Milo

Milo
Is that a smile I see before me?

Friday, October 12, 2007

Missing in action

Ah, baby, where do I begin? The reasons I haven’t updated this blog for a few weeks are:

The house fell down. I came home from a day of meetings to find Colin, the builder, standing several feet below where the living room floor had once been. Dust everywhere. The dog traumatised and in a complete huff upstairs.

To illustrate the point about the parlous state of the (crumbling) joists, Colin clambered out of the hole-that-was-my-front-room and jumped up and down on what remained of the floor. Everything wobbled. ‘Yup, that’s all got to come out,’ he said. I was just about to lie down in the hole and pull rubble over my head when your Dad pitched up. I left him with Colin, chewing the cud. Between them they worked out a way of making it all better.

Joists fixed, Colin then went AWOL. Again. This, so I believe, is common. You are a builder, ergo you are incapable of either commitment or communication (hmm, sounds like every relationship I ever had before I met your Dad...). After a period of increasingly hysterical phone messages, Colin turned up again this week and we’re back on track. He is the only person in the entire Manchester-sphere immune to your imminent arrival. Such is a builder’s blissfully unaware life.

Then I developed a kidney infection. If anyone had told me that I could drink three pints of water and not pee, I’d never have believed them. I mean, where does all that water go? I couldn’t sleep for, ooh, about three weeks due to chronic back pain and the hourly need to drink and/or visit our freshly decorated WC. ‘Well at least when the baby’s born I’ll be able to sleep again,’ I told Simon, thinking these were just the symptoms of pregnancy. He looked at me quizzically until the penny dropped that no, I will not be sleeping after you’re born, not for a long stretch. I started thinking it might be worth having a caesarean so that I could at least get a little shut-eye on the operating table.

Due to your mother’s total fear of being branded a malingerer by the NHS, I didn’t do anything about said infection for some time. It was only after I looked up ‘symptoms of kidney infection’ on t’interweb and scared myself silly that I decided I should do something about it. So that’s how I found myself in Trafford General at 9pm hooked up to a fetal monitor.

This late night trip to Trafford (the place you’ll be born, please note) had its upsides. I got to listen to your racing heartbeat for one (I never knew that babies have really fast heartbeats compared to adults – our heartbeats get slower and slower as we age, presumably until they just stop altogether, at which point we are packed in under the floorboards to prop up rotten joists). And I also got seen by a rather luscious Greek doctor, who sauntered into the room wearing ER-style scrubs and speaking in a husky, heavily-accented voice. While I drowned in his enormous brown eyes (look, it’s my hormones, OK? I’m not proud of regressing to the level of a simpering teenager), Simon remembered to ask all the right questions.

I recounted all this to Eliza the following weekend as we elbowed our way through mums-to-be at an NCT Nearly New Sale.
‘Was he single?’ she asked.
I shrugged.
‘Oh god, did I really just ask that?’
I nodded and carried on looking for babygros…

And there’s more, but I’m running out of space and time: I’m still learning to drive (so far, I’ve managed not to kill anyone, though I do frequently spark road rage incidents thanks to my talent at stalling at traffic lights); your Dad is still deep into DIY and thus close to losing the will to live; your grandparents came last weekend and helped out on the house; we finally finished your bedroom thanks to help from our friend Vic; I interviewed Rose Tremain, the new issue of Transmission came out, I had a few features published in new places and went to an event with Martin Amis, Will Self and bezzie mate John Banville. And I’ve been over in Liverpool beginning research for a book I’ll be writing next year.

But, mostly, I’ve been reading about babies and childbirth and alternating between terror and excitement. Which is nothing new: I’ve been feeling that way for the past 34 weeks. So, not long now; the childbirth clock has begun its countdown.