Back in my day ...

When I was growing up, a few of my friends and I used to have some fun with the phone. On PA days and during the summer holidays, we would phone kids from our class and pretended that we were officials from some kind of adolescent group and were gathering information via a phone survey. We wrote up a script so that our opening patter was flawless, and without pausing, we would move straight from it into a list of questions. We began innocuously enough, enquiring about their age and grade level, whether or not they smoked or drank or did drugs. From there we would quickly move the interrogations towards sex. Since we were only in the fifth or sixth grade, our questions revolved around the basics like "Have you ever been kissed? Have you ever French kissed? Have you ever been felt up? Do you masturbate?"

It was amazing how many of our classmates actually fell for this and were forthcoming with so much personal information. It was hard for us not to burst out laughing during key moments. Surprisingly, no one guessed our identity.

As we got older, our fun with the phone evolved. Through one of our older siblings, we caught wind of something called "looped lines". These were dedicated phone lines used, I believe, by Bell telephone employees to communicate between themselves. My usually photographic memory is a bit foggy on this front, but these numbers either all had the same first three numbers, or the same last four numbers. If you happened to dial in while someone else was also dialing that particular number, you got connected or your lines became looped. Otherwise, you simply encountered dead air.

My friends and I used to congregate at one or the others' houses after school and after quickly doing our homework (we were good students, after all!) would spend hours cruising the looped lines. I'm not sure exactly what our intentions were. Mainly, the lines were jammed with older teenage guys looking for phone sex. As fascinated as we were, we were only twelve or thirteen at the time, and therefore lacked the experience or the desire to have these kinds of conversations. Nevertheless we continued to make these calls on a regular basis and pretend that we were much older girls.

One day while at one of my closest friend's house, her younger sister gave us a slip of paper with a name, a phone number and a brief description of a person (twenty-eight, very horny and dirty-minded) whom she'd accidentally called once and who stupidly (or desperately) gave her his correct home number during the process. Curious as hell, we dialed the number and crowded around the receiver, giggling as it rang.

Quite obviously, the voice on the other end belonged to a man in his late twenties or early thirties. For whatever reason, he very willingly entered into a conversation with us and was quite graphic in his descriptions of what he liked to do. The most bizarre thing was that he never once asked us who we were and how we had gotten his number.

I'd like to say that our fun ended there, but unfortunately, we were strangely drawn to this aberration of a man. We called him on a regular basis, with different friends present, and essentially egged him on to tell us about himself and his sexual conquests. Each time, he never once asked us who we were, must simply eased himself into conversation without question.

Finally, one day many phone calls later, a friend and I decided it was time to find out what this pervert looked like. We made arrangements for him to come and pick us up at a street corner, and then watched from far away as he sat in his car and stopped every girl that might match the description we'd given him.

I grew up firmly believing that one should never judge a book by its cover, but really, this guy was completely ugly and slimy looking. He was quite obviously desperate for something because he apparently hung around waiting for us for close to an hour (we hopped on a bus and went shopping after the first five minutes, but found this out during a subsequent phone call).

I haven't thought about this stuff in years. I'd almost completely forgotten about looped lines until just the other day. Ironically I had been patting myself on the back the other day about how vigilant and careful I am about my kids' use of the computer and internet at home, when really they could have been in the other room using the phone for all I knew.

The only thing I have over them is that at least I was focussed -- I didn't multi-task!

Don't think it through, just do it

I read a little miscellaneous bit of nothing in the Globe and Mail the other day. The title of the blurb was "Why we need sex". (I realise I sound like some kind of obsessed nympho since I'm so often writing about sex and correlated issues, so I should abstain this one time, but this was just too damn funny to pass on).

The bit of piffle referred to research which looked into why members of the Kingdom Animalia engage in sexual relations versus asexual reproduction. Indeed, according to a quote from Smithsonian Magazine, the act of sexual reproduction requires a great deal of energy to carry out, while it only allowes an individual the possibility of passing on half of its genes, as compared to cloning in which one hundred percent of an organism's genes are transferred.

The part that cracked me up was the following quote: "Scientists have long wondered why organisms bother".

Um hello? Have you guys been spending that much time in the lab that you don't know the answer to that question? I realise that this was meant within the context of energy expended as compared to the genetic output, but really!

Why do we bother to have sex? The answer list to that could be endless ... because we're trying to have a baby, because it's damn good fun, because we're horny, because we're bored, because the power is out and the T.V. doesn't work, because we're too broke or cheap to go out on a real date, because we're procrastinating on a work deadline and this seemed like more fun, because she wanted the old geezer to give her a pretty and expensive bauble and this seemed like a good way to get it, because this is a good way to destress, because we just fought and the make-up sex is the best, or just because it feels amazingly, awesomely good.

The real issue here is why would anyone even question the reasons for doing it? I mean, why look a gift horse in the mouth? Are scientists going to come up with a more efficient (and less pleasurable) way for us humans to reproduce?

I was curious if any of those genius scientists had done any research into why people bother to engage in oral or anal sex. Why does that physiological drive exist when it doesn't have anything to do with reproduction per se? I smell a doctoral thesis in there somewhere.

Labour of Love

A number of my friends have buns in their ovens at the moment, and it's caused me to reflect back upon my own pregnancies. Snooze once said I should post something about my first pregnancy in particular. Apparently, she finds this little anecdote quite amusing for some reason -- no dobut because it was about me and not her.

I think I am not in the minority when I state that first pregnancies are special. The novelty is, at first, completely exciting; the excitement then gives way to nerve-wracking insecurities, a fear of the unknown and the anticipation of an irrevocable change in one's life.

Now, most sensible people think things through before they decide to conceive. Although typically a planner, I somehow naively and unthinkingly went along with the general idea that we would start trying to get pregnant. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my husband and I are a walking ad for the saying that "it only takes one time". We literally got pregnant the very first time we had sex after deciding to try.

In the ensuing excitement of pre-natal vitamins, leafing through What to Expect When You're Expecting, and eating healthily, my husband decided that it would be a nice idea to put together a photographic triptych paying homage to the dramatic changes happening to my body. The idea was that he would take a picture of me wearing the same outfit and posing the same way each trimester. Since I was self-conscious and shy back then, I refused to do nudies and the shots were of me clad in bra and panties, as well as in a black dress. It became almost a pregnancy flipbook because other than the emerging bump, the photos were identical.

We eagerly awaited the arrival of the first two trimesters so we could immortalise my tummy in our photo shoot. Time being relative, those early months just crept along while the last two flew by. During the final trimester, I would fall into bed exhausted at the end of each day and as I would be turning out the light, my husband would remind me that we hadn't taken the final preggo shots yet.

One week before I was due to give birth, I was at my office helping out a colleague prepare for an offer presentation. After counselling her, I returned home at midnight and felt compelled to start cleaning the house like a fanatic because I deemed it to be in a complete state of shambles. That should have been my first clue that something was up. The second clue that should have tipped us off was my subsequent freak out over my discovery of hubby's dirty socks on the floor. After kicking toys and clothes around and nonsensically screaming four letter words, I flopped into bed, frothing at the mouth and silently resolved to never again speak to my husband.

My mortatorium on silence lasted but a short while for several moments later, I felt something weird -- a sort of scratching from the inside of my stomach. I held my breath and lay in the dark with my eyes wide open. After a few minutes, I whispered my husband's name. He was instantly awake and off the bed like a shot.

"Whaaaaaa??!! I'm up ... I'm up," he exclaimed, running around the room as if his rear end was on fire.

I quietly explained that I felt weird but wasn't sure why. He immediately reached for the multitude of pregnancy reference books which he'd purchased for his own sanity during the early hormone infused days of my condition. He quickly flipped through each of the dog eared tomes to the "Signs that you are in labour" sections and started reading off symptoms. At this point, I was sitting up with my back against the headboard and was beginning to feel silly because that scratching feeling had completely disappeared.

Suddenly, a small river wound its way down the bed. I jumped up in horror and disgust.

"What in the bloody HELL is THAT?" I shrieked, pointing a shaking finger at the mess on the bed.

Hubby looked up from his books and then nervously flipped to the index, all the while muttering "Membranes rupturing or water breaking". At this point, I started protesting that it wasn't that; I wasn't entirely unsure if maybe I'd just lost control of my bladder.

My husband recited a passage out loud that described the smell of amniotic fluid in great detail. This is where we reached the point of no return. We looked up from our respective positions on either side of the bed and without hesitation, my beloved husband then bent down, put his face close to the pool of liquid, took a deep whiff and then announced that yes indeed, my water had broken.

I knew right then and there that if one's relationship is at the point where one is sniffing the significant other's bodily fluids, it's a pretty good indication that one is going to be with the other for life.

While I frantically rushed about the house simultaneously trying to get dressed, throw random things into a bag to take to the hospital and communicate with the triage nurse on one phone line while calling my doula on another, my husband suddenly came to a screeching halt.

"The pictures! The damn pictures! We haven't taken the last set of pictures!", he exclaimed.

He coaxed and cajoled me into first stripping down to my unmentionables for the first shot, then donning the black dress for the second shot. In the meantime, that scratching feeling had suddenly transformed into full-blown contractions. I started snarling at my husband to hurry up and capture the moment already. (Much later, a close friend of the family saw the triptych pictures and asked why in the last framed shot, I'd looked so upset).

As if that wasn't enough ... as we drove away to the hospital, my husband realised that I didn't have any suitable nursing bras. Obviously we weren't thinking very clearly because in my leaky condition, who really gave a fig what kind of a post-partum over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder I had stashed away in my bag? So, while I sat in the car panting and puffing, he stopped off at several 24 hour drugstores and purchased a couple at each location. This while my uterus continued to expel amniotic fluid all over the car seat -- who knew a woman's body could hold so much liquid!!

Twenty-four hours later, our beautiful son came into the world and the whole importance of a prenatal photo triptych simply vanished. It was unimaginable that we'd once spent so much time discussing it and planning it, to the point where we'd taken the last shots at the nth hour. The only images we cared to capture on film were those of our scrumptious baby. It was ludicrous that I'd sat with my legs tightly crossed in the car while my husband shopped for some stupid undergarments. Suddenly none of that mattered any longer.

So for all you moms and expectant moms, I wish you a Happy Mother's Day.