Sunday, June 27, 2010

WHEN DO BABIES BEGIN CONSCIOUS THOUGHT?


There can be nothing more deflating for one’s ego than to have to squeeze into pants that used to sit nicely low on the hips, with plenty of room and no pulling across the front.                                            At two a.m one evening last week, (I am really productive at that time of night) I packed up my pre-peanut clothes while Gregory lay on the bed, waving and saying; “goodbye jeans, see you next March.”  I still don’t really scream pregnant to the average person, but I have donned the maternity clothes with pride and a sigh of comfortable relief.  Gotta be honest though, it’s lucky I’m already knocked up, because if Gregory ever saw me in my pregnancy leggings he wouldn’t come near me with a ten foot pole.  I look like a long-legged, bloated Christmas beetle.                                                                                              It was a shopping job for an obliging mother, and after discovering that both DJ’s and Myer in the city had removed their maternity sections entirely, (a discrimination I would take up with the head of DJ’s if he hadn’t fled the nation in a disgrace of sexual harassment) we found ourselves in an industrial part of Castle Hill, where had it been left up to me, we would still be driving around trying to get us out of, two days later.
I am now in possession of enough clothes to get me through the winter (if I wash almost every day unfortunately) but when we return to the States at the end of July, right in the middle of their summer, I may have to wear the dress I still haven’t bought for the weddings we’re attending for our entire ten day stay.  People with opinions (and when you’re pregnant, everyone seems to have one) all told me to just buy bigger clothes, but my arms and legs will hopefully not expand in a similar ratio to my belly and when I tried that method, I looked like a kid dressing up in Grandma’s old clothes.                               Next thing to fix is my peanut pimples, pregnancy acne, whatever you want to call it.  They are very unattractive and compounded my self-esteem problem while I was still trying to squeeze into pants that easily fit me when I was training to run a marathon.  Add to that a bit of a dry, scaly patch right in the middle of my back where I can’t reach to put moisturising cream on, and I am one attractive broad, I gotta tell you.  That’s the great thing about kids though isn’t it?  I don’t recall ever having an opinion of my mother’s looks as a young child.  She was just mum and I knew I belonged to her.  That sense of, well, ownership for want of a better word, is a concept I’m already quite enamoured with.  How cool to have made someone that belongs solely to me, and the man I love.  Gregory and I own our very own human.  Well, foetus at the moment if you want to be specific, but I bet it’s devoting as much time to developing its personality as it is to repositioning its ears (they slowly work their way around the head apparently, so that by the time the baby is born it no longer looks like an alien…we hope).                                                      I’ve been pondering the peanut of late (as I am often want to do) and am wondering at what point it begins conscious thought.  According to my weekly baby email, our developing human has just started to dream and I wonder what a little being who has never met anything outside its little amniotic sac can possibly be dreaming about.  Last night I dreamt about lions and elephants attacking me, but I know what those things are.  You can’t dream what you don’t know…or can you?  Now there’s a question for you blogees, anyone into existentialism?

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