Last week I found myself in the most fortunate of situations, a situation that myself and my partner have been hoping for, for just over a year now, we have found that we are successfully pregnant.
Having previously believed that, with a year of hopes, thoughts and expectations, I would be entirely ready for this event. Now that I find myself here, I realise that of course, I am not prepared, not in the slightest.
So, I have decided, that while my beautiful and intelligent partner, who I could never deserve, (this isn’t a platitude, people literally tell me that… often… even my sister… not even in joke) as she, selflessly sacrifices her body and faces her innermost fears and apprehensions to bring into the world, the miracle of life, now, is my opportunity to support her by writing a blog gently poking fun at our most most intimate and private moments and generally trying to make this pregnancy more about me.
Firstly, let me introduce my partner, she is a celebrity, well, nearly. She has been on TV and if you Google her, she is the first page of Google Images, her job mean’s that she sometimes meets celebrities… So, she is celebrity-ish, to me certainly. She is incredibly driven and at the top of her career, she got there early, through hard work and without any help and she always does more than what is expected of her.
She cares about people, she cares what people think, she cares about my seven year old son who is from a previous relationship and lives with us every weekend. This essentially means that for the last four years she hasn’t been out for a Friday or Saturday night at all, which is a sacrifice that she has never complained about or even mentioned and something that I have never brought up in case she hasn’t noticed and for fear that if she does, she will finally realise that my sister is correct in her analysis of our partnership.
She is brave, funny, thoughtful, motivated, sort of Laura Ashley-esque feminine and yet can pull off drinking a pint in a pub without looking out of place, however I am not writing her obituary so I don’t want to describe her too sycophantically, after all she breaks wind like everybody else… I can’t verify that, she hasn’t done so in front of me, but I bet she does sometimes.
…if you were going to twist my arm I could mention that although she gets ill very rarely, when she does, its proper Man Flu! Never a cold, even if it looks like a cold, it is NEVER a Cold! And she has that thing, that thing that very clever women have sometimes, where she can be discussing the finer points of a business decision to a level of complexity that I can barely keep up with and then the next moment exclaim: ‘I am going to have a boiled egg, I can’t remember how to do it, will I need a pan?’ I am not sure whether she does this because there are big chunks of general life knowledge that she has somehow entirely skipped, or whether she just asks me so that I can feel like I can definitely contributed to the conversation, as one might with a toddler.
Other than that, she’s perfect, it’s infuriating!
I, however, suffer from none of those traits! I’m not particularly career oriented, I am what you might kindly describe as over-educated but under qualified. I have spent most of my career working in the care sector in various roles. Which I guess means that I am caring, as long as it is for money.
I have four close friends but generally, if i can avoid people I will, at all costs, especially new people.
I am perhaps ‘well-meaning'(?) To give example of this. I once broke into a park at night to save a trapped dog, who then attacked me, after retreating, I phoned the Police to report my worries about the poor animal. When they phoned back, the officer tried but failed miserably at keeping the laughter out of his voice when he explained that I had in fact, attempted to rescue the park’s guard dog.
Our Relationship? Great! We are best friends, we only argue about important stuff like who’s turn it is to put the blue bin out. I like action films, she likes romance so we settle on drama and are equally unsatisfied by all film nights. We both happily and consciously teeter on the brink of armchair alcoholism, you know, a bottle of red wine between us more nights than not but if a second gets opened no one complains. We literally spend every moment out of work together and it never feels too much, we often put the world to rights until the wee hours and forgive each other our shortcomings…
… And then along came The Bump.
Man vs. Bump 