Waking Up is hard to do
Waking up next to a pregnant woman is like waking up next to a motion-detecting bomb. You really, really can't afford one false move.
Have you ever seen one of those movies where the insane villain holds the damsel in distress hostage by strapping an explosive device to her body? If she so much as twitches KABOOM! That's where the brave hero comes in and, risking his own life, rescues her.
With a pregnancy, the husband gets to play the role of the insane villain and the brave hero. The plot is simple: He got her into this mess, and he had better rescue her. When my wife, Dale, was pregnant for the first time, she woke up horribly nauseated one morning. She desperately wanted a saltine cracker, but I did not know this because she was so queasy she could only manage to moan the word, "Crerr."
Well, "crerr" is not a word I recognized.
"What?" I asked.
"Crerr!" she whispered, frozen in place with a desperate look on her brow.
"Do you want me to get you something?" I asked.
"Crerr." She nodded ever so slightly.
"Bacon and eggs okay?"
"KABOOM!" went the hostage.
She later explained rather testily that crerr meant, "I want you to get me a cracker and some warm tea immediately before I get violently ill, but you need to ease out of bed very s-l-o-w-l-y so you don't jostle me." Regrettably, there is an inherent contradiction in the directive to do something both immediately and slowly. So we had a few more KABOOMs until I at last sort of mastered the technique, which was: Levitate out of bed without so much as brushing against a single molecule of bedsheet Make a cup of mild tea, with just three granules of sugar to take out the bitterness, and Have both the tea and a cracker ready for her the split second she woke up.
As you can imagine, these were tense mornings.
Besides, I think it is a pretty big deal for the hero to rescue the damsel once but every single day for three solid months?
I have a good friend, Tim, whose wife, Pam, was likewise stricken with morning sickness only it was more like morning, afternoon and evening sickness.
"At first, I was right by her side every time she ran for the bathroom," Tim told me. "I would get her a glass of water and a washcloth and pat her back and practically be in tears, I felt so bad for her."
But as time wore on, he found himself just calling out, "You doing okay in there?"
Toward the end, this devolved into Tim remarking, "Hey, try not to spill my nachos!" as Pam bolted from the bed and dove for the porcelain target. Tim would just continue watching TV or reading his book.
Now, it isn't that guys are insensitive oafs; it's just that the routine starts to get a little old after a while. Besides, it isn't like we can make our wives feel better anyway. I mean, if we could we certainly would, but even with the tea and crackers and all our best efforts, the odds are that Old Faithful is going to blow sky-high anyway. So we guys tend to get a little fatalistic.
But even if I survived the daily morning disarmament drill, I was by no means home free. Pregnancy does REALLY weird things to a woman including, in Dale's case, creating an insatiable need for stir-fried cabbage at 9 p.m. Nothing else would do. And she wanted it NOW!
So I would speed to the store to buy enough cabbage to feed an entire convention of vegetarians. But the next night, cabbage was out and zucchini was in. Menu planning was impossible. The clock would strike 9 p.m., and only then would the mystery craving be revealed and it was almost always some offbeat substance that we did not have readily available in the cupboard, such as steamed goat cheese with paprika.
I have never heard an adequate explanation for the bizarre food desires of pregnant women. Not that I doubt for a moment that those wild desires are real. On the contrary; they are a staple of pregnant woman lore through the centuries. But why?
Aside from the obvious fact that a pregnant woman's body is seeking certain nutrients to keep the developing baby healthy, I have a hunch that this is one of those God things like making sure our babies require diaper assistance when He could have just as easily let them take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen like your basic Boston fern.
Pregnant animals don't ask for special diets. Mrs. Lion doesn't say to Mr. Lion, "Yuck! Keep that dead wildebeest away from me and get me a peach yogurt!"
No, animals just keep eating the same old thing they always eat. But women turn into moody, weepy, goofy, sleepy, irritable insomniacs with food allergies sometimes all in the space of five minutes. The net result is that guys are given the opportunity to be more supportive, more understanding, more patient, more protective and more loving than ever before. Which, of course, is precisely what God wants from us anyway, so it only increases my suspicion that this state of affairs is not simply a coincidence.
Further bolstering my God-thing theory is the fact that infants also tend to be moody, weepy, goofy, sleepy, irritable insomniacs with food allergies! So it looks very much like God has arranged pregnancy as a sort of parenthood boot camp, except that the person who wakes you up 4:30 a.m. by yelling at the top of his lungs is much shorter than your standard drill sergeant and has a wet diaper.
The truly amazing thing about pregnancy is that, even with all its inherent dangers and difficulties, most men survive it.
Background Information
Questions and Answers
Stories
If you've been through a experience related to this topic, we invite you to share your story with others.Share Your Story
Other Things to Consider
Related Topics
Life Pressures: Working Moms, Stay-at-Home Moms
Relationships: Blended Families, Divorce, Parents and Adult Children, Caring for Elderly Parents
