Small Pink Things Part II

I had a couple of other friends pregnant at around the same time. One knew the sex of her baby and its name but she called it the ‘small pink thing’. I sent her an SMS one day when she was a week late, on some latest findings about encouraging labour. It was recommended she consume large quantities of raspberry leaf in either tea or tablet form. She sent me an SMS back just a mere couple of hours later telling me she was force feeding herself tonnes of raspberry leaf so she would have the ripest cervix ever to help bring that baby out NOW. She had, had enough of it being in there.

The other friend who conceived for the first time discovered she was having triplets. It blew everybody away especially her husband who wasn’t sure he wanted one at all. She went shopping for a triplet pram not long after and was shocked to discover they sold at a modest price of $1500. That’s mental. That is a flight to Los Angeles.

For some reason I always naively assumed that when pregnant the desire for drinks and cigarettes instantly goes. Maybe for some it does but two of my friends who were pregnant had always been party kind of people who have always liked a few adult bevvies and puffs. Occasionally we heard coming out of their mouths,

“God, I’d kill for a nice cool Jim Beam and a cigarette.”

“Give me succour. I need wine and I want to inhale some fags.”

“When this thing is out of me,” they say.

“What?” I retorted, “You’ll have two drinks and want to go home, or fall over whichever comes first.”

They both commented that they wished they could carry a small heated baby bag or even an incubator with them and just pop the baby out of their womb at will at social gatherings and put it back in after the evening is over.

“We could market this?” they said.

“It’s a great invention.”

Course it is girls. I’ve noticed more than one disturbed thought process in both of them and forgetful, lose the car, lose a bag, leave the dog tied up outside the shop a kilometre away. Or forget you brought a bag to the movies and report it stolen from home to the police.

It’s the actual birth stories that I hate hearing. Apart from tales of drugs and tearing, the most common thing I hear about is when the woman screams in a primal fashion at her husband, without any sign of love whatsoever,

“I hate your guts you bastard,” and then screams at the doctor, “GET that fucking thing out of me,” as if it were not her small child being delivered but some alien creature that had crawled on in there of its own free will and is now clinging onto her uterus walls for dear life. It can probably hear her and is terrified to come out and is already calling her bitch or motherfucker.

All I can say is ouch. And who is the woman who tells people it’s like shelling peas. It has to be just one woman because I’ve only ever heard it once. She was one of the world’s earliest politicians trying to encourage a population increase and she was a bloody liar I think. Can’t wait to do it myself!

Now the hardest role for us as visitors to the new baby in the hospital is to say how cute it is when in actual fact it is the most unsightly hideous monkey child looking thing you have ever laid eyes on and ever hope to again. And you have to say convincingly, “Oh how gorgeous, oh he’s just lovely, lovely.”

You just know when walking out of there that the first thing that you and your partner will say to each other is, “Jesus, what THE HELL was that?”

But you have to goo and gah in all the right places because the parents think he is beautiful (and love is blind) and they feel they have done a bloody marvellous thing here (and they have, although it really is just a lucky root) and it is just not visitor etiquette to say what you really think. You also know that it will be your turn one day and that your baby will be absolutely gorgeous. On a positive note I have actually seen ugly babies turn out okay when it loses its monkey fur and gets a normal colour happening.

Don’t the mothers look different when you go in and see them in hospital? It’s their eyes. They are so wide and alarmed looking and you just know that it is the last time for a while that you will see this mothers eyes as open as this. I think it has something to do with the fact that everyone on earth has seen your bits with extras and the actuality that that small thing came out of that, well, really little thing.

I’ve got a couple of friends who are trying to get pregnant at the moment and are having a bit of trouble. Could be something to do with the fact that they are lesbians. They are actually on a program where once per month one of the girls goes to a clinic and gets a shot of sperm and then they wait and see.