Louisa Simmonds

The difference between the way men and women make decisions by Aki Tan at http://www.flickr.com

We make many decisions in our lifetime, some important and some fortunately less so.

I’ve made great decisions in my own life, (such as trying Scarborough wine), and a few I’m not so proud of now, like an annual salary’s worth of gym memberships, a long list of jobs and a multitude of bad hair styles.

We often have to make life-changing decisions in our relationships too, like choosing the right time to say ‘I love you’ and the risk of baring our soul, deciding when it’s time to pull the plug and finally say goodbye or when it’s been long enough to tell him he’s a shit head who doesn’t deserve you. And in those situations, (because someone else’s feelings are invariably on the line), we need to be certain that our decision is right.

NB (NC’s eye candy) made an important decision yesterday – the right one, I believe.

But before I tell you about it, I will take you through a good decision that the old man made a very long time ago – well, other than marrying me in spite of his doubts or buying me that eternity ring that he had robbed me of for at least ten years.

Two weeks before my due date with NC, (and for some reason that I really can’t fathom out now but can only assume was because we were young and foolish), the old man and I decided to paint the town red with some friends as a last fling before the real responsibility of parenthood began.

Aside from weighing the same as a small Blue Whale, I must have been feeling well because we didn’t get back home until the early hours of the morning – I was still sober, but unfortunately the old man was completely off his face.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to imagine what happened next…

We went to bed and within half an hour I awoke to find myself swimming in amniotic fluid. So I called the hospital and they told me I had to come in straight away.

Obviously, the old man was not in any physical state to do this – the best laid plans and all that. In fairness, I too had believed, as every first-time mother does, (and before we twerked our butts off at JoJo’s that night), that I would have a textbook birth, the stork would land on my due date, and my husband would be there at my side, tearful, supportive and demonstrating all the potential of a truly, natural father – like the ones you see on One Born Every Minute.

Shit happens, what can I say?

I remember bending (with great difficulty) over his inert body and shaking him to tell him our fantastic news and him responding in ‘grunt’, a language developed by red wine that is even more un-intelligible than teenage-speak. So I shook him a second time, quite violently this time, because although I knew it wasn’t really his fault that he was absolutely fucking shitfaced when our baby was about to make her entry into the world, I had still expected him to jump to his new responsibilities like a crazy man when he heard that I was going into labour; like they do in the movies.

This was when the old man made the best decision in our relationship.

Years later, he admitted to me that when he felt me rough him up the second time, the last thing on earth he felt like doing was getting up out of that warm bed and accompanying me to the hospital, (although the thought of watching me in pain for 24 hours was tempting). And for a nano-second, while he ruminated on his decision, he contemplated telling me to go ahead by myself, until fortunately – DING! – a warning siren went off somewhere in the logic side of his brain. And VERY fortunately for that man, he managed to pull his sorry ass out of bed and into the passenger seat of the car, while I squeezed my bump behind the wheel and drove myself to the hospital.

NB faced a similar dilemma this morning.

NC had organized for me to take NB to the airport to meet her after her five-week travels in Thailand. However, fifteen minutes before he was due to arrive at our house he casually texted me to say that his motorbike had unfortunately got a flat tyre and he wouldn’t be able to make it to the airport.

I repeat…’casually’.

Bear in mind that one of the other girls boyfriend’s was going to the airport too and she and her boyfriend are one of those couples that can’t keep their hands off each other, even in public – as NB admitted when bravely comparing his Lothario game to Romeo’s, the boy had probably camped out at the airport the night before just to blow up the army of ‘welcome home’ balloons and write the banners and to make sure he would be on time.

To be honest, I was impressed by NB’s calm in the face of impending doom. But couldn’t he see that being a no-show wasn’t seriously a viable option and that he’d need to come up with a better excuse than a dodgy tyre? I texted him back hastily, urging him to reconsider what might become a pivotal decision in his relationship. I reminded him as diplomatically as I could that NC had been on a flight all night, not slept, and might become unnaturally bitchy irrational if he wasn’t there to meet her. I hoped he knew how to ‘read between the lines.’

Fortunately, NB is a potential rocket scientist and he reconsidered his options.

#decisions #Childbirth #men #Humor #Relationships