Baby, let’s not make more babies
’Never say never,” people say. That’s a wise policy considering that I bet you whoever Rick Astley sang about never giving up, he not only gave up but turned around and hurt, made cry and deserted. That said, here’s something I’m never doing again: having another baby. My last-born son turned 14 last October and I’m done with creating more human beings. Whenever I share this revelation with people, it’s always with a smug aura, as if I’m gloating. This is because deep down inside I’m thinking,
“Move on folks, there’s nothing more to see here. This impressive babymaking factory is closed for business. It’s been decommissioned. Put out to pasture.”
Look, while shutting down my baby-manufacturing plant isn’t much of an achievement, it’s certainty far more impressive than making a baby. Eleven years ago, I actually went to a urologist and asked him to retire my tadpole conduits. That was a far more deliberate decision than my participation in the baby process. I wore that ridiculous back-to-front pinafore, caught that cold operating theatre draught on my crack and snip, snip.
No-one met me outside with balloons reading “Congratulations! You did it!” And yet each time I told people about the birth of my babies, they’d bring out the Cuban cigars and
Remy Martin. As a man, what great feat was I being congratulated for? You would swear that I’d brokered a peace deal between Putin and Ukraine. It seems to me all that a man contributes to this process is to look at his partner’s tush in her leggings, lie to her about it being better than Kim Kardashian’s, give her the best three minutes of her life and voila!
Of course, any man who has had to spend years attending fertility clinics is exempt. Coaxing your lil’ lazy swimmers until one of them finds his inner Chad le Clos is worthy of a Gurkha Royal Courtesan cigar and a glass of Courvoisier XO.
The only hero of this babymaking theatre production is the woman. She has to carry the damn baby for 40 weeks, overcome bouts of nausea and dramatic mood swings and learn how to walk with a full bathtub strapped to her midsection.
And all of this usually with a disfigured, bulbous nose and swollen feet. She has to listen to pathological liars gushing, “Oh Vanessa, you’re positively glowing,” when Vanessa owns a perfectly functioning full-length mirror.
All the while, she has to endure living with this individual whose sole contribution to this drama was huffing and puffing for 180 seconds. I’m ashamed to admit that during her first pregnancy, I was that moron who peppered my missus with unfunny barbs about how she walked like Fred Sanford from Sanford and Son. You know, to lighten the mood. Never mind dealing with expectations of the customary nocturnal scrum every Tuesday. In my defence, Tuesdays were terrible TV nights that year. She’d snort derisively each time I proudly told people that we’re pregnant because, “Who’s this ‘we’ that’s pregnant? I don’t see you getting up to pee every 23 minutes during the night.”
But back to the man’s role in the process: I forgot one of our chores. And that is to be the photographer of the day during childbirth. A former colleague and I had babies in the same week when my second was born. Afterwards he asked me if I’d recorded the whole thing on DVD. I proudly told him I had. That’s when he stumped me with the question, “Under what circumstances do you envisage whipping out that DVD with your wife yelling profanities, demanding morphine, with her nether organs all bent out of shape?”
Never mind, he went on, the probability of the son in question stumbling upon that footage at some point. How many hundreds of thousands of rands of therapy would it take to fix that?
And then I got deflated at the realisation that my proud contribution was of dubious usefulness. Seeing the disappointment in my face, he tried to cheer me up: “Look on the bright side. Black babies are born beautiful. When my father asked me afterwards if it was a girl or a boy, I told him it was a purple reptilian alien.”
I wore that back-to-front pinafore, caught that cold operating theatre draught on my crack and snip, snip. No-one met me outside with balloons reading “Congratulations! You did it!”