30 Weeks

What possessed me? After spending a good deal of time as a single teenage mum on the breadline, I am finally financially solvent, reasonably happy and I have a good job and stable home life. Add to the mix a highly disinterested and very sarcastic teenager, a husband whom I’m convinced thinks that storks bring babies, an over attached cockapoo and you have my life.

So what possessed me, after working my arse off for the last 15 years to start all over again with pregnancy and a new baby?

I do not have a clue. I want this baby. My husband wants this baby and she will be a much loved addition to our family. But by God, as D-Day looms ever closer, I am getting more and more anxious.

I’ll address some of the delusions I had prior to this pregnancy…

Trying for a baby will be so much fun….nope. It became like a military exercise. It involved temperature taking, charting, alarms, strangers peering at my pink bits and eventually 3 months of Clomid. By the point I actually got a positive test, my husband cringed every time I looked at him. In fact I’m surprised he didn’t try to buy himself a chastity belt off e-bay.

Nothing could be worse than my first pregnancy….oh you poor, naive fool. I had HG throughout the whole of my first pregnancy, and although it was hellish, my mind managed to convince me that it wasn’t so bad…and lightening can’t strike twice can it? With this pregnancy, not only have I had HG, I’ve also had Pancreatitis, SPD and chronic Rhinitis and a hostile ovary. So when I do manage to eat, it has to be low fat, non-spicy and basically mashed potato. Anyone remember Bodger and Badger from the 90’s? Yep- this kid is going to come out looking like that!

I will go to Aqua- Natal classes and yoga and mummy groups and make a lovely group of pregnant friends, and our babies will all grow up together…I severely overestimated my ability to socialise. In fact, I would go so far as to say that not only am I anti-social and pretty unfriendly, I am also socially inept and have a rather strange sense of humour. I did attend aqua natal...one of the mothers there disclosed she was naming her child Xenon, like the gas. Whilst all the other moms were cooing and marvelling at the original name choice, I had nearly drowned myself laughing and now don’t feel like I can go back there. So no, I have not made mummy friends.

Husband and I will agree on all aspects of child rearing and present a united front to our children…we can’t even agree on a baby name or nursery colour. In fact, we are almost constantly in a state of whisper fighting. You know the type where you hiss insults at each other whilst sporting a rictus grin so nobody notices you are contemplating killing him with his own shoe.

It’s always amazed me how I was originally left in charge of my daughter. I always feel like it was more luck than any child rearing skill of mine that she’s the amazing person she is today. I have always found it quite funny that people expect me to be responsible and adult when I’d quite happily still go play manhunt in the woods with my friends, well maybe not at this precise moment, I’m fat and my piles would probably give me gyp (another pregnancy gift)  but you get the idea. I don’t feel like a proper grown up. And if that’s the case, how on earth can I have been entrusted with not one, but two children? What if I fuck them up? It’s not like at work where I can blame one of the work experience kids…the buck stops with me.

So I suppose this is going to be about me, trying to navigate parenting more than one child, without mentally scarring either of them. I guess it’ll be about the difference between parenting in my teens and in my thirties- not that I’m any the wiser this time around.