I'll never tell...

When S first broke the news to me that we were preggers I wanted to call up everyone I could think of right then and there. That I have poor impulse control will come as a shock to no one.* I’m the kind of person who wants to give Christmas\Birthday gifts as soon as I buy them. Waiting for the actual day to come around is pure agony. But, in this case, we decided to wait a week and tell our families on Mother’s Day, purchasing two Happy Grandmother’s Day cards and patting ourselves on the back about how clever and funny we were.

Our families were thrilled. And naturally they understood the need to keep things under wrap for the time being. But this task turned out to be easier said then done. I didn’t develop poor impulse control all on my own, it’s a learned behaviour. For nearly a month now my mother has been driving herself nuts because she’s got such great news and can’t tell anybody what it is. When she got a phone call from my uncle on Mother’s Day we nearly had to restrain her. And it doesn’t help that she keeps buying things ‘for the baby.’

“That’s a real nice high chair you’re buying, who’s pregnant?”

Our reasons for keeping this good news a secret are fairly typical. A woman has a greater chance of miscarriage in the first three months of a pregnancy. After about 12 weeks those odds drop dramatically. So it’s best to just wait and see how things are going before you tell people something you can’t take back. Or, as our doctor put it, ‘don’t tell anyone that you wouldn’t tell if something went wrong.’

Since Mother’s Day we’ve managed to violate our own Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy almost half a dozen times. S was forced to tell a couple people at work so they would know there was a legitimate reason why she couldn’t look at certain patients. And I insisted that I get to tell at least one of my friends so I’d have an outside opinion I could consult whenever some crazy idea pops into me head.

“Don’t tell S, but I really like the name Diana Prince if it’s a girl. Whaddya think?”

We’ve plugged the slow leak but I’d lay money that at least some of our friends have clued in to what’s going on. S’s crew are always on the look out for changes in behaviour. Everyone and everything is suspect. When S took a couple days off work due to her unrelenting morning sickness we started getting quizzical phone calls from her co-workers, not-so-subtly fishing for information.

Apparently we’re also predictable creatures of habit. We went out for dinner with some friends and when S had a 7up instead of her usual beer my ex-roomate piped up with “Wassa matter, you pregnant?”

For me the tricky part is remembering that not everyone knows. I’m plotting the next six months of our around our forthcoming ankle biter and it sometimes slips my mind that I have a secret I’m not supposed to be sharing. So when someone asks why we’re so determined to move before the fall I have to have a credible lie ready to tell them.

An ode to meat

S was so happy in the early days of the pregnancy that her normally weak constitution had apparently dodged the morning sickness bullet. When we were informing a select group of family members about our impending peanut she proudly drew attention to her lack of morning sickness. Apparently this was enough to tempt the gods of irony because soon after her declaration she started piling up stomach turning food aversions like a squirrel storing its nuts before winter.

There’s only one way to figure out if a certain type of food is going to make you nauseous. And that’s the hard way.

Losing tomatoes was unfortunate, but hardly devestating. Losing red meat at the height of BBQ season? That’s a body blow.

I’m not going to lie to you, I’m fairly big on eating meat and taking it out of my diet has not been fun. I’ve caught myself daydreaming about hamburgers and sausages as I struggle with whatever vegetarian concoction I’m trying to pass off as lunch. Just because rabbits can get by on lettuce doesn’t mean I should.

Oh sure, the first day of our new eating regimen was fantastic. I got to empty the entire fridge of all meat products and spent my time at work happily munching on pepperettes. I was blissed out, new baby and complete possession of all the household meat products. What more could you ask for? But all too soon the fridge was empty and my dinner plate was filled with these strange and unusually shaped objects called ‘vegetables.’ It was tough. Vegetarianism is all well and good, enforced vegetarianism is tantamount to torture.

Sometimes I can’t stand it. The smells of meat are everywhere. At night the scent of BBQed steaks waft in through open windows. Co-workers heat up their lunches, spreading the enticing odour of leftover meatloaf everywhere.

I am awash in the heady perfume of red meat and unable to do anything about it.

Baby on board

That’s right, we’re pregnant.

That sounds weird. Because, um, the last time I checked, I lacked a lot of the anatomy necessary to carry a baby. But I can’t tell people ‘oh, my wife is pregnant,’ because, as she points out, she didn’t get knocked up by herself. Someone else had a hand in this, someone who looks an awful lot like me.

Although I’ve been sitting on this post for over two months, at the time of its writing I’d known we’d been preggers for two weeks. And I don’t think I’ve slept soundly through the night since we found out the good news. And it is good news, great news in fact. But it’s also terrifying and frightening. I don’t know anything about being a parent. I still spend a healthy part of my weekends watching morning cartoons. Now the giant man-boy, more concerned with comic books and computer games than one-sies and strollers, has less than nine months to pull his shit together and start laying the foundation for a new kind of life. A life that incorporates the DINKs we used to be with the overworked, overstressed and overrun parents we’re about to become.

Despite what I think (and hope) I can already conclusively say that our pregnancy won’t be much like this. In fact all of my knowledge of what to expect when you’re expecting comes from TV. And apparently that bastard has been lying to me half my life because I don’t know anything.

All I have is questions, and a big gaping black hole between my ears where the answers are supposed to be hiding. So I do what I always do when I bump against something I don’t understand, I grab all the books on the subject that I can find and read the shit out of them. Although rather than solve my dilemma in this case it really only seems to be lead to even more questions. But I take solace in the fact that they seem to be more focused and relevant, somewhat along the line of When is a good time to start bottle feeding? as opposed to, Babies come out of where now?

But what I’ve really noticed is how the arrival of our little peanut has caused me to take a good long look at myself. As S would say, only I could take our pregnancy and use it as an excuse to make it all about me. But she’s not quite right. I’m looking at myself because now I have to make some very real choices about what kind of parent will I be.

How will my parenting style differ from that of my own folks? Or, even more chilling, what will the similarities be? Will I be able to find the right line between doting parent and disciplinarian-for-hire when necessary? What sort of experiences will I expose, or not expose my child too? And when? I don’t even like cleaning the cat’s litter box how will I manage dirty diapers. Oh god, I was a horrible teenager, will my kid be as bad as I was? How will I deal with that?

You can boil all these questions down to a single thought, what kind of person am I?

Because you can’t really take responsibility for someone else’s life until you’ve got a pretty solid understanding on the elements that make up your own.

I’ve got a lot of thinking ahead of me, and some pretty important decisions that are going to come out of it all. This is the pre-season right now*, where I get the luxury of doing all the work on paper and making strictly theoretical plans. It’s a time to blue sky and imagine all the wonderful potential for the season ahead. But soon enough, the regular season will come and I need to make damn sure that I’m prepared. Because that’s when reality sets in and the choices I make won’t effect just me anymore.

*Oh god, I’m using sporting metaphors to illustrate child rearing. This is how it starts.