Pregnancy: on the whole, I am glad to be a bloke

Unexpected discoveries on the brink of old age include this: being pregnant with a breech baby is very like voting in a British General Election.

Despite appearances, I am not pregnant myself; but my wife unmistakably is. And our baby, due in February, is resolutely refusing to adopt the approved position for a conventional delivery, despite increasingly voluble encouragement to do so.

Mrs Hann reckons that this can only be because he is stubborn to the point of self-defeating bloody-mindedness, like his elder brother. I am genuinely unaware of anything in their genetic inheritance that could account for this profound flaw in their characters.

A small boy reluctantly obeying instructions he does not agree with

In case you are wondering, the similarity to voting in a General Election is that medics keep outlining various ways of dealing with the problem, and my wife’s reaction is the same as mine when confronted with a ballot paper: she does not fancy any of the above one little bit.

Whether that be performing origami on her womb before delivery, extracting the baby by Caesarean section or simply allowing nature to take its course (with special emphasis on how they would respond if the infant got stuck on his way out, as breech babies are apparently more prone to do).

Sadly, Mrs Hann does not have the option of spoiling her ballot paper and walking out of the polling station in disgust. One way or another, a decision has to be made quite soon on how to bring young Jamie into the world.

So tomorrow we are going to hospital for our consultant’s Plan A: attempting to turn the baby around inside his mother.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy: what could possibly go wrong?

This comes with plenty of caveats. It will be painful. It may distress the baby or damage the placenta. It could even induce premature labour and require an emergency Caesarean section. Best of all, even if it is successful, there is every chance that the baby could simply turn straight back round again. Particularly, I suppose, if he has already shown form as an awkward little so-and-so.

Luckily the doctor was quick to set my wife’s mind at rest when she said that she had read that the chances of this happening were as high as 50%.

“No, no, it’s much closer to 40%”, came the confident reply, as though that made it pretty much a dead cert.

The baby is scheduled to be induced before full term in any case, because Mrs Hann has gestational diabetes, and this happy event has already been pencilled in for Friday week.

I saw the light bulb clicking on above my wife’s head.

“Here’s an idea,” she said. “Why don’t you just wait until you are ready to deliver him anyway, and try to turn him around then?”

“Oh no, we can’t do that.”

“Why?”

“Er, logistical reasons.”

“Such as?”

“The bloke who knows how to turn babies around only comes in on Wednesdays.”

So are the great life-and-death decisions of our wonderful health service arrived at. For some reason my mind wandered off at this point to that South African hospital where unexplained deaths in the intensive care unit turned out to due to a cleaner disconnecting the life support machine to plug in her vacuum cleaner. Though that is probably an urban myth, as most good stories turn out to be.

I do not know why women willingly put themselves through all this, and I certainly do not know why so many of them volunteer to do it more than once. Particularly in our case, when I kept leaving all those magazine articles about happy only children so prominently lying around, and even made one the home page of our computer.

All I can do is hold my wife’s hand, smile reassuringly and think, as I so often do when I run into the participants in elections: “Rather you than me.”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

And the bad news is: my son is not a psychic

My mother was almost 45 when I was born, so there was never any chance that I might acquire a younger sibling. Which was nice, so far as I was concerned.

Indeed my principal objection to my early domestic arrangements was that they included a grown-up brother who still lived at home, preventing me from being the sole focus of my parents’ attention.

I longed to be an only child, and conversations over the years with sibling-free acquaintances have revealed few complaints; except among those who have found themselves responsible for the care of two ill and aged parents, with no one to share the practical or emotional burden.

I have nodded sympathetically to their tales of woe, while privately thinking that it constituted a reasonable payback for the undivided parental interest they enjoyed during childhood.

So I cut articles out of newspapers and magazines about how happy only children can be, and left them strategically positioned around the house in places where my wife was likely to see them.

I also lost no opportunity to tut about the Earth’s population approaching the seven billion mark, the looming energy crisis and the collapse of the global economy. All making it very undesirable for us to bring more children into the world, and pretty much guaranteeing that they would have a miserable time if we did.

This worked as well as most of my schemes, and Mrs Hann somehow managed to get pregnant, against staggering odds. We then felt compelled to introduce two-year-old Charlie to some of the basic facts of life, at least a decade before anyone tried to do so with me, in an attempt to stop him bouncing on his expanding mother while shouting “I squish mummy”.

This worked a treat. He continued to behave in exactly the same way, but now yelled “I squish the baby” as he leapt on top of her.

He also announced to anyone who passed his way that “Mummy’s got a girl baby in her tummy”. And, despite his evident immaturity and the fact that he had no track record whatsoever as a clairvoyant, we started to believe this to be true. No doubt partly because, in his mother’s case at least, it chimed with her own wish to have a daughter.

Just over a week ago, in the absence of any suitable volunteers for babysitting duties, we had the pleasure of Charlie’s company when we went to hospital for a 20 week anatomy scan. Throughout the journey we tried to maintain his interest by telling him that we were going to take a look at his little brother or sister.

“Sister,” he corrected us pointedly each time.

He made friends with a little girl of around his own age in the waiting room and they rampaged around in the noisiest possible fashion. It was obvious from the facial expressions of some spectators that this was making those experiencing their first pregnancy wonder what on earth they had let themselves in for.

Then we had the scan and the sonographer pronounced, after confirming that we would like to know the outcome, that our second child was going to be another boy.

At which all hell broke loose as Charlie wailed “I don’t want a brother!” Hoping, presumably, for a response along the lines of “Oh, sorry, I hadn’t realised. In that case, it’s a girl.”

Mrs Hann has, on the whole, borne any resulting disappointment much more stoically than her son.

As for me, study of the Hann family tree suggested an inherent bias to the male, so it was the conclusion I expected. And I am naturally attracted to the economies we will be able to realise by passing Charlie’s old clothes, toys and other impedimenta on to the new baby.

That’s on top of the huge savings I am already making now that I have accepted that Charlie has no psychic powers, and have stopped giving him a crayon and each day’s racing pages in the hope that he will pick me a winner. He has been a consistent disappointment in picking Lottery numbers, too; but at least I can now hope for more profitable gifts in his brother.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Another big win in the lottery of life

I never had much time for Father’s Day, being inclined to dismiss it as a bogus invention of the greetings card industry. A line I almost certainly picked up from my own cynical dad.

After he died 30 years ago the event did not impinge on my consciousness at all until 2009, when I first received a card and present, and naturally started thinking that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

But even this softening up process did little to prepare me for the shocking impact of Father’s Day 2011, which will be seared on my memory forever. Because that was the morning when Mrs Hann entered our bedroom wearing a big, silly grin and brandishing a positive pregnancy test.

Last time she brought me this news I had high hopes that it was a technical error, until her GP advised us that commercial pregnancy tests may sometimes yield false negative results, but never false positives.

So this time I rapidly resigned myself to my fate, keeping shtoom until the end of her first trimester as conventional prudence recommends. While marvelling at the tact with which so many of Mrs Hann’s friends and colleagues were diplomatically ignoring the clear evidence of her expanding waistline. I suppose, once you have endured the embarrassment of saying “When’s it due?” to a fat lady, you take extra care not to repeat the mistake.

But now it is deemed safe to broadcast the news because we have been to the hospital and had one of those scans, which at least revealed that there is only one bun developing in the oven, with the timer due to “ping” for its release into the world in February 2012.

A random foetus (for illustrative purposes only): I'm much too dumb to scan our own scan picture

Mrs Hann is wearing a big, silly grin again and happily showing off one of those black and white scan images that looks for all the world like a faint picture of ET viewed on a 405 line black and white television in an area with notoriously poor reception, during a particularly powerful electrical storm.

It is not often that I look at the products of modern technology and reflect on how primitive they will surely seem half a century on, but this is one instance where I certainly do.

So all that time I invested in cutting out articles from the papers about how happy only children can be has come to naught, and my wife’s long-standing wish that Charlie should have a sibling looks set to be realised. The woman has her way. How surprising is that?

I thought my secret weapons in this conflict of wills were great age, dedicated inactivity and the awesome power of statistics. Just look at the sharply declining lines on charts of age versus fertility for both men and women, and you will see instantly what I mean. But sadly all these proved to be as much use as Britain’s Great Panjandrum revolving rocket bomb on D-Day.

Sharing my secret with an older, wiser and infinitely richer friend over lunch shortly after Father’s Day, he took a sharp intake of breath and observed that I had had more chance of winning the lottery. Then he pondered for a moment and said, “But then you’ve already won the lottery, haven’t you?”

I frantically racked my brain for the evidence. I know I always tick the box for no publicity, but surely even I would not have forgotten a life-changing event like that?

Then I realised that he was talking about meeting my wife and having my son, rescuing me from the life of a solitary curmudgeon. Which is an undisputed boon, even if the new arrival looks certain to push my retirement date well past my 80th birthday. In consequence, all suggestions for profitable employment and foolproof casino-beating wheezes will be received with the utmost gratitude.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.