"A Bag Full of Fannies"

We had our first Parentcraft class last Monday night, a class which details the ins and outs (mostly outs) of labour, and the days thereafter. It was all fairly informative, even if it’s nothing I haven’t already read about in the baby books, but when there’s a medical professional telling you it, it seems more real somehow. As if it’s not actually happening when you’re sat on your sofa reading a book, but when you’re sat in a stiflingly hot room in the local hospital with seven other couples watching a woman struggle to pull a baby doll out of a plastic recreation of a pelvis, it suddenly dawns on you that this is actually happening. And that it is simultaneously hilarious.

Mostly because it’s hard to listen to anyone say the word ‘vagina’ seriously, and not laugh your head off. And believe me, in one of these classes that word is bandied about a lot. Its vagina this and vagina that. You’d think this woman was obsessed with them. You’d think it was her job or something. Oh wait. Every time she said the V word, I got a case of the giggles. So if that were me I and I had to say the word that many times, I’d try to come up with all the variations I could think of - foofoo, doot, fanny, la-la - just to keep things fresh, so to speak. And those are just the most pleasant sounding ones (or the least unpleasant sounding ones) I could think of off the top of my head; I could think of a lot more that are much more vulgar but shan’t write them here.

Before long the woman produced a bag and proceeded to empty the contents on the table. Pouring out of it came various items; flip charts with pictures of fannies on them, dolls of babies which no doubt were girls and therefore had fannies, and last but not least fannies themselves, or at least the partial skeleton of the fanny area (that’s the pelvis FYI). Big ones, small ones, ones that she could push the doll through to simulate labour. This woman was carrying around a bag full of fannies. Fannies fannies fannies. All I could think of was this woman walking around town with the bag, with everyone else gleefully unaware of the contents. Imagine she got stopped in the street by a friend:

Friend: Oh, what’s in the bag? You buy yourself something nice?

Woman: Nah, it’s just a bag full of fannies.

Friend: …

I struggled to maintain my composure for the entire class. Happily, my wife was in the same boat. A boat floating on a sea of fannies on which we were hopelessly adrift, trying not to laugh our heads off. And we’re going to be parents! Surely parents shouldn’t be struggling not to laugh at the mere mention of the word ‘vagina?’ I suddenly wondered if we aren’t mature enough to be parents. Was this baby malarkey above our maturity level? I mean, I’m nearly thirty. Is there an age at which I shouldn’t find these types of things hilarious? A quick glance around the room however quelled my fears and revealed that everyone else, with the exception of an older couple, were in the same fanny boat as us. People, older than us and who frankly should know better, bravely fighting the urge to burst into laughter which suddenly made me feel a whole lot more relaxed. One fella had gone bright red with the amount of effort he was putting in trying not to spontaneously ROFL.

She did say ‘back passage’ once though, and I’m pretty sure I involuntarily snorted.

There was lots of very technical talk throughout the course of the two hours, and although as previously mentioned, if you’ve read the baby book you’ll know a lot of it already. Although there was a flip chart showing what happens from when you first start getting contractions, and the pictures showed the slow progress the baby makes; while this bursts, that thins, and the baby’s head and shoulders emerges from between the woman’s legs, culminating in a hilarious artistic rendering of the new mother holding her newborn child in a way I imagine no mother ever does while in the hospital surrounded by nurse, doctors and midwives. In fact, I’ve recreated it here:

Only instead of a cat, it was a baby. And there wasn’t a hastily drawn on MS Paint ‘umbilical cord.’ And the person was naked. And not me.

In real life, it’ll probably be Jenny asleep in her bed with baby happily asleep next to her, and me, passed out on the floor.