In honour of Q’s 9-month anniversary, I’ve decided to keep the celebrations going and celebrate some of the crazy, odd, rude, weird and funny things people have said to me during the growing, delivery and earth-dwelling moments of the divine Miss Q.
In no particular order…
‘Are you a natural redhead?’ a shoe saleswoman says to me when I’m 39 weeks pregnant and decided I really needed to buy a new pair of shoes.
‘Yeah, I’m way too lazy to dye it,’ I reply, I get this question reasonably often.
‘You’d better watch out then. Redheads don’t clot well. Be careful you don’t haemorrhage to death.’
I sure don’t get that answer all the time.
‘If you want to do everything you can to avoid a miscarriage,’ says the doctor I saw for the first and last time after this comment, ‘avoid spicy food and running.’
I had already run 60k’s that week.
By the way, there is absolutely no scientific evidence to support the theory that exercise can induce a miscarriage.
So there.
‘You’re definitely carrying a boy.’
WRONG WRONG WRONG world.
The only person who was right was the old bloke who works at the funeral parlour on the corner.
‘Oh no, you won’t feel an episiotomy,’ says the midwife who took us through our antenatal classes, ‘they do it at the height of a contraction.’
Excellent.
Contractions hurt more than having my clacker snipped without anaesthetic.
Is there any way out of this?
‘It looks like you got at yourself with a whipper snipper,’ my husband proclaims when he sees the home-job bikini wax I performed on myself mid pregnancy, when I couldn’t see the offending area.
‘Miso soup is excellent for labouring women.’
No idea why. I think the midwife that told us that just likes it.
‘Try some nipple tweaking and rigorous sex,’ my godmother alarmingly informs me during my final weeks, which were full of brutal pre-labour, ‘that ought to bring this baby on.’
It didn’t.
Nor did running ten k’s.
My girl came when she was good and ready, but when she came, boy did she come. See point below.
‘Is this normal?’ Gregory mouths to the midwife halfway through our very fast labour.
‘No,’ she mouths back, ‘but she’s doing an excellent job.’
‘Eat an egg a day and the baby will slip right out of you.’
Boy am I glad I didn’t do this. She would have flown out.
‘Oh, your daughter likes to get around naked,’ a mother comments to me when Q was rudee-nudee in the middle of last year’s sweltering summer. ‘Careful, not liking clothing is one of the first signs of autism.’
‘Wack a cabbage leaf inside your maternity bra to prevent mastitis.’
Enough said.
‘Hmmmmm,’ a concerned child worker said to me a while ago, ‘you really want to encourage Q to crawl before she walks. If she doesn’t she may be dyslexic.’
And my most recent favourite…
‘Isn’t it nice you had a daughter,’ an old lady says to me at the swimming pool last week. ‘You’ll have your daughter for the rest of your life. But not your sons. Daughters-in-law are like the war, they take your sons away.’
Happy 9 months Q.
Without you, I never would have known any of this.
And then where would I be?
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