The Main Issue

Archives

Horoscopes

Accessories

Theatre

Fables

About Us

Contact Us

---

Sign-Up:

Name:

Email:

Search Sane:

---

Choose Your Sign Taurus Leo Virgo Gemini Capricorn Cancer Pisces Aries Libra Scorpio Sagittarius Aquarius

TMGTNBP 1.1

Continued, believe it or not, at long last, from a while ago.

Getting Started

So what will you notice in that fateful first month?

Well, first off, the hormones raging around your body will begin preparing you for... wait, no. You will have no additional hormones rushing around your body, unless you happen to be a professional athlete, struggling going into a contract year. In fact, if you are a professional athlete on hormones, legal or otherwise, it might make an interesting sidebar in future editions of this book to hear how similar your and your wife's experience is as both she and you experience the flood of chemicals rushing around your body.

So what you really need to prepare for is the influx of books into your once happy home. Maybe your tastes previously ran to Sue Grafton, Dennis Lehane, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Jonathan Swift... you will more likely than not be facing a barrage of books detailing what she will be going through (and, by inference, you will not) over the course of the next nine months.

The first thing you might notice about these books, and the process of you ot being pregnant in general, is that, for whatever reason, months are deemed too coarse to capture the true course of things. Like the Ross Ice Shelf (if you're reading this in the future, the Ross Ice Shelf was a large chunk of ice on the edge of Antarctica, what looked like a really large land mass at the bottom of the globe, but turned out to be no bigger than a couple of chaise lounges with accompanying side tables when all that ice melted), this little unexpected code word for a period of time in which a person (not you) finds themselves pregnant is just the tip of a very large, nearly all submerged ice berg of coded words, hand signals, secret handshakes, and outright lies you will uncover at almost every step of the way of becoming a parent into the stage where you actually are one.

Your partner's doctor, savvy friends on the block who happen to be nurses, women in your life who've been pregnant, themselves, all will start referring to what you'd previously heard was a nine month gestational period for the human infant (straight out of biology class) as a forty week trek towards getting that sucker out. Perhaps someone got bitten by a leap year and the old "thirty days hath September..." rhyme and a baby popped out too early, or too late. But for whatever reason, your loved one, and mini, gestating loved one to be are now on a forty week timetable. It's also possible this attempt to jar you a little bit out of your monthly comfort zone is designed to prepare you for parenthood in a few ways. The first and most obvious is that the switch from months to weeks (if we can do this, why can't the people of the U.S. with children switch from the English measurement system to the metric system?) will give you a severe mental jolt, the same way you will be jolted months down the line (when you've reverted back to months or years to refer to the passage of time) when you wake up in your comfy arm chair to find yourself holding a drooping child, smelling of vomit and something else you can't quite place, the child's cheek stuck to your now filthy tshirt.

The second, and initially less obvious facet of the time change, is to prepare your mind to be more mentally agile. It is, after all, more difficult to remember forty numbers than it is to remember 9 months.

So the books will pile up, and the phrase about opinions and... well, rear ends, to be polite, and everyone having one will occur to you at least once a day.

Depending on the reaction of your partner to the special blend of hormones she's just received, the bathroom will become an important place. Smells, tastes, and all sorts of other sensory trigger may become unpleasant... and you may be the creator of some of those smells. I'm not being cruel here, and we're not talking about solely potty humor type of smells, but just the general stink of ourselves as human beings going about our business everyday may be enough to overpower the poor girl, and set her on edge. And you do not want to set a pregnant woman on edge. One of the goals, over the next forty weeks, then, will be to not set them on edge. If you can, shift your bathroom habits to another one. If you don't have another one as an alternative to whatever one she finds convenient, consider building an outhouse. Or moving near a coffee shop with a public-ish restroom.

Nearly as important and related to the hormones, do not laugh at your partner when they suggest they need to go out and buy maternity clothes at this stage. Ignore the fact that they look no different than the day they did before the pregnancy test, except maybe a bit paler, and possibly thinner, depending on their amount of morning sickness. Do take pictures, though, of your adorable partner, for example, in a swimsuit near the ocean in Hawai'i, cradling what she imagines is her belly with her two hands. While you can't laugh too much now, you'll both laugh about it later.

12 Nov, 2007

Your weekly horoscopes.

The Main Issue     Archives     Horoscopes     About Us     Contact Us