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Our friends who have had a baby are preparing us for the rigours of what is to come. I practised putting a nappy on a doll. I did OK with this, but then again the doll was not coated in its own excrement or wriggling around or peeing on me, so maybe it wasn’t a fair test. I threw the doll to the floor in triumph at my achievement, which apparently lost me some points from the judges. Learning to change a nappy on a doll is maybe not all that helpful.
Dealing with another person’s effluent always seemed to worst part of having a child to me. I have difficulty enough keeping on top of cleaning up all the stuff that leaks out of my body without having to take responsibility for someone else’s filth. But now the prospect is imminent and real I don’t feel so bad about it.
I have managed quite well with coping with the effluvia of our cats. Admittedly that doesn’t involve wipes or nappies, but Liono is still not really on top of the whole litter tray idea, thinking that pooing near the tray is good enough and still not understanding that the scratching at the plastic walls of the tray will not bury the stinky poo away. She still tries to do that every time. She is stupid. But a genius compared to Smithers.
And because both cats have long fur we sometimes have to clean or cut away some disgusting matted shit-bomb too.
So if I can deal with my cat’s faeces, surely a child’s will be OK. 50% of that poo will be the same as mine anyway and I don’t mind my own poo one bit. But who knows what chemical weapon will be created by mixing up my poo and my wife’s poo (not that my wife does poos of course)? I imagine that people who make perfumes have the same issues. They try something new and they think it should be amazing, but the combination turns out to smell like 1970s Bridgwater.
I am not just focusing on poo, of course and as much as it is fun to speculate on what my baby’s shit will smell like (and I doubt we’ll get lucky and somehow create rose flavoured dung), it’s also fascinating to wonder what this child will look like. Will it be a case of Carry-On-Syndrome where Sid James’ babies invariable turned out to be his exact old face superimposed on a baby’s body. I am not thinking our child will look like Sid James (thought that might be interesting) but wonder if it will resemble me. Or which parts of me it will inherit and which of my wife. I try to envisage the child, but of course I can’t. My main hope is that I don’t pass on the curse of being small. Again, I hope it will be small to begin with as I don’t want a Benjamin Button style explosive birth and would like my wife to survive, but I hope it inherits my wife’s tallness, not my stocky shortness. With luck my wife’s genes will have crushed mine in most areas and then I don’t have to feel guilty about passing on my many inferiorities to a new generation. I have learned to cope with being small, but I hope that my child does not have to do the same. I will apologise in advance for all the disadvantages that I will be passing down genetically to this innocent whelp.
What will he or she look like? What does life have in store for this tiny human who has no clue what awaits it? Will I be a good father? Maybe genetics are less important than the example I will be setting.
Poor little unborn twit. If you’d timed this differently you could have been popping out of Kate Middleton and be a Prince or Princess. Sorry.
