“She’d Like Two Scoops of Mint Chip with Hot Fudge and Clams, Please”
When I got married a couple of years ago, most of my friends, especially the male ones started smirking a lot.
“Are you happy?” they’d ask.
“I am,” I’d answer.
That’s when they’d smirk. Some of them would even say something cryptic, like, “Just wait; ha, ha, ha…”
I remember that at my bachelor party, I was told a series of increasingly filthy jokes, all of which had more or less the same punchline: a soon-to-be-married bride laughing with her girlfriends and saying, “Thank God I never have to do that again!” I just laughed nervously, as I was supposed to and ordered another drink.
So I have to admit that I was a little nervous a couple of months ago when I whispered sweet nothings into my wife’s ear one evening only to have her turn green and dash into the bathroom.
“Hmm,” I said to myself, “she must have a touch of flu. I’ll give her some time to recover.”
Then – being a guy – I waited half an hour or so and tried again, only to have my wife make another dash for the toilet. This seemed entirely unreasonable.
“Are you okay?” I asked, trying to show how sensitive I was to her little moods.
“Actually, I feel pretty awful,” she replied. “It must be the flu.”
Ah ha – just as I suspected. I decided to ask for a bit of clarification.
“Will you have it for the rest of the night?”
I got a dirty look, but only a short one, because just then, she had to make another break for the bathroom. I timed her this time – just under eight seconds; pretty impressive.
Over the course of the next couple of weeks, my wife continued to work on her bathroom sprinting, particularly in the morning or at times when I had made a particular effort to be romantic by cooking her a curry or wearing a lot of cologne. Subtle though the signs were, I started to get the message that I wasn’t bringing out the romantic feelings in my wife that I had been hoping for. I have to admit that I started to take it personally. I mean, she wasn’t eating my cooking, but still seemed to be putting on a bit of weight. Was she seeing some other cook on the side?
For no reason in particular, I kept remembering something that happened to me several years ago:
A few years before I met my wife, I went away for a long weekend with a very nice lady, who, for the purposes of this story, I will call Florence Nightingale. We got to where we were going and settled in for a relaxing time. I was feeling a little tired though and had a bit of a stomach ache, so I decided to take a nap. After an hour or so, I woke up with stabbing stomach pains, which I later found out were symptoms of gastroenteritis.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had acute gastroenteritis, but it feels a bit as if you had swallowed a hedgehog – not just any hedgehog, but a hedgehog with drug habit and hobnail boots, who’s been watching too many Bruce Lee movies.
Unfortunately, my traveling companion had never had gastroenteritis and didn’t recognize it when she saw it. She had passed the time when I was taking my nap by having a cocktail or three and when she heard me grunting and moaning in the next room, she took it as a signal of some sort. It took me almost an hour to convince her that I wasn’t trying to play “The Adventures of Naughty Nurse” and I have to confess that by the end, some harsh words were spoken before I could get her to take me to a hospital – a real hospital, not a “love hospital”.
It probably goes without saying that this episode drained a lot of the passion out of our whole relationship and before long, we shook hands and called it a day. I remember wondering at the time how somebody could be so self-centered that they thought someone else’s sickness revolved around them.
Now, years later, watching my wife dash for the bathroom (Hey! Six and a half seconds! A new record!), I wondered if my wife had a touch of gastroenteritis. This proves two important points:
1) Fate has a cruel sense of irony.
2) I am very stupid.
In the end, my wife did everything but knit little booties before I got the main thrust of what was going on.
“Should I start redecorating the spare room into a nursery?” I asked her.
“That might be a good idea,” she answered. “Would you like me to show you where it is?”
That was pretty bitterly sarcastic for a pregnant lady.
We called our families and they reacted pretty much the way we had expected:
My wife’s mother squealed with delight and insisted on putting her husband on the line. My father-in-law didn’t quite know what he was supposed to say, but he congratulated us cautiously. A lifetime of cruel experience had taught him that anything his wife was this happy about was bound to cost him money somehow.
My wife’s thousand or so aunts and female cousins also squealed with delight, then proceeded to tell us a series of horrifying stories about women just like my wife who died during delivery, gave birth to webbed-fingered, bat-winged mutants, had 27-hour deliveries or pushed too hard during the delivery and blew out their entire reproductive systems, killing everyone in the delivery room.
My father was probably the most excited of anyone and called us every three or four days to tell us how thrilled he is to finally be getting a grandso… er, grandchild.
My mother’s reaction was a lot like mine. When we told her that we were expecting a delivery, she didn’t quite get what we were hinting at.
“Oh good,” she responded. “From that Amazon place you order stuff from?”
No, we explained, more like from Stork.com.
Was that like Pets.com, she asked, because she’d heard that they had gone out of business.
No, we explained again, trying a new tack – we were wondering if she wanted to come visit us next Christmas to spend the holidays with her new grandchild. This seemed to throw her a bit for a loop.
“But I don’t have a grandchild!” she exclaimed, before finally getting it and breaking down in tears.
My wife, realizing that my mother would be at this for quite some time, put down the receiver of her phone extension and looked at me with a slightly queasy look on her face. This time however, she didn’t run to the bathroom.
