Jumping Through Hoops

Sunday

Last week wasn't a good one. Apart from feeling depressed through financial near-failure and as attractive as an overweight churchwarden, I was unable to think of anything witty to say and my one foray that dipped a toe into mentioning Mr Singh's libido provoked such a response (ironic considering he never normally reads what I write), I deemed it better to delete-all and come back fresh this week.

Most interesting news last week for us pregnant types was the blog of Penelope Trunk, the career bloggist who twittered her way through a miscarriage (http://blog.penelopetrunk.com). The following furore showed how little progress we've made in the last 20+ years. Miscarriage, one of those things I've been dreading since the stick went pink and 'we' became pregnant, is little discussed beyond the physical elements (thanks NHS Direct) and usually mentioned in hushed tones by sympathetic family and acquaintances. Yet it leaves many women (and men) completely distraught and (as with death) there's no guidelines to dealing with it. The other point is that women are still (and mainly by other women) expected to all make giving birth and raising children as their number one objective in life, and anyone who says differently is considered unnaturally cold or lying. The fact is that we don't HAVE to want to have children - and the beauty of the last century of so-called feminism is surely to give women the freedom to choose the tyranny of children or otherwise. The result was that a woman who publically announced her miscarriage as a welcome event that solved a problem pregnancy and saved her from queuing for an abortion (that spectre of the religious Right) caused an international outcry and propelled her to the headlines of every newspaper and nightly news broadcast across the world.

In my own pregnancy, things appear to (thankfully) be going pretty well. Singhlette has been very active, jumping its way around my stomach with the energy of a hyperactive child with a belly full of sugar. Singhlette was good enough to hold still for both my mum and Aunty Boo to cop a feel, induce indigestion (or so I thought until the indigestion moved all the way around my rib cage and intestine with the feeling of a small foot kicking repeatedly) and even carried on long enough for Mr Singh to feel his offspring headbutt his hand at the bus stop. I couldn't work out what had caused this extended period of activity - a quick shopping trip to Bicester shopping centre on the way home from visiting my Grandma (Singhlette's great-Grandma) certainly got me excited (hey - the frist two bras to actually fit in as many months with the added delight of having jumped from a paltry 34B to a 36D of cleavage loveliness), but I didn't think that checking out half price Dior handbags and eveningwear would do quite the same for my unborn child (if it did, then it looks like we're giving birth to Paris Hilton or Alexander McQueen).

Then as I lay on the sofa recovering from the nutrients and reserves the little blighter had zapped from me during its olympic tumbling, Aunty Boo phoned with the answer. Friday morning with my 3-monthly vitamin B12 shot, the much needed energy booster for someone such as myself who is too pitiful to digest it normally. But it's the first such shot since becoming pregnant and if it can transform me from being a tearful lump unable to move even to reach for the biscuits, imagine what it must be doing for my unborn child. So basically the child is a like a doped sprinter, breaking the world record for ante-natal tumbling only to be discovered not as a genius gift of nature but as a drug addled cheat who was stung by his own mother.