Where do babies come from? (Note: I have an offcuts folder whenever I write books, stuff which didnt quite fit in the final cut. I dont think this one ever made it into a book... so I thought maybe Id share it with you all. Enjoy. Or not. Up to you.) It seems like such simple question. “Well, when a daddy and a mummy love each other very much…” Yeah, right. Babies come from all kinds of places. Sometimes babies come because, in the heat of the moment, it just doesn’t seem that important to reach over to the drawer and try to get the wee latex device out and wrestle with it for twenty minutes or so only to find you were trying to put it on upside down. ‘What’s taking so long?’ Fumbling. ‘It’s the thing.’ ‘The thing?’ ‘You know, the thing.’ Sigh. ‘This always happens.’ More fumbling. ‘It’s not my fault, I’m doing my best.’ ‘Maybe you could go to a class or something?’ ‘A class?’ ‘I’m sure they have classes for this kind of thing.’ ‘They don’t have classes, trust me.’ ‘Well they should.’ Still more fumbling. ‘Well if they ever do, I’ll go.’ ‘Times like this it would be good to be catholic.’ ‘You want to convert to Roman Catholicism because they don’t wear condoms?’ ‘It’s something to think about.’ Extended fumbling followed by exasperated sigh. ‘Screw this. I can’t get this right. You wanna just watch tv?’ ‘We could always just chance it?’ Pause. ‘Is it safe?’ The sound of mental calendar checking. ‘I think so.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘I think so.’ ‘You think so?’ ‘I think so.’ A further brief, ill-considered pause. ‘Okay, why not.’ Why not? Well, how about the fact that twenty years later they’ll be going crazy trying to get their deadbeat kid to move out of the house and get a job, all because they got the maths wrong? How about that for a why not? Or sometimes family planning comes in the form of the following, slightly breathless, conversation: “Ummm…” “What?” “I think it broke.” A brief, recently pregnant silence. “Oh crap.” Or sometimes it comes when you open your bathroom cabinet the day after and discover that the pill you thought you took yesterday is still sitting in its nice little plastic pocket smiling up at you like it just the cleverest little pill in the whole diggidy-dog world. Hey there, it says, grinning like a fool, we be makin’ babies. And you are. Sometimes, as with us, babies come from conversations on planes. Personally, I think a lot of babies get made during conversations on planes. When you’re on a plane you’re either going somewhere or coming back from somewhere, and babies are often hidden in there somewhere. You add a baby into an enclosed space where there’s nothing to do but talk, and you better watch out. Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying. ‘When should we have kids?’ I asked my wife one day as we were flying home from visiting family. This was in the good old days when it was just her and I, when flying on planes was a relaxing and peaceful time of coffee, reading, and snoozing. This was before we became the people that no one wants to sit next to, before flying became a stressful, messy, and chaotic time. My brother had just had a baby, and it looked okay, not too hard, a bit tiring but kind of nice in its own way. I asked it as a whimsical question, something to pass the time. I could just as easily have said ‘Did you like the colour in their new bathroom?’ There was no serious element to the question. I was far too much an idiot to ever be a parent myself, that was very clear to me. So—in a moment of passing whimsy—I asked the question. There was a small silence, which I mistook for reciprocal whimsy, and then she said: ‘I suppose we should start soon.’ Now, those of us who’ve been with other people for a while, we get to recognise certain tones of voice, don’t we. You know after a while when you’re in trouble just from the tone. In the middle of a large group of people your other half might say something that to everyone else sounds fairly nondescript, but you know straight away you’re in all kinds of terrible trouble, some of which you might know about although most of it you probably don’t. So you don’t know the true extent and form of the trouble, you just know that trouble has indeed arrived. All that just from tone of voice. I knew whimsy in my wife, the tone of it, how it’s paced, the words she uses. This was not whimsy. This was the opposite of whimsy. This was anti-whimsy. I had merely thrown an ill-considered question out into the cosmos, and she had taken it and gone to some whole other place: Anti-whimsy. I looked at her, suddenly aware that something huge had shifted in the universe. It was only much later that I realised that’s how it feels when your old life slides quietly out the back door. Even though I didn’t know it then, freedom and sanity were in the process of packing their things. Freedom and sanity knew that babies left no room for them, so at 32 000 feet, without anymore needing to be said, they started to gather up their stuff in little cardboard boxes and headed for greener pastures. ‘What?’ I asked, mildly alarmed. ‘Well we should start some time.’ ‘Are you serious?’ She nodded, the anti-whimsy so thick it was hard to breathe. I half expected the oxygen masks to fall down from the ceiling panels. ‘But we can’t have kids,’ I protested. ‘We’re just kids ourselves.’ ‘We’re both thirty-two.’ ‘Yeah but I’m a very immature thirty-two.’ ‘Other people do it.’ ‘I’m sure they do, but are we able to raise kids? Looking after the dog is hard enough. You know how I sometimes let his water run out? I’m sure kids aren’t as forgiving as dogs about stuff like that.’ I had the feeling I’m sure people get when they realise that even though they’re swimming quite hard they’re getting further and further from the beach. Things change when you have kids, and not just a little bit either, everything changes. The shift from being just you to being a mum or a dad is huge. You become a parent and suddenly your life isn’t the most important thing, theirs is. If they’re happy, you’re happy. If they’re sad, you’re sad. If there was only one place in the lifeboat, you’d give it to them. If there were no places in the lifeboat you’d pick the least pleasant, least deserving-looking person, pull them out, and shove your kid in. Things change in ways you can’t begin to explain. Sitting on that plane I felt all that. After a few moments silence I turned to my wife. ‘You really think we can do this?’ She nodded. ‘I think so.’ ‘Are you sure?’ She shrugged. ‘Who can ever be sure?’ I sighed, turning for one last glimpse back at the shore. ‘Okay. Let’s have a baby.’ It was a lovely moment. We smiled at each other like two kids embarking on a grand adventure. We were going to have a kid. How cool. Idiots. And just like that, we made a baby.
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 06:53:46 +0000
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