I blame Disney

‘Cheeky little monkey’ rings out quite often in the homes of the pregnant.

Or at least it does if our home is anything to go by.

We’ve projected a playful persona upon this child. A mischievous wee bugger, scurrying from one side of the belly to the other, delightfully lodging its feet between the ribs of its host, happily toying with the idea of snapping a couple.

Every kick is interpreted as a spirited wink to the outside world, each head butt to the cervical canal a merry nod of its cap in our direction, and all occurrences of an internal organ being trod on is merely an impish wave.

We’ve mentally made this child into a rogue. A scut. A tease. Everyone does, while of course this could be complete and utter nonsense.

What if digging a heel into a bladder is the kid telling us to stop singing, or each head-first dive for the emergency exit is its way of telling us that there is a dreadful smell in there, or each fist pumped into the uterine wall is a demand for the immediate removal of Mugabe.

What if the child is a disgruntled old thing? A grump in a bump. A foetal Victor (or Victoria) Meldrew, constantly displeased with everything around it.

Simply put, we don’t know what it’s thinking, or what its bursts of activity mean. What we interpret as a pixie-like dance with an umbilical chord along to the top 40 chart countdown may in fact be the child freaking out, swinging its lifeline around its head in uncontrollable rage, like a nine iron in the paws of a pro golfer’s discontented spouse.

What makes us force a happy personality on a human who dines on their own urine and whose greatest ability is jabbing itself in the face with a fist it doesn’t know it has?

I believe we are extremely lucky that babies can’t talk, otherwise we’d be witnessing a barrage of abuse in delivery rooms and birthing centres the entire world over. We’d be inundated with complaints of being poked and pushed and prodded into uncomfortable places, being ridiculed over the weight it was carrying, cramped conditions, dreadful food, hideously uncomfortable journeys, late arrivals, and reaching the other side without a stitch of clothing.

They would reveal to us the horrifying truth that pregnancy and birth is in fact a service provided by Ryanair, a fact that we as a civilisation are just not ready to cope with.

Because

I’m sitting here on Christmas Eve and I’m of the opinion I may be going just ever so slightly mad.

It’s not because I take my own life into my hands anytime I step outside the door, the 3 inches of ice up and down our road testing my already dubiously misaligned centre of gravity. Cranial blood on fresh snow is a tremendous sight.

It’s not because people have gone demented. Even though there’s no milk in the supermarket, the vegetable aisle is a fire hazard, and I saw an old woman bludgeon a teenage boy to death for the last six pack of Heineken. The shops do open again on Saturday, right?

It’s not because I’m twice as drunk as I ever am because my biblically pregnant other half is sipping horse chestnut juice or some such, leaving me to ‘waste not, want not’ and finish every bottle that gets opened. Those nightclub sized bottles of gin were a bad idea.

It’s not because I’ve noticed that I have a bigger gut, more stretch marks and higher blood pressure than the aforementioned human incubator, meaning that either they squirted that wallpaper paste into the wrong half of this couple or I need to eat a vegetable occasionally.

It’s not because I can’t come up with a second verse to the ‘night before Christmas’ beyond:

It was the night before Christmas, when all through the house

The foetus was kicking, trying hard to get out’

Creativity is dead, I can live with that.

It’s because now, today, on Christmas Eve we are just 7 weeks and 6 days away.

7 weeks, 6 days.

Fa la la la lah, la la la laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!

Was Madonna Dutch?

There are going to be a couple of interesting hurdles to navigate in bringing a child into this very below sea-level of worlds that is Holland.

The language itself doesn’t bother me, learning how to say ‘go ask your mother’ in Dutch should save most of my blushes, while proclaiming ignorance of what is being said will spare the remainder.

The food may even turn out to be an interesting experiment; the Dutch are a giant race, every single one of them directly descended from Gulliver. What better way is there to settle the nature versus nurture argument than by feeding the child of two vertically challenged individuals Dutch food and see if we grow a six-footer? I’ll see it as a challenge.

The traditions are different, but we can adjust. While the rest of the world’s children are preparing for Santa Claus this week, the great Dutch gift giver has been and gone since early December.

Sinterklaas is an elderly Bishop who sails into Holland on a barge from Spain, helped by a crew of black slaves, all named Piet. He fills the kid’s shoes with presents and quickly buggers off again after a few songs have been sung. If the kids don’t behave during the year, the bishop then kidnaps them and takes them away on his barge. We can probably come to see this child trafficking by the clergy as perfectly acceptable, we are Irish after all.

There is one thing I will truly struggle with. One thing that grates at the back of my brain, one thing that send shivers down my spine, one thing that makes me want to read another Tiger Woods story for a pleasant distraction, and that is what Dutch children call their fathers:

‘Papa’.

I have no desire to live in Walnut Grove, nor to be addressed like an aging Smurf, and certainly not to be brow beaten by a teenage Madonna.

I can be a lot of things, within a conservative and low achieving margin, but ‘Papa’ can’t be one of them.

Time to move.