed out when he spotted the gaping maw of my self mutilation. When he asked “WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!?!”, I replied via ventriloquism using the piercing wound. He was not amused…. not even when I sang ‘Blue Moon’ with it. Nitrous Oxide is wonderful stuff.
- Tattoos of dolphins ‘jumping over’ your navel: That is, unless you also like Humpback whales. Humpback whales who have been through intense orthopaedic surgery, for that matter. It’s not pretty. Any sort of tattoo is a bad idea in the belly department for that reason, for while everything else might shrink back to normality, tattoos don’t. They disobey logic in all its forms… maybe this is where Picasso got his inspiration?
Ten things they don’t warn you about before you get pregnant… #1
Thrupenny bits
Yes, I mean those two girly lumps stuck to the front of you that you’ve grown to know and love… from the early weeks of duff’ness, they develop their own personality altogether. Welcome to the anomaly that is alien pregnancy boobs.
You may notice at first that the straps of your favourite dark and lacy number suddenly dig into your shoulders and leave deep tracks where there never were before. Then the rest of the bra suddenly begins to tear under the strain of growth… they threaten to spill their contents on every bend-over… they create a weird muffin-effect that makes your chest look like it’s perpetually frowning. Time to go shopping. Not only for a new cup size, but a bigger (horror!) chest size too – we need to make room for all that rib-growth and baby weight, don’t we?! Katie Price, eat your heart out.
(Scroll to the end of the post to see an amazing pair of tits*)
High beams
Don’t even start me on the raspberry ripples… you could pad that bra with re-inforced titanium and those things will still find a way to poke through and stare at passers-by. Full beams, baby… get used to woolly sweaters. If the darkening of their colour doesn’t alarm you, their sudden sensitivity will… it’s like somebody came along one day and re-wired them completely. If you have fillings in your teeth, and have ever accidentally experienced the sudden shock voltage of chewing tin-foil accidentally, you’ll have an idea of what an brief brush with those nipps feels like. Electric shocks, when you least expect it… takes a lot of getting used to. This does of course also have its advantages, but that’s for a whole other post.
There are ways to ease the boob situation of course, that you don’t always find in books. If you don’t want to roll over and trap a nipple under your elbow while you sleep; thus making you hit notes that Kiri Te Kanawa herself would be jealous of, wear a bra to bed. This over-the-shoulder-alien-boulder-holder also helps to stop the formation of shuddersome stretch marks that never go away, and gives you something to put cabbage leaves into when things get overly hot and stuffy in there. Yep, a good bra is your best friend, and so is that lovely lady in the lingerie shop that will fit you out properly… when your thrupenny bits are in order, that’s a quarter of the battle of pregnancy sorted, right there. Oh – and stay away from tight white tee-shirts… because you just never know what might leak, or from where. That panic you feel when you realise that things have gotten so bad even your boobs need nappies – that’s normal. It’s not pretty, but somebody’s got to do it I guess.
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*…there’s nothing quite like the sight of nuts nestled between lovely tits.
God be with the days before Christianity
I’m reading ‘The Mists of Avalon’ right now, a book about Arthurian legend from his mother and his sister’s point of view. In them days, it was all about appeasing the Goddess and natural ritual and Bardic poetry and such other lovely stuff, as Christianity and convents slowly crept into their consciousness.
I can’t help but be slightly jealous at the constant mention of the Bealtaine fires. May first every year, everyone in the community douses the home-fires, then celebrates life and re-birth during a giant hooley by a huge fire. As part of the ritual, it’s required by the Goddess that random people should couple up… so named the unity of the Great Mother and her young horned God. Not an orgy, no no, just appreciation for the exuberant healing powers of spring. It’s not just at Bealtaine either… they get to do this every quarter of the year to celebrate the ever-changing stages of life and death. This is most likely the origins of bonfires at Hallowe’en, then? Can you imagine loads of skobies all dressed up as Gardaí and Zombies all shaggin’ away after their sugar rush because the Goddess wants them to?
Pity they didn’t have Youtube back then!
Tit for TAT
Gerry Ryan actually stopped talking about himself for long enough to let a very interesting subject through on his radio show this morning. That subject was male breastfeeding. Yes, that’s male lactation.
A young man named Ragnar Bengtsson, a Swedish father of a two year old boy has decided to conduct an experiment on himself to see if he can produce breastmilk in order to supply his future children. His theory is that if he stimulates his moobs on a three-hourly basis (playing havoc with his image at college), by December he should have stimulated enough hormones to produce milk.
This has been done before, apparently. In some cultures where powdered milk is unavailable, the death at birth of a baby’s mother has led its father to suckle the infant successfully to weaning stage. This fact amazes me… that throughout history, and in some parts of the world today, men are breastfeeding babies.
Three things are needed for boob-juice. Mammary glands, a Pituitary gland, and a hormone called Prolactin, normally produced by the Pituitary gland in the later stages of pregnancy. Men have (potentially) all of the above, given that they are born with the first two, the third requirement can in theory be stimulated into action without the help of artificial hormones.
I wish this guy the best of luck, without any fear of this idea taking off in Ireland whatsoever. Sweden’s male to female roles in the workplace are quite the reverse of what’s happening here, with 90% of women in the workforce and 16 months of paid maternity/paternity leave in most, if not all jobs in the country. This means that the concept of the ’stay at home dad’ is far more liberal there. Children therefore bond with both male and female role models which can only be a healthy thing.
In Ireland however, men hold on to their well ‘ard image tightly while still wishing they were curled up in somebody’s womb. Most would happily pass a law against public breastfeeding, seeing it as an abomination, the destruction of the true purpose of breasts – the titty wank. It’s probably an unhealthy mindset, but I’m a sucker (sucker, gettit?) for butch. If I caught TAT suckling our future new-born child I fear I would grab that child and run as far away as possible from the beardy freak. But then, I’m not Swedish.
Having a child suckle a hairy boob, that’s an entirely eerie concept. Yes it produces skin-to-skin contact which is excellent for a baby’s psychological growth, but it somewhat blurs the idea of a nurturing mother, doesn’t it?
Then again, there are many women out there who don’t like the idea of breastfeeding for the fear it will saggify their breasts and muck up their nipple alignment which is devastatingly entirely true. Some don’t do it because they don’t have time, others are completely horrified with the idea. Isn’t it the right thing to do for the father of the baby to give breastfeeding a go if this is the case? Far healthier for the child, and daddy gets a taste of that wonderful bonding feeling that is a totally unique experience. It’s win-win, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?!?!?
PS… I’ve discovered via a link on the article’s web-page, that breast cancer among Swedish women has DOUBLED since the 1960’s. Coincidence or Kismet? I wonder…
The post in which K8 is told to bugger off
I went back to the Megalithic Tomb today, this time armed with bad-ass thorn resistant gardening gloves and a heady thirst for archaeology.
I worked hard for an hour, and was delighted to find a sapling Hawthorn tree, almost strangled completely with ivy. I freed it up to give it room to grow, and sent it some energy as you do… then began to work on the area around the entrance to the tomb to see if I could get inside.
A car pulled up on the road beside the field in which I was working.
“OI!!! What are you at?!” a woman in a silver car shouted from her driver’s seat. As I approached, she wound her window up to within four inches, as though I was about to attack her from the other side of a heavily barbed fence. She had a face on her like a Chihuahua chewing on an earwig.
“I’m very sorry to trespass… I…”
“You’re not trespassing!” she interrupted.
“I found this tomb over-run with brambles and thought I might take it upon myself to clean it up.” I smiled my prettiest smile.
“You have no business doing that!” she shrieked. “I’m sick of young ruffians coming in like they own the place and destroying everything, sick of it!!”
“I promise you, I’m no ruffian” I replied; “I used to be an archaeology student and this sort of thing fascinates me. I’m destroying nothing, only cleaning the place up. I’m very proud of it.”
“I’m proud of it too, so GO AWAY! When one comes in to wreck the place, the rest of them follow” she shouted.
“I didn’t mean to offend…”
“Well then GO AWAY” she shouted even louder. I began to get slightly pissed off.
“Look, if you don’t let me do this, then I can’t find a way to protect it. The Council could come in tomorrow and bulldoze the lot and we’d lose a seriously amazing piece of history.”
“It is protected!”
“I don’t believe it is… I looked on the archaeology information website and can’t find any record of it.”
“SO WHAT?!” she scowled.
“So… could you tell me how I can get permission to access the tomb to clean it up and protect it?”
“You can’t have permission!! GO AWAY!!” She smiled a demonic sort of smile and shut her window. End of conversation. I walked away, furious.
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What are the politics behind this? Does anybody know? If I’m not trespassing then who is she to tell me to leave?
I hope the tomb faeries break the pistons on her crappy little car. Stupid bint.
So close, yet so far.
Tomb raiding
I wrote a while ago (here) about my search for a Dolmen.
I failed this search for a very good reason; there is no Dolmen. There is instead a megalithic tomb, or *happy claps* possibly even a chambered grave. Thanks to the combined efforts of my dear old Dad, my neighbour, a website (what are the odds?!) and Google Earth, we found it.
Today, being the second day of our Irish summer, I decided to go and explore it. Yes, I have been given a myriad of household things to be done at Headrambles Manor, but… call me Ms Croft, the curiosity of ancient history got the better of me. Sorry Dad, the cesspit can wait.
Not much to look at, is it? Hidden in plain view by a thick blanket of raspberry brambles and nettles, the knarly looking Hawthorne tree should have been a major clue. My neighbour, before she moved away, wanted to visit this place at midnight on a full moon with me. I thought she was a bit touched for wanting to do so at the time if I’m quite honest, but today when I went to visit the tomb, I could feel what she was talking about. I felt like I was trespassing, dancing on somebody’s grave. It was not my place to explore… call me quirky, but I felt a very weird condensed sort of energy surround this place.
Armed with a pair of secateurs, hedge-clippers, gardening gloves and a ribbon, I attacked. No… wait… that sounds quite violent – of course I asked it for permission first. I’m not stupid. Just because I might not believe in something, doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t true. 1,000 ancient Irish Druids can’t be wrong, I’m not about to go inviting faery curses upon my family, thank you very much.
This is the tomb after an hour’s worth of pulling brambles apart. The ribbon on the left tied to a branch is a gift, I thought it couldn’t do any harm. The wee hill in the background is Carrickgollogan, or Catty Gallagher, if you ever wondered how Katie Gallagher’s pub beside Bray’s Dart station got its name, now you know.
At one point, a very loud “MUUUERURURRR” sound from behind startled the Bejeezus out of me. Turns out I’d attracted an audience.
After two and a half hours I had to quit to collect Puppychild, but I’ll be back. Apart from all the embedded thorns which I’m having a lot of fun tweezing out, I consider myself extremely lucky to have such an unusual pile of rocks near my gaff. Cleaning them out and taking care of them is kind of nice in a painful sort of way and besides, you never know when the Council may sneak along on a dark night and bulldoze the lot… somebody needs to classify it and protect it. That’s me I suppose.
Parknasillogue Megalithic Tomb: After a haircut
My Bladder is taking the piss
I’m sure you’ve heard dodgy stories about toilets in Thailand. Yes, they are porcelain holes in the ground. That I can deal with. It’s the lack of toilet-tissue I have problems with. Because their sewer system can’t handle solid matter other than the obvious, they supply the user with a hose fixed to the wall beside the unit and the rest, my friends, is up to your hands and your imagination. A nation of drip-driers who most likely go commando? I thought it rude to ask.
That was all well and good until TAT and I visited a bamboo tattoo studio on our penultimate day and spent the whole day being tapped to death, but that’s for another post. The bog in that place was the weirdest of all. A tiny cubicle, no hose, no toilet paper, just a bricked-up shower cubicle, an enormous spider skulking the doorframe, and a huge batik wall hanging depicting Metallica crossing over through the doorways of hell. It was all very charming until I realised a day too late that this bathroom was also E-coli heaven.
Yes, poor K8 the Gr8 spent the entire 22 hour flight home with crossed legs and crossed eyebrows and curled toes, praying teary-eyed at regular intervals for the seat-belt sign to be switched off, and convincing perplexed airline staff that peeing during take-off and rough turbulence is easy-peasy. Bloody Nazis and their safety regimes.
So, other than the fact that it’s sunny in Ireland for a change and it’s a crime to spend time indoors on blogs, this here website has been quite quiet. Sorry about that. Normal stories of deep-fried maggots, strange tattoos and Ladyboys will resume shortly, as well as a wee anecdote about how I was propositioned by a lesbian hooker if you’re very very good.
In the meantime, here’s a dodgy photo just begging for a caption;
