It's Not Over Until The Fat Baby Screams

The puddle on the wheelchair removed any lingering doubt, this was actually happening, I was about to become a father. The parents' class on what to expect during labour was due to be held later that week, so I only had hearsay and sitcoms to guide me. I believed that the waters breaking was the final stage before labour and parenthood. Sure I guessed that in the real world the labour might last longer than a 30 minute episode of Friends, but I was thinking in terms of hours. It was days.

I was not expecting to be sent home alone from the hospital, leaving a wife who looked as bewildered and as emotional as I felt. I couldn't sleep, the bed was too empty and my mind was too full. I dreamt of a phone ringing, which seemed so real that I found myself dialling 1471 at 6am. 6am! How early that seemed once!

Having been let down by popular culture, I spoke to friends and colleagues who had children and their stories were very similar. The agony of waiting, the failure of a gel that is supposed to induce labour but never does and then the phone call from the calm midwife.

Let Nobody Sleep

As the pregnancy developed my wife was forced to sleep on her back. The resultant snoring provided ample training for the sleepless nights to come.

I considered going to bed first, which reminded me of childhood holidays sharing a room with my snoring elder brother. I would watch the clock, trying and failing to get to sleep, knowing that each elapsed minute brought me closer to a restless night.

The decision to wear ear plugs seemed the perfect solution, although waking up to a silent world was a little disorientating.

Then one morning at 3am, I was woken up by my wife. She was agitated, she was shouting at me, but I could hear nothing. I removed the ear plugs ...
"I think my waters have broken."

This made little sense, she was only 35 weeks pregnant, we hadn't packed her bag for the hospital and we hadn't covered this bit in the parent craft classes yet. I didn't realise it then, but we were going to have the mother of all excuses for missing the next class.

I packed her bag with a mixture of trepidation and disbelief, which perhaps explains why her bag contained six pairs of underwear, but little else. The only coherent thing I did was to put a dustbin liner on the passenger car seat to keep it dry.

We drove towards a new life, with the empty early morning roads making a slient mockery of our decision to chose the provincial hospital because it would be more accessible in rush hour.

Names

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet;" Romeo and Juliet, Act 2 Scene 2 lines 43-44
"Not if you call them 'Stench Blossoms'." Bart Simpson, The Principal and the Pauper

Usually just two words, and in some cases just one, are enough to identify a person and it is this which makes names so important. We wanted to avoid giving our child a name that was either obscure or common; we sought to provide an identity without ostentation. Anything remotely associated with a famous person was immediately rejected. In fact we agreed to avoid naming our child after anyone, as this could create only one friend but many enemies. The problem was that although all people are unique, no name is (yes I know I've just ended a sentence on a preposition, but I can't think of another word for "unique").

We eventually agreed on Cate, which by spelling with a "C" paid homage to the Celtic blood in both our families and also made the name special but familiar. We realised how familiar when settling down to watch the Lord of the Rings.

Seven Magpies

The risk of miscarriage is at its highest in the early stages of pregnancy and so there was a limit to the number of people I wanted to inform. However, while I may have the stoicism to hide bad news, I do not have the will to keep good news to myself. Within a few hours of the test the entire office must have known. Unfortunately it is not a family business and so while people I don't recall ever meeting were coming up to offer their congratulations, my nearest and dearest were still in the dark.

It was several days before I managed to arrange a meeting with my parents and that was at the Eagle in Cambridge. So in the same pub that Crick and Watson had announced that they had "found the secret of life" some 50 years before, I announced to the head of my family that a new generation was on its way. Their surprise seemed muted. Whether I was truly the first to tell them, I shall probably never know.