Before we bring our own little treasures into the world, our parents try telling us this, but we just laugh in their faces. Of course, it was hard for them; they were doing it all wrong. Therefore, perhaps with the arrogance of youth and certainly the bliss of the ignorant, with stars in our eyes we go forth to multiply.
As the female in this endeavour, you read all of the literature on the best way to fall pregnant. You use a calendar to track your cycle, eat all of the vegetables recommended and start to take little vitamins and minerals that interfere with your bodily functions. “That’s ok”, you tell yourself. “This is for my baby”. Women plan for days, weeks and months to ensure that everything is right so that their little bundle of joy will arrive before Christmas, after the football season ends, at the beginning of the new financial year, or on Great Aunty Joy’s birthday. Of course, the reality is that the condom will break while you are still in ‘practice phase’ of baby making and, as a result, your baby will be due three weeks before or after you are due to stand up at your best friend’s wedding as Matron of Honour. The prospective father has contributed to this very important phase – he bought the faulty condoms.
Having failed the first step in planning for the perfect timing for having your baby, you want to confirm that you are in fact expecting. Hoping that you won’t drench your shoes (or underwear), you decide to pee on a stick because you don’t want to wait four days until your doctor’s appointment. When we had our first child, these home testing kits were as reliable as a politician, but they have become more sensitive and accurate over the last three decades. Having established that you are in fact pregnant, you will then start to make a memory book with the urine-covered pee-stick glued to the first page for posterity. For the next few weeks, the world is rosy as you carry your little secret safely inside. That is until you start to get ‘morning sickness’.
It should be said here that this term had to have been coined by a man. No woman in her right mind would have called it this. It would have been called ‘the most inconvenient time of the day sickness’ or the ‘not now, I’m driving sickness’. For me, it was the ‘all-day sickness’ and it didn’t occur between week six and week thirteen as the text books (and doctors) would have you believe. Oh no; for me it was almost from day one. Those little aliens sucked the life out of me on the inside and made me expel anything they didn’t want to consume. My husband still likes to tell people it was like living with Regan from the Exorcist. Happily, this usually settled down sometime before the sixteenth week, as is the case for most expectant mothers.
At the same time as you are trying not to let your insides become your outsides, your pregnancy carer will most likely refer you to have an ultrasound completed. These have become commonplace over the last twenty-five years or so, but prior to that it was very rare that this technology was used in this way. These days ultrasound is used to run a gamut of tests from determining the due date for the baby, to measuring risk probability for a range of physical and developmental conditions that can affect unborn babies, before thirteen weeks gestation. After this, usually between nineteen and twenty-one weeks, another ultrasound is completed to check the health and progress of the baby and to check for potential risk factors for the baby and mother. It is now possible to get a 3D scanned image of your baby. We didn’t ever ask for a 3D image of any of our babies. To me, very early iterations of this 3D imaging service gave the babies the look of being cryo-packed in the womb, and that was just a little too out there for me.
As this is your first baby (and you don’t know any better), you can’t wait until your little baby bump starts to show. For many first time expectant mothers it may be months before they are able to show off their fabulous baby body. With my first, mainly due to my Regan impersonations, I didn’t start to appear pregnant until I was about seven months along, and I have to admit that I felt a little robbed. With my subsequent pregnancies, I appeared to be seven months pregnant almost from day one and again I was not a happy camper. Stupid pregnancy hormones! The expectant father is superfluous at this stage until the stupid pregnancy hormones kick your libido into overdrive. I theorise that this is a biological imperative to lull men into a false sense of security that their sex-life will not be affected by the arrival of children and thereby ensure that we do not end up with an overabundance of one-child families.
While the baby continues growing and as your internal organs are turned into playground objects that the baby loves to bounce on, you continue to plan for the second half of your pregnancy. All of the important things such as a ‘boy or girl reveal party’ with sixty of your closest friends, which is in addition to the baby shower you expect your best friend to surprise you with. Should you have the party at home, or should you hire a hall? How will you handle the ‘big reveal’? Setting up the gift register for gift suggestions you will offer your friends and family. All very important and complex stuff.
At some stage, your health care provider is going to ask you to consider your birth plan. A birth plan is made up of all of the wonderful ideals you have fixed in your mind, focusing on the arrival of your baby. Everything from the clothes you want to wear, your decisions around using gas, pain medication or epidural, do you need to have a caesarean scheduled for medical reasons, or because you are ‘too posh to push’? Which soothing, esoteric music will you have playing softly in the background? Do you want photos taken, who will be your support person, in addition to the father? I know very few people who have actually followed their birth plan. When push comes to shove (no pun intended) a birth plan is equivalent to a federal budget. You just need to accept that it will most likely change somewhere between the planning and the doing.
In the final stage of becoming a parent, the father once again becomes very important as the arrival of your child is imminent. They need to be prepared to be yelled at and abused for their contributions to your current state. It is imperative they have undertaken strengthening exercises to ensure they don’t end up with permanent injury to their hands, and just accept that there is probably very little that they will get right between the time you go into labour and the time the baby actually makes an appearance. My husband was able to get almost a full range of motion back in his left hand with diligent physiotherapy.
Yep, becoming a parent is tough.
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