For some time now  a number of you, have been asking to hear more from the elusive Dr. O’C. She pops into the comment stream now and again with a clever commentary. But, she’s been a bit reluctant to seriously put pen to paper (or fingertip to key), primarily because she’s rankled by my titular narcissism – “It’s afreeman.org , not ‘A Free person.com”.Well, after much cajoling, begging and badgering I’ve finally worn her down. Today marks the beginning of a (hopefully) episodic new feature here on afreeman.org- Dr. O’C speaks…

Chris has been hassling/requesting/asking kindly that I write a post for a while.  Most likely because he doesn’t have the time to keep you entertained now that he is a busy man tackling 1.5 jobs.  I warn you however – I am not a writer.  My school counselor strongly recommended that I give Year 12 English a miss if I wanted to get into University.  On a recent English quiz on the BBC I scored a pathetic 12/20 and had to have Chris (re)explain where apostrophes should be positioned at the end of words ending with ‘s’.  But, I thought I would tell you the story of my experience of motherhood so far.

I thought it was going to be hard and it is, but first let’s go back to late 2006. Chris and I had talked often about having kids, he wanted them now and I was always the one to hold off.  I loved my job, working and traveling and the baby-thing wouldn’t really fit into all that.  I also wanted my life to play out in a certain, pre-planned way and having a baby before we owned our own house or were in a country we both felt was home was insanity to me.  But somehow my sister, who works in an IVF clinic and a nurse who I went to see about refilling my prescription for The Pill, put a fear into me that it would take ages to have kids.  Two years was the time frame they were talking about.   And I thought ‘Shit, if it takes two years, I could be back in Oz with my own house, just in time to pop one out to get the $5,000 baby bonus.  I had better start cracking.  Chris, where are you?”.

I stopped taking The Pill in October 2006.  We went to Sweden for Xmas, the winter was miserable and in early January I was feeling increasingly sick and tired.  Chris came back from a trip to the US, I complained about having SAD and two days before I was due to fly to the US for work it clicked ‘Shit, I could be pregnant!’  Chris came home armed with pregnancy tests, the digital type which left no room for error.  I persuaded him to wait until the next morning when the tests are more effective.

There was one problem though.  I could not pee.  Normally my bladder wakes me up, but on this Saturday morning it wouldn’t work.  I drank enough water to overcome Australia’s drought problem but my bladder knew that I wanted to remain in denial.  If truth be told, I didn’t want to be pregnant.  When finally through risk of serious bodily injury (Chris was not impressed with my bladder) I did pee, the bloody digital stick took barely a nanosecond to light up ‘pregnant’.  Chris said “cool!” and I started to cry hysterically.  There goes my bloody plan!

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