Growing Paynes - Week 4

Now this isn’t going to be a blog post about the seminal rock band and their ode to the Native American Plain’s Wars. Instead it’s a description of the missus - and what I’ve felt like doing this week! To be fair, so far I’ve been quite lucky, we’ve had a problem free pregnancy and the wife has been an angel - but wow, things can change quickly.

This week saw my lady swell up almost overnight, like one of those comedy movies when someone gets super inflated because a fire hose has been shoved in their mouth. Seriously, it was like she’d swallowed a bowling ball. Combine this with the muggy, hot weather, her daily commute into London with dudes who are a little too fragrant at 7am (c’mon, how expensive is a can of Lynx guys?) and you have a woman who’s become a living human combustion engine primed for explosion.

Obviously I felt sorry for her, it must be so uncomfortable and it’s only getting worse, but to be honest, it did start to grate on me. You may be thinking ‘hey chill out’, but let me give you two examples of how stuff is getting blown way out of proportion by her furious rage.

I work from home, so I usually do most of the household chores before Ness gets home feeling homicidal…sorry, I mean tired. On this particular day, I’d been really busy and didn’t get a chance. One of my chores involves making sure I put the cat food in the fridge to stop the flies taking up residency on it. On discovering that I’d neglected my duty and that flies had laid eggs on the food (lovely I know) I was not only accused of complacency - but possible murder! Yes, murder!! What if the cat had eaten it and the eggs had hatched in its stomach? Luckily, the cat hadn’t.

The Avon lady drops off her catalogue on a Monday and picks it up on a Thusrday with any order you may have. Sounds reasonable right, three days? Yes? NOOOOOOOO! It turns out that in the mind of my pregnant wife, three days was barely enough time to crack the thing open, let alone place an order, and she flew into a tirade about the whole process. For fear that children may read this I’m unable to write the actual words spoken but they were slightly nastier than pretty much anything said by Linda Blair in the Exorcist. Let’s just say that only David Attenborough has seen more venom spat from a living creature.

So after about four days worth of constant tears and tantrums for EVERY TINY THING (was she turning into Elton John?) I’d just about had enough. I let my temper get the better of me and suddenly, there she was, the Iron Maiden. In a blink of an eye, my beloved transformed into a medieval torture device dedicated to causing pain.

Again, as some of you may be of a sensitive disposition I’ll refrain from recounting the horror of the apocalyptic argument that followed. Eventually we all calmed down, and she recognised that perhaps she was being a little over-sensitive. In turn, I agreed that maybe I needed to let her know (nicely) when she was getting a little hysterical. To sum up then, this week I learned that Avon is evil, pregnant ladies are boiling cauldrons of rage, and that shouting at them is a bad idea if you don’t want to get horribly tortured for the foreseeable future.

Next week: Be a good scout!

Dads Space contributor Simon Payne loves going to rock gigs, adding to his collection of Aztec tattoos, good wine, football and his PlayStation. He's also the co-founder of Mind Adrenaline, a team building and events company that specialises in organising creative days out for organisations around the globe.

He readily admits he is a bit of a late starter.