So you might be wondering how I can write another entry about pregnancy. Well, I’ve decided I’m the town crier of pregnancy truth – “Hear ye, Hear ye….” Because it’s become quite clear that a few months of holding a newborn gives women amnesia. I suspect that something in the smell of fresh skin actually wipes out bad memories.

First off, the high-points. Our son was born healthy and full term via C-Section as planned. He has all his fingers, toes, lungs and limbs. And all the parts which properly qualify him as a boy. We are blessed.

But in nearly every other way the actual birth was as problematic as the pregnancy itself.

Multiple Doctors and Nurses took one look at my wife and said “Oh, a redhead… well redhead’s bleed more and have more pain than all other folks.” Imagine the great news that was to a woman who wanted a C-Section for less pain, and a man who didn’t want to see the blood and gore from the process.

But after watching my wife get jerked and tugged like the opening scene of Jaws, my son let out a cry, turned from a crazy purple black into a normal skintone, and we were suddenly parents.

Normally at this point things get better.

While our son rested comfortably, my wife endured rising pain. It took a while to find the right combination of meds to keep her both comfortable and lucid. Meanwhile, her blood levels were way down and her blood pressure way up – the exact opposite of her normal state. Thankfully, when things turned for the better we got to take our little man home and start returning to normal.

Or so we thought.

We’d been home less than 48 hours when her pain was up, and the incision was gaining a nasty growing bruise. One look from the doctor and he knew it was internal bleeding. After a quick sonogram we were re-admitted to the hospital and planning to go back into surgery.

Apparently sometimes when cutting through multiple layers, a blood vessel can restrict from the trauma of being cut and not present itself as something that needs to be dealt with. Then, after a patient is sealed up, the vessel relaxes again and begins pumping blood once more… into no where. There was a real chance of this pooling blood eventually bursting through the remaining layers and tainting more of the torso. Luckily the problem had been found early on.

However we now found ourselves in a Groundhog Day style retread. My wife who should have been a week into recovery was back at ground zero but with twice as much surgery and anesthesia to show for it. Thankfully she is now recovering properly, albeit slowly.

Yet she’s enjoying the fruit of her labor (or surgeries in this case). Our little man is a good sleeper, most of the time, an easy picture subject, and has stolen his mom’s heart in a huge way. Holding him, she feels no pain. She forgets many of the things that got her here until she shifts the wrong way and remembers… two surgeries.

All the while I keep thinking how everyone talks about the beauty of childbirth. And I realize there’s a great confusion going on. Beauty of a child itself… sure, I can go with you there. But the process of childbirth is far from attractive or enjoyable. Just a quick scan of my wife’s experiences and it’s obvious that most anything else would have been more fun.

We never had a glow. More like a spotlight of blinding discomfort, fear, and complication. Whatever our experience is in the years to come, we won’t look back and mistake it for a glow. It was a struggle. And my wife is a trooper.

At least she got something out of it.

My parents, who told me stories of my birth with tears in their eyes.

Your mother, who endured the odd sensations of C-Section, pain, and fear.

And you… who got forced into a world you didn’t know and asked to breathe.

Leaving me mostly groundless and unaware of my own age or generation in this march of time. But now I remember, and we should talk about what it means.

I’m now 36 years and a few months. You’re now 36 hours and a few minutes. And this evening you opened your eyes and really tried to focus on me for the first time. I’m sure I’m just a big, blurry, hairy, giant to you, but you know my voice, so just listen.

I promise you we’ll do our best. And it won’t be good enough. We will screw you up in our own particular way. Cause we’re flawed people raising you, a flawed person.

And you’re not going to like us a lot of the time, and that’s fine. Truth is I’m not jumping up and down about you either, so we’re all going to have to learn to live together through this deal.

Many people have told me “Wait until Bodie’s born… “. Expecting me to see your little pink face and decide all my feelings up to that point were irrelevant and now I’m madly in love with my son.

But you may as well learn now I’m not a reactionary guy. Your Dad’s more of a slow burn. Those that know me will tell you it’s gonna take some time. That’s going to annoy you when I’m not nearly as excited about something as you need me to be. But you’re going to really appreciate it when I don’t get as mad as you expected either.

I won’t be cool enough or plugged in enough. I wasn’t even cool when it mattered so I certainly can’t maintain it now. But your mom is way out of my league, and she married me, so I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve. Don’t take my word for it, though… ask some friends of mine, and get them to tell you the real truth.

I promise we’ll do stuff. It’ll probably involve mountains. And often include the dog. And we’ll talk about cars a lot so I hope you’ll find them interesting. But if you decide you’re rather learn ballet… that’s fine… just talk to your mom cause the stage is her world. I’ll clap from the audience.

Ultimately, little man… you’ll be an adult at 18, and I’m already twice that age. Which means I’m old enough to know I don’t have this figured out. I’ll do a lot of stuff wrong. But know that even my screw-ups will be with the best of intentions. That won’t help much – but it is true. We will try to make you the best man you can possibly become. And the scars from our mistakes will leave you fodder for some future spouse or therapist.

When you’re 36, come find me and tell me how I did. By that point I’ll be some crusty old guy in his 70s. Hopefully willing and eager to hear the truth.

Plus I’ll probably tell you the story of your birth with tears in my eyes. There will have been time for a slow burn by then. Years of time beyond this moment.

36 and Counting…

That’s why I write it down.

You see, I can only describe my wonderful wife’s pregnancy as a roller-coaster crankhill of rising discomfort. Everything we’ve been told or read about which trimester is the worst, or which experience is the turning point, have all been proven as better fertilizer than advice.

So here we are. Eight Months. Actually we are having a C-section so it’s on my wife’s calendar like a lunch date: December 9 @ Noon, “Give Birth”. Technically, as I write this we are 22 days & 18 hours away. Not that we’re counting.

Currently we are enjoying moments which should probably get recorded by science instead of me. Psychologists could have a field day with the mind-warping effects of seeing body parts suddenly change.

For instance, I had no idea that after more than a decade together I have subconsciously imprinted the size and look of my wife’s feet and legs. Yet, random swelling occurs, suddenly turning her calves into cankles and toes into little sausages ready to explode. And I know for a fact those are not my wife’s feet. Imagine how she feels, since she’s known them longer than I have. Foreign appendages are attached to her body like something out of a low budget horror film.

And simple tasks often taken for granted, like sitting up, now get discussed like things from a by-gone era. And breathing. My wife talks about a full breathe of air like the rest of us dream of winning the lottery.

All this discomfort brings noises. Moans and groans at every movement which makes our bedroom sound like either an old-folks home or the world’s worst porn film. And the latest additive to this cornucopia of sound is snoring. Because poor breathing brings about crazy snores heretofore never recorded.

Last night my wife snored on the inhale AND the exhale. Considering she never snored before she was pregnant, I found that quite impressive. “So wake her up.” You might be saying. But she so rarely sleeps that doing so just felt mean.

I did get her to roll over, but the snoring only changed pitch. Oh, and added a little whistle, like a windtunnel crescendo.

So I slept in the other room. The Baby’s room. Ironically it’s the quietest place in the house at the moment. And there’s a bed in there.

And I learned something else very useful. The bedside clock in our new nursery has a screen only slightly less bright than the surface of the sun. I covered it with a pillow. Which proceeded to glow.

So it’s a party at the Deeken house. And I’m considering installing one of those huge LED countdown timers. Think of it like a play-clock counting down until my wife can get her body back and we can start not sleeping for some normal reason. -

Like our son screaming because his retinas are getting scorched by the bedside clock.

In many ways I’ve spent a large portion of my adult life trying to figure out quick effective ways to use my native tongue. In fact, my only tongue.  (Porque yo hablo espanol muy paquito y muy mal….. or something)

But there are times when English doesn’t provide enough ways to get a point across.  There’s only so many times you can add “really, really, really” to something before it just confirms that you “really, really, really” have no idea what you’re talking about at all.

So I have a tendency to work in metaphor.  Using something unrelated to explain the gravity of my current point.

“Saying Todd has a tendency to use metaphor is like saying Iran has a bit of a PR problem”

You see what I did there…

And these days, because of Everyday Driver, I’m prone to torture metaphors like a Chinese Hitman on Redbull.

Sorry…

And I guess that’s my point, I generally enjoy not having the right English word and resorting to a mental picture for reference.  But sometimes I’d just like to have a way to hit the point in one individual word of perfect selection.  Of course all of our vocabularies would have to be exponentially better to make that idea work at all.

Other times however, a metaphor side-swipes a point so powerfully that it sends the conversation in an entirely new direction.  And that happened to me tonight.

My wife was sitting on the couch, very pregnant, very uncomfortable, and decided she’d spread the wealth.  So, she got her headphones, put them across her stomach and began scrolling through her ipod.  At one point she also got out a flashlight, so between the thumping music and the strobing flashlight our unborn son suddenly got treated to his own version of Studio 54.

And while he’s dancing (or trying to cover his little ears – let’s be honest there’s no way to tell) she says:

“This is just like the aurora borealis”

I have no idea what I was doing before she said that as I was stopped dumb by that proclamation.

“What’s that now?” I said.

“You know what I mean,” she says.

“Yes dear, of course… I see exactly why blasting Janet Jackson into your uterus is reminiscent of odd trails of light during sunset at the arctic circle.”

Now, she was referring to the rare strangeness of her stomach bouncing to the movement of an actual human inside her.  And yes, it probably falls into the same likelyhood & common occurance percentage as the average person seeing the northern lights.

But for me it provided one of the best laughs I’ve had in months.  And she laughed along with me.  But Bodie stopped kicking and his nightclub dance party never returned to its former glory.

You see, you’ve got to be careful with the ole English language.  Sometimes the metaphor is not our friend.

(If you didn’t know… well… SURPRISE… We’re 6 months pregnant!)

As my wife and I march closer to the birth of our little man, the changes are already coming fast and furious.  And anyone who knows me knows I over-think just about everything.  No starry-eyed wondering at the miracle of it all… not me, not here… I’m wired more the opposite.  Cold hard analysis. Looking at the short and long term effects of decisions.

You could argue I’m draining the wonder and glory out of the whole thing.  You might be right, but it’s who I am… and thankfully I married a woman who loves me anyway.

Except we are both quite blindsided by the most recent development.  Apparently, society has another topic which it displays in a blanket of misinformation and wrong advice from every side.  I thought the only thing fully in that category was sex and it’s true realities (don’t get me started… a whole other blog post about both the religious and secular worlds doing more damage than good).  But no-no… there is a bigger smoke and mirrors campaign.  Something like:

“Pregnancy is a beautiful wonderful thing.”

Um. No. That’s a lie.

Okay, maybe that’s too harsh.  I suppose there are women out there that have good pregnancies to perpetuate the myth.  Some must actually enjoy it.  Heck, that Duggar woman is now pregnant with her 19th kid so I guess that’s an example of good times no matter how extreme.

But in our house… any sighting or representation of “happy expectant mother” is laughable.  I truly believe that the “glow” is only something Hollywood created.  When have you ever heard a real “it was awful” pregnancy story? Morning sickness you hear about.  Maybe you know a woman put on bed-rest… but that doesn’t get discussed as anything worse than a monumentally boring hassle.

This is one of those things where looking back apparently becomes so altered by the rosy glasses of the little cuddly person that all the crap is forgotten.

So.  Here I am for the sake of history.  Or so I’ll tell myself.

Morning sickness. – Nope.  Didn’t happen.   We had evening sickness.  Not with puking, but a general dislike of all smells, food, and wafts of the airconditioner.  I had to eat in another room.

Oh… and the first trimester is supposed to be when she feels the worst.  Um.  No.  We’re on a perpetual rise of discomfort like a never-ending roller coaster crank hill.

Now, Catherine’s a trooper.  No doubt.  Wanted to go camping.  Likes to get out and do things.  But the snap-back for her boldness is horrific.

Heartburn so bad she wants to cry.  A bronchial infection.  That leads to coughing, which stirs up the acid reflux, which generally leads to puking, which empties her stomach, which makes her hungry, which leads to heartburn and the cycle continues.

But wait!  Coughing moves ribs!  That’s right, dear reader, ribs in my wife’s back are swinging out of place like they are on hinges.  And that comes with a big basket of excruciating pain, which makes her cry, which stirs the heartburn, which aggravates the cough, which hurts the rib, which often leads to puking, which makes her hungry and on and on it goes…  except now with terrible tear-stirring pain.

And… nosebleeds!  Cause when all of that’s going on what she really wants to do is lay down and let the blood trickle down her sore throat, stir her heartburn and…  yeah.  See above.

So.  Where’s the glow?  Who thought up that steaming pile of fiction?

What really breaks my heart is there’s not a thing I can do to help her.  She’s sorting through a list of medications longer than my entire medical record, trying to keep down lunch and not cough to send her rib screendoor-ing around her torso…

And I’m standing there going “I’m sorry, baby”.  I may as well just shrug and say “Sucks to be you” – that would be just as helpful.  Thus… if no one else in the history of pregnancy wants to say it… I’ve done it.

Pregnancy sucks.  It’s not wonderous.  It’s not beautiful.  There are no Angels with softly gelled spotlights making sure there’s a glow off perfect skin.

If you’re reading this – and you’ve gotten this far – I must ask one serious favor.

Do not ask my wife how she’s doing.  You’ve already read how she’s doing.  She’s somewhere in the discomfort cycle listed above and swallowing her way through her daily mountain of pills.

Don’t ask.  And don’t mention it.  That doesn’t help either.

There’s no glow.  Baby’s healthy.  Mom’s in Hell.  Dad’s hanging on.

And the truth has been recorded.