A Drive to be Forgotten

That’s it, just come a little closer, I’m going to tell you something tonight, a chilling tale of a man’s complete inadequacy.  It will be a story to curdle your blood and have you sitting up at night wondering about how such a man has managed to survive for thirty something years.  

I need you to imagine yourself in a hospital labour ward.  Your wife has just suffered through a very painful, though quite speedy labour, and you have a newborn daughter in your arms.  You got it together enough to tell the midwife the name that you and your wife had literally just decided upon.  I mean it.  We had a number of names that we were pondering, I had vetoed some of my wife’s more outrageous suggestions (I don’t care how much you like 70’s soul and funk, we were never going to call our baby Earth, Wind & Fire, no matter how well it describes it’s early days, just imagine how terribly it would go with the registrar) but we had not managed to agree on a name until she popped out.  

Speedy Arrival

I understand that labour is painful.  I’ve never actually been through it myself, so I cannot corroborate it from personal experience, but I am an observant fellow and I have experienced it through B on three occasions so I am fairly confident when I say that it didn’t seem like she was enjoying it.  Which is what makes what I am about to tell you quite so impressive, from my point of view at least.

Firstly though a bit of background.  After all, you know me, I’m not happy until I’ve written 1000 inconsequential words before finally getting to the punchline.

An Ode to Many Arms

I once wrote, “ For one thing, once you have three children you've run out of arms, unless you're an octopus of course.  Not being an octopus, and only having the normal number of arms, I am concerned about what is going to happen once we have our third and I am left an arm short.”   Yes, that Wildeian wit really was me. Honestly.  Look, just go here if you don’t believe me.

That was about 4 months before the birth of our 3rd child, and one of the very last things that I managed to write on the blog.  It turns out I had seriously underestimated the number of arms that I would need.  Also the amount of time I would need to do everything.  Not to mention the total chaos that an extra child would bring into my life.