Work was going so bad that I got it into my head that having you two show up was actually going to be like a vacation. The fact that I wouldn't sleep and that my ears would ring with your piercing cries somehow seemed preferable to all the painfully unproductive thinking I'd been doing.
And then we went to breastfeeding class.
I don't know if it would have done much for the boys, but if they sent high school girls to breastfeeding class I think we'd nip most teenage pregnancies in the bud. Here's what your mother has to look forward to. Two babies gnawing at her for up to 40 minutes, up to every hour and a half. And if she can't master feeding you at the same time then she'll pretty much just become a stationary milk dispenser. This is what they tell you in a class designed to make it sound appealing.
I wish I could say that I was listening to this and thinking how unfair it is, how much I wished I could help. I wish I could say I was thinking about anything other than how happy I am that my body produces nothing of nutritional value while I made the practice doll that they gave us do the robot. I wish I could say that. But I cannot.
It also became clear just how much of the shaft your mom got on the husband front, if that wasn't obvious already. The instructor would start to talk about breast pumps and the other dads would correct her about their features. They would ask intelligent questions about colostrum and hand expression. They knew what kind of nipples, both real and synthetic, to use when. They knew where things were on sale. I knew how to force our practice baby into the lotus position.
The other shocking news was that you're collectively expected to produce between 16 to 24 dirty diapers a day! One mom asked if she should plan on changing the babies before and then after a feeding. I thought she must be insane. The instructor suggested that sometimes it's a good idea to also change them during! Do you have no organs? Does everything just leak right through you? I could diaper a running faucet and I bet I wouldn't have to change it 24 times a day.
So, no, it doesn't quite sound like a vacation. It feels like your mother and I have been convicted of some terrible crime, but when the sentences came down I just got life while she got death by extraction. Who knew a penis was a sort of get out of jail free card? Like all young men I was once obsessed with breasts and I thought more than once how handy it would be to cut out the middle man and just have a pair of my own. Had I known the true price women pay for the ability to fondle themselves endlessly, I'd have looked on my flat bony ribcage as if it were made of diamonds.
Mystery rim tomorrow. My nipples hurt.
Novel - D (of H)
Dunking - Update tomorrow
French - I should look up the word for boob.
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2 comments:
French for breast = tetons; as in Grand Tetons! Apparently these mountains look like breasts; perhaps only to women-starved explorers before the age of portable porn.
I really like your writing; I think if my hsuband had had a blog like this to read prior to our son being born some of that glazed terrified look might have left his eyes; and he might not have made so many off-colour jokes in the antenatal class!
We got married in the Tetons. How prophetic.
Thank you much for the kind words.
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