Slice of Life

Some of you may resent seeing this column getting too minikid-centric of late. If it helps, let me assure you that it is just a matter of days. Moreover, it's an opportune moment to sympathise with The Hubby who has to suffer this day in and day out…

Ungainly Facts

Creating a new life is not easy. Look at these facts below:

Richa Jha

*You can't lie down in bed on your back. You can't lie down on your sides. Since you can't do either, usually you go without sleep for months.
*So, what do you do in bed? You spend some five minutes turning from one side to the other. And then, another five minutes doing the reverse within minutes of the previous turn. Five minutes is a conservative estimate because each move involves a complex set of manoeuvrings of first leg, torso, second leg, pillows and more pillows. The process starts with sending SOS signals to the brains that take ages to be read and acted upon (your senses become dull too, but we'll come to that later), so you are in that suspended sense of inertness for a while where you want your body to start turning around, but it can't budge. When it does, you wish you had a crane at hand to help you lift that several pounds of bulk around your abdomen and deposit it on the other side.
*The only other thing you do in bed is planning to climb out every twenty minutes to visit the toilet, which has been your second home for a while. Remember, your bladder gets really small, squashed, assaulted from all sides at all times. I need not explain the process of getting up, because the effort is more or less similar to the one mentioned above. Only, it takes longer.
*Earlier, you were breathless only when you spotted this most dashing hunk at the fast food joint, which in itself is a rarer occurrence than spotting Hailey's Comet. Now you are breathless all the time, but for reasons slightly more physically distressing than that. You are so full of the baby that this growing being puts pressure on your diaphragm, and prevents you breathing freely. You partially experience what a person dying of asphyxiation may be going through. If this person survives, exchanging notes may be such a bad idea. A couple of years later, that same baby will make you breathless running around the house after him with his food.
*The only other thing you are too full of, besides the baby, is gas. And that's embarrassing. You may be going through the most feminine process of your life, but it isn't all that ladylike. You are so full of it, that if it wasn't for the weight of the baby pulling you down, you would be up there like a hot air balloon (and delivering a baby in stratosphere sounds like a terribly lonely thing to do).

*Next, your hormones. Of course. The lesser said, the better. There are times, and it may happen pretty often, when you want to dig out your glands that produce these substances which control your happiness, and to replace them with some pre-conditioned robotic chip of permanent bliss. What happens instead, is that your partner and every one around you thinks you are afflicted with a temporary bug of extreme form of lachrymosity. You yourself didn't know you could cry so much. No, no, this is a worse frame of mind than even when that first boy friend of yours ran away with your best friend…
*Feeling graceful and dextrous isn't a part of the pregnancy package. What is, instead, in generous measures, is clumsiness. Just remember that you are not in top form when it comes to muscle control and co-ordination. Which basically translates into being prone to dropping your precious vase over the carpet (double trouble!), bumping into tables and chairs, door edges, and maybe, just maybe, stumbling down the stairs. In any case, you have a truncated view of the world from up there: you forget what the lower half of your body looks like. I have stepped out wearing different pairs of sandals in each foot, not once but twice.
*Find yourself forgetting your anniversary (and this is different from your husband forgetting it, mind you), or where you kept your car keys? Rest assured, it's not you. Absentmindedness is one of the many hallmarks of pregnancy, but it stops being funny when you forget where you kept the car keys just when you have to rush out for that meeting…
*I have decided to skip mentioning the most common complaints in late pregnancy like stretch marks, varicose veins, muscle cramps, elephant-like feet and ankles, the whole host of digestive problems, and so on.
*And, in case you were wondering why the most commonly-heard morning sickness and cravings don't feature here, it is because I haven't been talking about the first and second trimesters at all! And don't you get me started on those…

I repeat, creating a new life is not easy; taking it, is far simpler. Every woman who has delivered a child knows it. Which is why, most women around the world know how precious each life is.

Which is also why we hear of such few women murderers. Elementary, don't you see…

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