Putting the “fun” back into the fundus

There’re laws for everything these days; where to walk, where not to walk; where to stand, where not to stand; what to eat/what you’re not allowed to eat (eg: people, dogs, cats); what trees to plant and where/what you’re not allowed to cut down; laws for housing; laws for building; laws for waste management and even laws which tell you where you can take a dump/where you can’t (eg: train carriages, street corners, department store fragrance counters); laws about having to go to school and where; there are even laws about who can marry/who can’t/what to marry (eg: boys vs girls vs Chihuahuas).

So many laws … covering so many things … and each one (supposedly) developed and enforced both in the best interests of society today, and for its future development. So tell me why, with all of these stringent boundaries directing us towards a better community and nation, they are still letting idiots breed?

Given that Mrs Donkey has been “in foal” of late, and ready to burst any day now, we have been touring the parental rapid training circuit for the past few months and have discovered that we are surrounded by a world of humourless, insular, self-obsessed dim-wits with nary an awareness of the world three blocks away from their hovels between them, and all of whom are soon to release/inflict similarly soft-baked offspring onto a society with, in my view, inadequate mental health and rehabilitation services to cope with the onslaught. Surely something needs to be done immediately to address this scourge which looks liable to set the development of this nation back a couple of decades?

I can tell by your sceptical frown that you think the recent nights I’ve spent sleeping on the floor in order to accommodate Mrs Donkey’s expanding (and aggressively demanding) bed-space requirements are sending me a little fruity, but before you click back to YouPorn, allow me to describe some of the cretins (oops, I mean) characters from our prenatal classes.

The fun kicked-off immediately in Session #1, when in response to a question from the midwife, “What will each of you bring to the birth?”, this one guy, either an imbecile or a comic genius, replied in a cocky manner and without so much as a hint of a smile, “My Mum!”. Both the midwife and Donkey displayed super-human powers of self control to stay upright on our chairs and to smother our chuckles and guffaws as it became clear from his confusion and bemusement moments later that he was actually deadly serious … as was his partner; and she was staring down the barrel of 24+ hours of pain, puffing and panting, all in the company of her mother-in-law! I mean, this was the stuff of crappy ‘70s TV sitcoms, and yet there was not a self-deprecating smile in sight!

The midwife’s response to all this, after 20-odd years of circumventing the unenlightened chauvinism of over-bearing fathers-to-be, was to repeatedly remind the clearly misguided partner of this Mummy’s Boy at every possible opportunity over the following 5 weeks that she didn’t have to have her partner’s mother helping her son ‘down at the business end’ during the birth if she didn’t want to, but on reflection, I think she may have been a-few-ova-short-of-a-conception herself, and never quite grasped the implications of her feller’s maternal dependence.

As I mentioned, this revelation from Little Lord Fauntleroy emerged only minutes into Session #1, at which time I suddenly grew fearful that I may have stumbled into a real-life zombie scenario, so in order to preserve my life, I resolved to pay a little more attention to my fellow prenatal class mates, only to discover that I had unwittingly stumbled into a real-life zombie scenario!

At the time of our first prenatal class, Mrs D and I were the least-baked of all the attendees – most of whom were expecting within the following three months. The maternity outfits of the ladies were tightening into a myriad of multi-coloured beach balls, and one might have expected their lads to have had some ideas and plans for what to do come beach-ball deflation time. On the contrary, a quick look at the male faces around the room revealed a mixture of either blank surprise and wonderment, or the tight-knit brows of a gathering of super-sleuths executing elementary deduction in an effort to ascertain a) how they came to be in this room, b) how long it had been that their partners had been walking around looking like beach-balls (and why), or c) how they could convince their partners to allow them to invite their mothers to attend the birth.

Honestly, these guys, (allegedly) the fathers of six-month-old, unborn children, looked genuinely, acutely shocked at their situation - sagging eyes, slack-jaws, white knuckles gripping the arms of chairs. It was as though they’d only just found out, on the way to the class, that their missus was knocked-up.

This observation was confirmed immediately thereafter when, in response to the second question of Session #1, “What would you do to support your partner during labour?”, at least three of them answered that they’d probably stay out of the room so as not to get in the way of the experts, while two others said they didn’t know, “…and that’s why [they’d] been forced to come here tonight!”

Hang-on a minute, these are the people who are having children?!

As the weeks unfolded, these nit-wits learned that there are resources such as the internet and books that one can (SHOULD) access for information which can help them prepare for having a baby (“Wot, are we having a bay-bee?”), but overall, very few of the half of the participants that Donkey ended up having to talk to had any insight into their situation, and absolutely no interest in dwelling-on any of the opportunities for humorous exchange to which the presented material lent itself, such as one of the pregnant participants referring to her post-natal self as a milk-factory, or one of the male participants worriedly asking when his partner’s figure would return to normal, or when one couple asked in unison when they could get their hands on the government’s baby bonus. C’mon people, this is funny stuff; comedy gold! How ‘bout a chuckle at the ape who just wants the baby out so that he can climb back on board, or perhaps a disbelieving snort at the prissy social-climber who refuses to breastfeed in case she will no longer be able turn the heads of the ball-boys down at The Club.

You may have guessed from these observations that Mrs Donkey and I didn’t quite endear ourselves with our fellow classmates. Our constant giggling and chuckling as we joked with each other about strategically placed mirrors and women down on all fours grunting like a barnyard animal may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but hey, Australians are culturally-renowned for using humour to help deal with fear. At least our approach (we think/hope), which requires one to have intellectually confronted one’s fears in order to turn them into something amusing, reflects a certain spark of intelligence; an admirable contrast, we think, to the stinking, viscous muck oozing about inside the skulls of our compatriots.

Which brings me back to my earlier comments regarding laws. We have laws for and against so many things in this society, so how come these morons are allowed to stick their appendages into each other and create offspring? Shouldn’t the long-term best interests of society prevail here? Couldn’t the money currently spent by the government on baby bonuses be better employed in the purchase of a bulk-order of Ginsu knives with which said appendages could be liberated from their intellectually-challenged owners?

Something needs to be done … and fast! I don’t want to inflict Baby Donkey on a social group whose favourite pastime is picking lice from each other’s back hair and cracking them in their teeth. I want more for my child; literature, art, music, dancing and above all, humour … not football, motor sport, World Wrestling and The Biggest Loser. But if our pre-natal classes are anything to go by, I think that’s all she/he’s going to get.

I’m calling for a major judicial overhaul. Remember former-Prime Minister, John Howard’s famous anti-immigration battle-cry some five years ago, “We decide who comes into this country and the circumstances under which they come”? Well there’s a whole generation of new arrivals who’ve come-in through the back-door (not literally … but you know what I mean), and it’s high time we turned the same, tough stance we’ve committed to border-control upon our home-grown stock. Selective breeding, people, the time is most definitely nigh.


The scene outside Donkey's prenatal classes just the other night. There goes the neighbourhood. Pic : http://www.revok.com/zombie.html