This one isn't funny. Sorry about that. It's not serious either though.

I had my first freakout a few weeks back.

It was a minor one but a freakout nonetheless. Lying in bed, unable to sleep, with my wife snoring away beside me, I began to panic. She’s seven months pregnant right now. We’re in the final stage. I can hear Europe playing in the background. We’re on our way to the end of level boss, and I suddenly found myself woefully unprepared.

I was out of mana and my enchanted sword was banjacksed.

It wasn’t the raising of the child that was freaking me out though. I’m still pretty confident I can do that and do it well. No, it was more the fact that it suddenly twigged in my brain that at any moment the baby could arrive. I’ve been, wrongly - stupidly - working on the assumption that babies somehow know their own due date and arrive perfectly on time with no mess and no fuss. Obviously I knew this wasn’t the case, but when you give a man a date, he’ll work to that date. And I have been. So when it - finally - dawned on me that this little ‘un could potentially arrive at any minute…it unnerved me. Mainly because we still have so much stuff left to do, preparation wise.

As I lay there in the dark, when I should have been sleeping, I was running through all the things we/I had to do. Most of it involved decorating the baby’s room, but when I listed them in my mind it seemed somewhat insurmountable. Carpeting, painting, getting new doors put on, buying various things from IKEA. All these things are fairly simple and don’t take that much time to do, but the ‘could happen at any time’ aspect reared its head for the first time and I flipped.

Very quietly and without waking my wife, but still…I flipped and couldn’t sleep for a while.

I explained my freakout to Jenny the following morning and she calmed me down, in much the same way I have done for her before. It’s never happened this way though and I think the worrying has somehow, maybe through osmosis, passed to me instead, because she’s as cool and calm as you like at the minute. She informed me that she’s had all her major freakouts already, some in front of me, some in work and some on her own.

It’s all fairly normal though. I think now that we’re in this stage of the whole pregnancy thing, both of you are living in a perpetual state of fear. Ordinarily in everyday life you’ll have no worries, but currently when you factor in that this baby could potentially drop at any moment you tend to sit on a permanent fear level, never quite relaxing. If 1 isn’t scared at all, and ten is too terrified to leave you house for fear of something horrible happening, I think we both rank at about a 3 or 4.

Which is good in a way. It spurs you into doing the stuff that you’ve not been doing or putting off, and in the weeks since my freakout we’ve actually completed all the things that I was freaking out about. It puts you in a state of continual awareness and readiness, like a cat ready to pounce; I’m ready at a moments notice to spring into action when the waters break.

 Which is when you move up to a whole new level of fear.

Shit.