LESSONS FROM MY FIRST DELIVERY

Not one that I underwent (impossible), or one that I conducted (impractical), but the one I witnessed. Here’s what I learned:

Tum do, tumhaara ek. Minus one, if you’re ambivalent about the whole no-sleep-no-life-potty-all-over-the-place routine.

All men desirous of a second child deserve a penectomy. And their very own vaginas.

Wives murdering spouses who pressurise them into bearing more children, should be let off by courts, citing extenuating circumstances.

Instead of Mumtaz Mahal after her fourteenth child, it is Shah Jahan who should have died. Look at the cheek of that man – he built her a monument boxed in by four giant phalluses.

When aggrieved women who are mothers several times over, unite to protest the lack of male uteruses – now that’s a labour union.

Medical caution aside, I fully sympathise with pregnant women who demand epidural anaesthesia and C-sections. Those who aphorise about ‘no pain, no gain’ can go have a baby, just for fun.

Episiotomies without adequate anaesthesia merit the intervention of Human Rights International and the UN Peacekeeping Force.

For a woman about to pass out of exhaustion become a mother, delivery and deliverance is the same thing.

No medical specialty requires humane doctors more than OBGY.

Soon-to-be fathers stationed in the waiting room while squirming at the cries of their wives, should be made to sit in front of a large angry sign saying – ‘see what you did!’

The only way that men can possibly bond with their wives during delivery is by self-inducing constipation, then straining to relieve themselves. Not that they’d even come close to the real thing.

Roving playboys who abandon unwed mothers need to be sniffed out, tracked down and devoured alive by rabid dogs.

Male schoolteachers spouting Moral Science have no business talking about the Dignity of Labour.

Surrogate mothers are misguidedly altruistic, heedlessly mercenary, mindlessly masochistic or the most heroic human beings alive.

Women who want to birth twins should have their heads examined.

Condoms are singularly the most important inventions since the discovery of rubber.

The most effective family planning measure is to drag the loving husband into the labour ward and force him to watch his wife pop out a two-and-a-half kilo un-streamlined mass through an aperture that is normally just a few centimetres wide.

I understand all the hoo-ha about compulsory sterilisation. Now let’s give Sanjay Gandhi a Bharat Ratna.

Despite teddy bears, Justin Bieber and a pregnant Schwarzenegger in Junior, there is nothing cuter than a newborn baby.

No muscle in the entire male or female body is stronger than the vagina.

Women are indubitably the stronger sex.

I now understand why, every year on my birthday, my mother relives her own eighteen-hour labour in odious and obstetric detail. Thank you, Aayee.

My great-grandmother gave birth to twelve (living) children. I’m going to try and get my road named after her.

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