Girls Night In

When your good lady wife is pregnant, and she decides she wants to have a girls-night-in, my advice would be, find an excuse, any excuse at all, to be absent from the home on the evening in question. You might make the mistake of thinking "It might be fun to hear what they talk about when they all get together", but you'd be wrong!

If another member of the group also happens to be pregnant, indeed heavily pregnant, the nature of the conversation is something that no man in his right mind she want to endure.

Such an event occurred a few nights ago at my happy home, and as luck would have it, I had business to attend to that took me away from home for the early part of the evening. Alas, when I arrived home, the pregnancy discussion was just getting under way, as the dinner dishes had just been cleared.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not at all squeaming about pregancy, about child-birth or even about bodily fluids, and I'm happy to keep apace with every rumbling, every detail and every discussion that my wife wishes to have on the subject of OUR baby, but quite frankly, I don't want or need to know about the changes in the discharge of one of my wife's friends during her first trimester!  And therein lies the problem.  Pregnant women seem to lose all sense of what is acceptable conversation as they undergo the pregnancy experience. 

I've known Sarah (I've changed her name to save her embarrassment) for several years. I've been on stage with her, been to parties with her, caught her and her boyfriend making love on the stairs, had many a laugh and a good time in her company. She is indeed a good friend.... but NEVER before has she thought it appropriate to talk in front of me about bodily fluids, dilation, sanitary towels or hemorrhoids!  Now, all of a sudden, they're as discuss-able as the weather!

Maybe it's just a man thing, preferring to think of the female form as something beautiful and sensual, something to be admired and enjoyed. The fact that all you ladies have to shit, pee and have periods is something of an inconvenience to us, and something about which we'd rather know as little as possible. Pregnancy, childbirth and all matters relating to them kind of fall into the same category.  It's the nature of men to deal with things on a 'need to know' basis, but we clearly prefer NOT to know, unless it's crucial that we do.

Now before all the women start to protest about my attitude, let me relate an experiment that I carried out that night. 

Sarah had just finished a report on how there was 'spotting' in her discharge during the early weeks of her pregnancy, which had set alarm bells ringing. She beautifully described a hospital appointment where an internal examination had taken place, describing the implement used for the examination, the sensation of it being inserted, and then the subsequent results and information she received about keeping an eye on her bodily fluids.  Lovely.  I felt that our friendship had moved to another level!!!!  Eeuuwww.  FAR too much information for me, to be honest. So I decided to turn the conversation on it's head.

"Examinations can be horrendous," I responded, "I remember once when I had a urinary tract infection, I went to the doctor looking for a prescription for pills, and ended up having a full body examination, which included the doctor taking a swab to the underside of my foreskin, and inserting a finger in my rectum. He said the slight discoloration around my knob was quite normal in such circumstances, and it wasn't uncommon for this to be accompanied by a slight rash of the scrotum!"

Well...... my wife nearly died of embarrassment, and the mouths of Sarah and the other girls dropped open in shock.

"Eh.... too much information, Peter!" Sarah was the first to speak, closely followed by my wife, who chastised me with, "That's not really appropriate conversation for a dinner party!"

I laughed. "Sorry ladies. I'll leave you to get back to the topics of discharge, afterbirth and leaky nipples. I have a bit of work to do anyway."  And with that, I excused myself and headed for the privacy of the laptop in my office, but I do believe I made my point!

The happy ending to this story is that Sarah's waters broke during the night, in our spare bedroom, and in the early hours, she went to the hospital. She is now the proud mother of a beautiful bouncy babay boy!  Congratulations Sarah.