SITTING in a clinic’s waiting room one day, The Supportive Spouse pointed to a sign that advertised the morning- after pill and elbowed me in a wink wink, nudge-nudge sort of way.
“Too late for that now,” I replied drily, patting my swollen, four months pregnant belly. The two of us snickered at our lame joke.
Okay, so we weren’t both drunk and reckless, nor did any condoms break when we conceived.
But, as the realisation that I’ll be a mother for the second time begins to hit me fully, I must say that it must have been temporary amnesia that led me to actively want to be a mama for the second time.
For three years after the birth of my first child Julian, it was probably the memory of those sleepless first months of countless night feeds, crying bouts and hours hooked up to a noisy breast pump that served as the most effective contraceptive for me.
There’s a memory-erasing quirk in nature where, after a few years of motherhood, you cease to remember the horrors of those initial months.
If this natural process did not take place, the world would be filled with rational women who bear only one baby, and then resolutely refuse to procreate further.
I had my own post-pregnancy litany of woes after Julian was born. Concerned that I wouldn’t shed my pregnancy weight, my well-meaning mother cooked the leanest dishes for me, and curtailed my consumption of carbohydrates.
As a result, I breastfed my baby while feeling ravenous all the time, and secretly ordered greasy fast food when everybody else was sleeping.
To make matters worse, it was a month of record-high temperatures in Singapore, and all the air-conditioning units at home chose to break down at the same time.
I staggered about the house in the sweltering heat, clad only in a thin sarong while cradling my son. As I nursed him, mosquitoes that bred crazily in the tropical heat snacked with abandon on my hot blood. It was agony.
Some nights, when my baby cried uncontrollably for no apparent reason, I would carry him aloft and shriek at him, demanding: “What do you want? What do you want?”
On those nights, it took every ounce of self-restraint not to shake him or throw him out the window.
These are things I’m not proud of, and, of course, the joys of being a mother have long overshadowed those first few months. But few people talk openly about the dark side of motherhood, apart from the occasional awareness-raising article about post-natal depression.
Fathers, too, suffer the same. Of late, some writer dads have decided to break the “conspiracy of silence” over fatherhood’s misery, guilt and pretence.
The Observer newspaper of London reported earlier this month on the rise of a genre of confessional fatherhood literature that chronicled the boring, tedious and demoralising side of being a dad, with one author even saying he would have felt only an obligatory sadness if his month-old daughter had been rolled over by a truck.
What I’m trying to say is that those things fade, but not before you suffer through them.
Ask me, and I won’t sugarcoat those psychosis-inducing first weeks of motherhood. As the saying goes, to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
Then again, if you’re a pregnant woman or die-hard mum like me, you’ll probably forget my cautionary tales as nature intended.
Sorry, what were we talking about again?
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