Questions, questions and more questions

I guess this is the point in my pregnancy that I realise just how little I know.

“When are you meeting your obstetrician?” demanded my mother-in-law. Er, I don’t know. Do I even get an obstetrician? What do they do? Should I know this?
“Will they keep you in for about six days?” Another question from my mother-in-law. I’m fairly sure the answer is no to this. Times have changed since the days when going private was a relatively affordable thing. Now I expect I’ll be kicked out into the street in a matter of minutes with a newborn in one hand and load of psychotically cheerful informative leaflets in the other, to free up the bed.
“Have you thought about your birth plan?” Er no. What’s a birth plan? Apparently its where you decide things like whether you want to suffer unimaginable agony or whether you want pain relief. Well that’s an easy one.

I have questions of my own though – pressing ones. Like, for example, will my tits continue to grow at their current rate? Pretty soon we’re going to need a third bedroom just to accommodate them. I tried on something I always remember as a loose and flowing sundress last night, thinking, well, I can float around Cannes looking like a purple jellyfish wearing this. The seams positively groaned. It looked practically obscene.

Words of comfort last night from L who had his first child with P twelve years ago, when we all knew considerably more about clubbing than childrearing. They took their newborn baby home, sat down and stared at him. Then both simultaneously burst into tears. Fortunately, both their kids are gorgeous and happy, so they did something right.

ITSABAYBEE!ITSABAYBEE!

I was expecting a certain amount of drama when we broke the news to S’s parents. But I didn’t realise quite how close we would come to killing his mum. Perhaps, in retrospect, S’s chosen technique wasn’t the gentlest of methods. He simply handed an envelope containing the pictures from our scan across to her and smirked as she opened it and, to put it frankly, completely lost her shit. ‘OHMYGOD! OHMYGOD I’m hyperventilating!’ she wailed, looking genuinely ill and clutching at her chest. I glanced around the restaurant, trying to calculate the likelihood of a cardiologist eating at one of the other tables. No dice. The average age of the punters was about 80, and most looked as if they had been bussed in from 1974. S’s dad looked at the pictures in complete bemusement. ‘What is it? I can’t see what it is’ he said plaintively. S’s mum let out this kind of primal howl. ‘ITSABAYBEE!ITSABAYBEE!ITSABAYBEE!’ which didn’t really leave much room for doubt in the matter. ‘Oh’, said his dad. ‘I thought it was something you had run over.’ Yes, my father-in-law actually compared my unborn child to road-kill.

Later in the evening, S’s dad turned to me and informed me that I was carrying a boy. Apparently the fact that he has been doing yoga for forty years has imbued him with a kind of sixth sense about these things. There are probably other things he could have said which would have irritated me more, but off hand I can’t think of what they might be. This from the man who can’t tell a foetus from a squashed squirrel.

The first of the useful suggestions:

Mom: You will look after yourself won’t you? Really look after yourself?
(What does she think I actually get up to? crystal meth with a brandy chaser for breakfast?)

Amelie and Olivia, age 3 ½ : I think you should call the baby Tinkerbell!
(Yeah. I'll be filing that along with Tiara Sparkles and Fresno Suicide in my list of names to wind my relatives up)

Does my foetus look fat in this?

The day of reckoning. The day when I learn whether I’m carrying a two-headed freak child or something approaching normal. I kick off the day by watching Case 39 starring Renee Zellweger as a well-meaning social worker and Jodelle Ferland as a demon-child who has slaughtered most of her family and sent her parents to the loony bin. Nice choice.

The clinic is in the basement of a townhouse on Harley Street. The entrance hall is decorated with faux-naïve paintings of women presumably meant to signify fecundity, tranquillity and auspiciously complication-free pregancies. There’s a tense silence in the waiting room. Thin, rich women pretend to read copies of Grazia. Couples converse in strained whispers. Performing my scan is Dr Violeta Stratieva, a steely Russian woman who punches me repeatedly in the stomach in order to ‘wake baby up’. ‘This hurts?’ she says – it’s more a statement than a question – before telling me, accusingly, that my bladder is very full. I guiltily shuffle off to the loo, with lubricant jelly still damp and clammy on my stomach. It’s kind of like the walk of shame but without the sexual indiscretion.

We get a better look at the foetus. It has a brain. ‘Good brain’, says Dr Violeta approvingly. It has the full complement of limbs and kidneys. It has a fat little pot belly. The heart is beating. My heart, I realise, is beating almost as fast. I’m far more nervous than I thought I would be. Dr Violeta gives us the full run down. Everything is normal. The risk of Downs is downgraded from 1 in 75 to just under 1 in 1500. The baby is towards the top end of normal in terms of its size. I have a fat foetus.

£201,000 to raise a child?

Get the fuck out of here.

I refuse to believe it. I’m sure that at least 50% of that goes on the toxic plastic shit that I am already planning to ban from my home, and the other 50% goes on Pokemon stickers. Little Ignatz will have a wooden clog to play with and will have to make his own entertainment out of empty carrier bags and used toothbrushes. If he’s good, he might get the other clog the following Christmas. Probably.

The big disappointment

I should probably be grateful that I haven’t had the urge to start licking the creosote from fences or munching handfuls of cat litter. But I can’t help but feel a little let down that I haven’t had the slightest sniff of a weird food craving. Since I have been approaching this pregnancy a little like a science project (it’s the best way I can think of to stop myself screaming with fear on a daily basis), I was rather looking forward to observing myself from a detached distance as I binged on raw potato or wood shavings or whatever it is that pregnant women find themselves scoffing. But so far, nothing. What’s particularly galling is that my mother-in-law craved good, solid Eastern European peasant food throughout her first pregnancy and McDonalds all through her second. And I am sure, once the news breaks, she will tell me all about this and every other detail of her pregnancy, on a daily basis, until the end of time. I’m planning to tell her I’m craving Sauvignon Blanc. Which is true, as a matter of fact.

The ups and the downs

To say I’m a little up and down would be an understatement. One day I’m perky and full of beans, the next I’m brooding and weeping over magazine articles and – weird this one – an estate agent’s website. It’s an emotional rollercoaster and other convenient clichés. Current status? Not great – I made the injudicious mistake of watching a documentary set in the maternity ward of Southampton hospital last night and found myself wailing at the screen in anguish. Followed that with a film about mothers whose sons hate them and attack them with knives and furniture and stuff. So, let’s get this straight – it’s going to hurt like buggery and them the little fuck will hate your guts? Where do I sign up? Oh, that's right. I already did.