I wrote this a few years ago. First public viewing. I'd like to put forward a complaint against the person that spread the rumour that late pregnancy is a time of peaceful and joyous contemplation of the future. It's misleading and an outright lie. The last month is a time of restless discomfort and barely concealed panic and I'd like to set the record straight. When I first fell pregnant I was horrified but confident that I would cope. I'd just accepted my encroaching motherhood when I was awoken at two in the morning with stomach cramps and an overwhelming urge to throw the contents of my entire alimentary canal into the toilet. I was shocked and more than a little frightened but consoled myself with the knowledge that this was 'morning sickness', a totally normal phase of my condition. Society had neglected to tell me that 'morning' is any time of the day and could be invoked by the smell of cigarettes, any food that wasn't Bonox sandwiches and any movement faster than walking. I was congratulating myself on surviving my month of normal illness when I began to cry. I cried at that coffee commercial where the city son returns to see his country Dad and finally resolves their differences over a cuppa. I continued crying when the phone rang I had to speak to anyone that I had the slightest affection for. However, I cried the hardest standing in the middle of the hospital hallway with a drug chart in one hand. a bedpan in the other and no idea what I was doing with either. I ran sniveling to my supervisor convinced that I was losing my mind. She told me that this was also normal and gave me a nice safe desk job where my entirely normal confusion wasn't going to endanger a patient's life. I howled with gratitude. My mother rang and, between sobs, that this was all normal and this too would pass. The blues passed and my ankles swelled to twice their normal size. My jeans retreated further back into the furthest corner of my cupboard, I got up five times a night to empty my shrinking bladder, I learnt that heartburn is more painful than oil burns and I acquired an elegant waddle. I threw myself into work to distract myself and tried to think nice things. To show what a caring and responsible company I worked for they sent me home on mandatory maternity leave which left me in an empty flat with the soapies and the telephone. As the dreaded, but entirely normal, extreme pain of labour waited for my lump to make a move, I lived in fear. I lived in fear that my next waddle to the shop would cause my waters to break in the meat department with only a hamfisted butcher in sight and my address book, overnight bag and hospital card locked in the Fort Knox that was my flat. I held to the belief that peace and joy would entail wearing my jeans and drinking a bottle of scotch in some distant future when the straightjacket came off.