Of babes and men
Babies. They dribble, they cry and they smell. When Lucy (my wife) told me she was pregnant back in July 1998 she asked me how I felt about it. How does one feel about having a baby in 9 months time when one has never had one before? When I was a teenager, I had a dog called Fudge and decided it must be a little like that. Having a baby is fine as long as it gets regular walks and we remember to feed it once a day.
As the months past, my wife changed. After the first month she start dragging bits of twig into the house and arranging everything just so. We descended on friends for advice and discovered that this process was known as nesting. No longer would I be allowed to leave dirty socks lying on the bedroom floor. In the second month Lucy's sense of smell became heightened resulting in nausea. I tried to remedy the situation by spending a whole evening preparing a special dinner for her. She took one look at my home-made chicken curry and ran straight for the bathroom. Things were starting to get tricky. After the fourth month the nausea wore off and so did most of Lucy's clothes as the bump began to grow.
For some strange reason, people started giving us things. Surely all we needed was a bowl, a collar and a lead? Lucy started putting these gifts and loans into the baby's room. The baby's room? You mean the spare room, my office, the place where I keep my fishing tackle? All of a sudden my fishing tackle became relegated to the end cupboard as the other three became filled with little clothes, something called a 'Moses basket', a plastic baby bath, a cot, two kinds of baby car seat, a baby chair, baby bag, changing mat, a strange machine (still not sure what it is yet) and a baby buggy that is more complicated to operate than a lunar lander. This baby had moved in and it hadn't even arrived yet! Even more to my surprise was that everyone else seemed to know more about what was happening than me. ' Is the baby's room done yet?', they would ask. Indeed the baby's room did get done. One day I cam home from work to discover my parents had redecorated complete with cute border and matching curtains.
I was starting to cope with these changes pretty well when one night whilst snuggling in bed, Lucy appeared to have trapped wind. She guided my hand onto her bulging tummy and something inside her poked it. The baby was kicking. Lucy took it all in her stride but I'd seen the movie Alien and that episode of the X-Files where that thing started laying eggs inside human bodies that hatched and...let's say it was enough to make me wince just a little.
Over a period of just under 8 months, the strangest thing had started happening to me. I started getting broody, clucky or whatever you want to call it. I was actually looking forward to having a sprog. Other people's babies started fascinating me. I started talking to them in a strange tongue. Maybe this was the gift of tongues? 'Ello-wee-kins', 'Oochy-boochy-boo', and 'Oos-a-little-munchkin-en' became part of my everyday vocabulary and what is worse is that I didn't seem to mind.
It was still five weeks before the baby was due so I decided to spend a weekend seeing a friend in Stornoway. On the way back I called Lucy from Glasgow airport to be told by my father that she was in Basingstoke Hospital. Her waters had broken whilst shopping in Reading. I spent the next few hours panicking and raced to the hospital as soon as I could. Lucy (as usual) was calm and relaxed. The baby might come today, tomorrow or maybe even in one week. In the meantime Lucy would have to stay in hospital and she did. After a very boring week of watching Supermarket Sweep on the telly, the midwifes started inducing her. I won't bore you with the details of gels, drips, epidurals, epesiotomies and ventouses, but four days later the baby arrived. I was there for the whole thing. For those chaps out there who think all this baby stuff is wet, you're right - blood everywhere. It was the most overwhelming thing that has ever happened to me. After I left the hospital at about 4.30am, I spent the next hour bawling my eyes out.
Lucy and Gemma-Louise are home now and I've never felt such love for two people more than I do for them. I thank God every day for them both and if God's love for us is anything like my love for Gemma, He must love us very much indeed.