‘Kai?’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘I’ve got something to tell you…I think I’m pregnant.’ Of all the April Fools to play on a guy, this has to be one of the cruellest. The only trouble was, it was only January and my girlfriend wasn’t fooling. Neither was the pregnancy stick that she held in front of her as incontrovertible proof that our life was effectively over. To say that I was taken aback would be something of an understatement. I knew that my girlfriend had been complaining of feeling sick lately - in the mornings no less - put had put it down to her valetudinarian disposition coupled with a reluctance to get out of bed before midday. Of course, every guy - whether he admits it or not - has envisaged the day when his girlfriend sits him down and inflicts those dreaded three words upon him. No, not ‘I love you’ but the other one: ‘Darling I’m pregnant.’ But I’d already had that moment, two years previously, and have the kid that proves my girlfriend wasn’t kidding. Which is why I thought I was safe, for a few more years at least. Lovely as my daughter is, looking after her is a full-time job with unsociable hours, shitty pay and no pension plan. With two screaming brats on the go, I really could kiss goodbye to my sex and social lives. (Although in saying that, Alex has two kids and he somehow manages to lead an active life. Socially at least.) My girlfriend had previously assured me that she didn’t want another baby for at least five years, which suited me just fine. While I had no idea whether I would want a second sprog even five years down the line, by which time the existing one would have just stopped using nappies and started cleaning up after herself, was another matter, but I intended to cross that bridge when I came to it, and even then I reserved the right to chicken out at the last moment and plunge over the parapet into the icy water below.
When faced with news of the gravest sort, a man’s typical response is to make a joke of it. That buys him enough time to work out how he really feels about the matter, instead of blurting out the first thing that comes into his head - ‘Let’s keep the baby!’ - which he may later come to regret. My reaction was no different. ‘I’ve got something to tell you…I think I’m pregnant’ my girlfriend had announced. The bombshell had barely landed when I calmly replied ‘Well so long as you’re not three months pregnant, I can handle it.’ For my girlfriend to be fostering another foetus was one thing; for it to have been conceived while I was still in jail would be quite another. The expectant mother assured me in no uncertain terms however that it had to be mine, fixing me with the sort of glare that screamed ‘Don’t you dare try and wriggle out of this one!’ I had no reason to doubt her, for she had been telling the truth the last time I was confronted by a pregnancy stick. If her ‘women’s intuition’ coupled with a Boots testing kit said that she was packing and my ball juice was responsible, who was I to dispute it? Given that the baby-to-be was irrefutably mine then, this left one other pertinent question to be answered - how? For my girlfriend to have fallen pregnant was little short of an immaculate conception. It wasn’t that we hadn’t been fucking regularly - we had, in spite of our daughter’s best efforts to invoke blue balling through her inopportune bawling - and it wasn’t that I hadn’t been ‘making love’ to her vaginally. I shan’t go into details about the contraception we were using, but let’s just say that short of pulling out and plumping for a pearl necklace every time, I couldn’t have been any safer. And yet in spite of our best efforts to stem the flow of tadpoles to the rendezvous point, one had slipped through the net. I might as well face it; my balls were so big and manly and their contents so potent, they overrode every contraceptive barrier put in their way. All that unspent jizz must have built up while I was in jail, until Vesuvius finally erupted the nite I got home, leaving a trail of creation in its wake.
Although the conception was seemingly a done deal, my girlfriend informed me that she was heading to the doctor’s anyway for a blood test that would confirm our fate. Meanwhile, I was left alone in the house to ponder my folly. The right thing to do would of course be to support my girlfriend through the pregnancy and welcome our latest progeny into the world when he/she/they arrived, then feed, clothe, shelter and nurture them for the next 18 years. But since when has life ever been about doing the right thing? In an ideal world, perhaps. In the real world however, it's all about doing the most practical thing, which in this case meant cutting my losses and bailing out. Where to exactly? Afghanistan; Iraq; Somalia - any country where the death rate outnumbered the birth rate was fine with me. George W. Bush was always banging on about resisting the urge to ‘cut and run’ from such war zones. Well now I was about to do the exact opposite; cut and run straight into enemy territory. The way I saw it, the worst that could happen had already happened; after having pregnancy sticks thrust in my face, it would be a relief to have dynamite sticks thrust in my face by deranged suicide bombers.
As I was weighing up the options, the fone rang. It was my girlfriend. ‘Let me guess…you’re still pregnant.’ ‘Well actually I’ve not been to the doctor’s yet’ she replied. ‘I was just in town so I went past Boots cos I wanted to check that the test was right. You see, I didn’t have the box for the testing kit in the house so I wanted to make sure I’d read the result correctly.’ ‘And had you?’ ‘No. I thought a horizontal blue line meant you were pregnant but it’s the other way round; a blue line means negative. Two blue lines means you’re pregnant.’ ‘So you’re definitely not pregnant then?’ ‘No.’ I should have felt relieved, but instead I felt like I’d been played. ‘You did this deliberately to test my commitment, didn’t you, to see if I would stand by you?’ The mum-to-be-or-not-to-be assured me that this wasn’t the case. Well fair enough, I reasoned, but seeing how she wasn’t pregnant after all, would it be OK to write about the incident in my weblog? ‘No’ came the curt reply.
I sat down on my half-packed suitcase and tore up the one-way ticket to Australia. Had she called ten minutes later, I’d have been gone for good. The fone rang again. It was my girlfriend. ‘Don’t tell me, this is you foning to say you were right the first time and you are pregnant?’ ‘Actually’ she replied ‘I was foning to say that you can write about it in your blog after all so long as you explain that I hadn’t used the testing kit in two years so I’m not a retard.’ True to my word, I sat down and penned a blog on the subject, making sure to point out that my girlfriend wasn’t a retard for fucking up a pregnancy kit so simple that even Torry mums could work it.
So just to clarify, my girlfriend’s not pregnant and I’m not going to be a daddy again but for the record, I’d like to stress that my balls are still enormous and my sperm virile and plentiful. Just because I couldn’t take the false news of her pregnancy like a real man doesn’t make me any less of one.
When faced with news of the gravest sort, a man’s typical response is to make a joke of it. That buys him enough time to work out how he really feels about the matter, instead of blurting out the first thing that comes into his head - ‘Let’s keep the baby!’ - which he may later come to regret. My reaction was no different. ‘I’ve got something to tell you…I think I’m pregnant’ my girlfriend had announced. The bombshell had barely landed when I calmly replied ‘Well so long as you’re not three months pregnant, I can handle it.’ For my girlfriend to be fostering another foetus was one thing; for it to have been conceived while I was still in jail would be quite another. The expectant mother assured me in no uncertain terms however that it had to be mine, fixing me with the sort of glare that screamed ‘Don’t you dare try and wriggle out of this one!’ I had no reason to doubt her, for she had been telling the truth the last time I was confronted by a pregnancy stick. If her ‘women’s intuition’ coupled with a Boots testing kit said that she was packing and my ball juice was responsible, who was I to dispute it? Given that the baby-to-be was irrefutably mine then, this left one other pertinent question to be answered - how? For my girlfriend to have fallen pregnant was little short of an immaculate conception. It wasn’t that we hadn’t been fucking regularly - we had, in spite of our daughter’s best efforts to invoke blue balling through her inopportune bawling - and it wasn’t that I hadn’t been ‘making love’ to her vaginally. I shan’t go into details about the contraception we were using, but let’s just say that short of pulling out and plumping for a pearl necklace every time, I couldn’t have been any safer. And yet in spite of our best efforts to stem the flow of tadpoles to the rendezvous point, one had slipped through the net. I might as well face it; my balls were so big and manly and their contents so potent, they overrode every contraceptive barrier put in their way. All that unspent jizz must have built up while I was in jail, until Vesuvius finally erupted the nite I got home, leaving a trail of creation in its wake.
Although the conception was seemingly a done deal, my girlfriend informed me that she was heading to the doctor’s anyway for a blood test that would confirm our fate. Meanwhile, I was left alone in the house to ponder my folly. The right thing to do would of course be to support my girlfriend through the pregnancy and welcome our latest progeny into the world when he/she/they arrived, then feed, clothe, shelter and nurture them for the next 18 years. But since when has life ever been about doing the right thing? In an ideal world, perhaps. In the real world however, it's all about doing the most practical thing, which in this case meant cutting my losses and bailing out. Where to exactly? Afghanistan; Iraq; Somalia - any country where the death rate outnumbered the birth rate was fine with me. George W. Bush was always banging on about resisting the urge to ‘cut and run’ from such war zones. Well now I was about to do the exact opposite; cut and run straight into enemy territory. The way I saw it, the worst that could happen had already happened; after having pregnancy sticks thrust in my face, it would be a relief to have dynamite sticks thrust in my face by deranged suicide bombers.
As I was weighing up the options, the fone rang. It was my girlfriend. ‘Let me guess…you’re still pregnant.’ ‘Well actually I’ve not been to the doctor’s yet’ she replied. ‘I was just in town so I went past Boots cos I wanted to check that the test was right. You see, I didn’t have the box for the testing kit in the house so I wanted to make sure I’d read the result correctly.’ ‘And had you?’ ‘No. I thought a horizontal blue line meant you were pregnant but it’s the other way round; a blue line means negative. Two blue lines means you’re pregnant.’ ‘So you’re definitely not pregnant then?’ ‘No.’ I should have felt relieved, but instead I felt like I’d been played. ‘You did this deliberately to test my commitment, didn’t you, to see if I would stand by you?’ The mum-to-be-or-not-to-be assured me that this wasn’t the case. Well fair enough, I reasoned, but seeing how she wasn’t pregnant after all, would it be OK to write about the incident in my weblog? ‘No’ came the curt reply.
I sat down on my half-packed suitcase and tore up the one-way ticket to Australia. Had she called ten minutes later, I’d have been gone for good. The fone rang again. It was my girlfriend. ‘Don’t tell me, this is you foning to say you were right the first time and you are pregnant?’ ‘Actually’ she replied ‘I was foning to say that you can write about it in your blog after all so long as you explain that I hadn’t used the testing kit in two years so I’m not a retard.’ True to my word, I sat down and penned a blog on the subject, making sure to point out that my girlfriend wasn’t a retard for fucking up a pregnancy kit so simple that even Torry mums could work it.
So just to clarify, my girlfriend’s not pregnant and I’m not going to be a daddy again but for the record, I’d like to stress that my balls are still enormous and my sperm virile and plentiful. Just because I couldn’t take the false news of her pregnancy like a real man doesn’t make me any less of one.
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