Ante-natal Antichrist

Sophie White

At the end of my second pregnancy, Himself wouldn’t stop making little quips about the imminent labour, and I was, in a very caring, loving way, concerned for his safety. I tried to impress on him just how much I would kill him if he annoyed me during dilation.

I’d stare into his irritating, smirking little face and say, “Listen I want to spousal-homicide you on average about six times a day, and that’s when I don’t have a small human trying to escape my body through what is clearly too small an exit.” “I know, I’ll be good,” he’d sigh, but couldn’t resist a gleeful parting shot: “You do know I was an 11-pounder?”

A part of me wanted to time-travel back to when the men waited outside the delivery room or, better yet, over in the pub. He did not distinguish himself during the first birth — a C-section. When a nurse was dispatched for a razor to do some grooming of the area, I was way too stoned to care, but when Himself joke-thanked her, I wanted to kill him. It’s just not the time for smart-arse-ery. Whatever is happening to us during birth is, let’s be real here, their goddamn fault. They are the perpetrators of these pregnancies, and there they are, having LOLs with the midwives at our expense.

I decided to drag him to the antenatal refresher class so that a stern midwife might smack some sense into him. He arrived late, having been enlisted to help position the new office beer fridge. “What?” he said in response to my raised eyebrows. “Good practice for lugging you around.” He even looked to a few of the fellow dads in a kind of ‘am I right, fellas?’ way. The cowed other halves sensibly avoided his comradery and didn’t engage. They spotted a maverick in their midst, and knew it was best to keep their distance, lest their 85-stone wives get a whiff of disobedience.

Himself was so late that we were well into the crowning portion of the morning by then. “Eeewww,” he turned to me, smiling cheerfully. “That’s going to happen to you.” “I could die,” I shot back, “it can happen.” This pronouncement caused something of a stir among the rest of the class.

“What are the chances of a uterine rupture?” I demanded of the midwife. “Very, very low; it virtually never happens. Don’t be worrying about that,” she said. But I knew the fact of my death wouldn’t play on Himself ’s mind so much as the thought of raising two children under three. At that point, he did start to look a little queasy — time to hit him with the perineum massage.

He made his exit at the next tea break, citing work commitments — presumably more beer-fridge positioning — and I noticed a few envious looks on the other dads’ faces as he left, while the midwife assumed a squatting pose to illustrate some other delight of the miracle of birth.

His early exit from the class left him vulnerable to guilt-tripping, and so I got a contrite and delicious batch of these pancakes for Sunday brunch.