A case of mistaken fecundity
I may have indicated here that I’m trying to get pregnant at the moment. There’s something slightly different about sex when you’re doing it in the hope of conceiving, and I’m not just talking about the fact that now, after the fact, Gordon usually picks me up by my ankles and bounces my head off the mattress in a misguided attempt to help the little swimmers along.
A few times lately we have been to see Gordon’s grandmother, who is in her 90s, and whiling away her twilight years in a retirement home, which she hates with a passion. She’s a brilliantly cantankerous old lady – she doesn’t give a toss what anyone thinks, she just says what’s on her mind. Everytime we go there she tells us how awful everyone is, usually within earshot of several of them. So, we went to the pub, where, after insulting the landlord by saying that she ‘didn’t like his nasty face from the moment she walked in’ and that ‘you can smell people who are only after money’, she began waxing lyrical about how she can’t understand why anyone would want to have children, as they are a pain in the backside in general. We thought this would be a good time to mention that we were thinking of starting a family. Instantly she was excited for us – a turnaround so speedy I got whiplash just watching her face. She seems to have jumped straight from ‘we are trying to conceive’ to ‘the baby is due ANY MINUTE NOW’.
The other day she rang up and asked Gordon if I was ’swelling’. He, of course, was confused, taking it to be an old-fashioned reference to conception. It made me feel a bit unsettled, and I had to check my face and ankles for puffiness, just in case I was actually swelling and hadn’t realised it.
Then yesterday, as we sat in the car on the way to lunch, she asked Gordon if it was a boy or a girl. “Is what a boy or a girl?”, he asked in some confusion. “The baby!”, said grandma. “They can tell you these things pretty much straight away now.” I don’t know how soon you can actually find out the sex of an unborn child, but seeing as we only told her we were going to try for impregnation just before Christmas, I think she’s run away with the timeline a little. I suppose when put up against 94 years, 9 months must seem like a tiny drop of time. We told her of course. I think she was quite disappointed, but I’m not sure she’ll remember.
As for me, I’m trying not to get to hopeful. It’s only month one. And pregnancy tests are expensive, especially when you use them far, far too early in an attempt to make yourself stop obsessing about how an egg might feel when it implants in your womb.
Honestly, it’s like waiting for Christmas to come around, when you’re about 4 and not sure whether it will ever, ever happen.
February 2nd, 2009 at 10:59 pm
Unless Grandma has been dealing in psychic matters, and has found out that you can now tell the sex of the child BEFORE it is conceived. Maybe elderly people are closer to these things…