Ex-Tabula Rasa

TT

I’m turning into something new. Something strange to me. I’m becoming something that I never gave much thought to because it just never came up. I can feel it happening, and I notice the changes in my behaviour, and I don’t know if I can do anything to stop it.

I’m turning into the dreaded Overprotective Husband of a Pregnant Woman.

It manifests itself several ways that I can tell. Maybe there are more that I haven’t noticed. Maybe more will come. I don’t know.

The first stage involved a blind panic whenever noises came from the room where my wife was. For example: in the past, if Mrs Fuiru was cooking and didn’t need my help, I’d hear the inevitable bangs and crashes in the kitchen and take them for what they were: the drawer under the stove being opened for a saucepan, or the dishes in the drying rack being shifted so a bowl can be retrieved from the bottom of the pile. Unless I heard a pained shriek from the room, I assumed everything was all right.

Now, if my wife is cooking in the kitchen and I hear so much as a pan lid rattling, I assume that something terrible is happening and that I am needed. Some strange unconscious reaction takes hold and I am there, proudly standing in the kitchen doorway ready to assist with medical techniques that I’m not quite sure actually exist.

My wife is not a feeble person. Quite far from it; she could kick my ass and your ass too. Pregnancy hasn’t changed that; we spent Sunday afternoon putting together flat-pack furniture and whenever I blindly claimed that Ikea had made the hole too small for the screw she was there, cordless drill in hand, ready to prove me wrong. Yet she is no longer allowed to reach the Bill Bryson book from the top row of the Billy Bookcases in our living room because there’s a chance she could fall, or things may fall on her, or look, just let me do it, sit down, put your feet up, do you need anything, tea, coffee, bubblewrap?

It gets worse. Since watching the first season of Downton Abbey, I have removed all soap from our apartment in case she [SPOILER] slips on some. Not just the bars, either. Hand soap, dish detergent, shampoo, even the Lush massage bar. Anything possibly slippable has been thrown out. Now we do all our cleaning with gravel.

It’s funny, we’ve laughed about it together. Crazy old overprotective Fuiru! But what if it gets worse? There’s still five and a half months to go. At this rate by April I’ll have replaced all our knives and forks with plastic cutlery. I’ll be wife-proofing the cupboard where we keep the toilet-bowl cleaner in May. And before the end of June I’ll have hired Kevin Costner for 24-hour protection.