I’d love a new baby… if I didn’t have to give birth
Hands up who’s feeling broody? Careful, you’ll take somebody’s eye out… That’s a lot of you, and I can understand why. Just a peep at that royal Archie bundle was enough to stir up my maternal instincts like a hornets’ nest. Or maybe I mean a field of floaty dandelion clocks.
You know what I’m saying. There’s a perfume by American fragrance house Demeter called New Baby: lovely idea in theory, a bit tricky in practice, I should imagine.
The scent of a newborn is so gorgeous that I would fear any adult wearing it (for whatever peculiar reason) might spark such an orgy of oxytocin as to suffer the same fate as the protagonist of Patrick Süskind’s hauntingly evocative novel, Perfume, who is literally torn apart by love.
Anyway, back to matters
broody. I have tried to explain to my husband why another woman’s baby makes me feel so envious when I already have two children of my own by using an iphone analogy.
Sure, he’s got a phone and it works and he likes it. But it’s old. Imagine someone walking in with the brand new, latest greatest iphone iteration? Would he not want to hold it?
Yes. Snuggle it? Hmm, he’s not sure. Whisk it away, cover it with kisses and softly croon to it… No, apparently not.
It’s a truism that other people’s baby voices, like other people’s dog voices, are grating and a bit embarrassing. Not like my own and, by some quirk of pair-bonding, my husband’s.
I’d be thrilled to have a new baby, but only if I didn’t have to give birth; a strung-out woman who has endured such exhausting horror is the very last person you should hand a baby to, yet weirdly, she’s usually the first.
I was too wrecked even to smile, much less appreciate the miracle, when either of my darling daughters arrived, although I do recall my spouse tenderly holding the first one aloft in a shaft of sunlight, like it was a movie. “Say hello to your new daughter, Amy,” he said.
“Over my dead body,” I snarled, before I was wheeled off to be stitched back into something resembling a woman. It was days before we (I…) settled on Lily. It’s only fair that she who endures the pain gets to choose the name. Don’t you agree, Meghan?