(Why I Made) The Face

Some of you may remember when I made The Face, at about 6pm on July 16th.

Hello, ladies.

At that moment, I’d just sat down, and my new wife Katie (so new I still called her my “wuh… wuh… ex-fiancee”) had just left the house to go watch Harry Potter with her family. I was staying in to do some work, and to avoid Harry Potter like the plague. Shut up, plebs. Don’t judge me.

Anyway. I’d had The Face on for just over a minute. A curious thing was happening to the skin over my skull. It was locked in place, forming The Face, and it stayed with the tenacity of rigor mortis as the seconds kept ticking on by. Intrigued by what The Face felt like, I took a photo of it to see what it looked like.

Turns out it looked like me pulling a stupid face, somewhere between fear and confusion. Who’d have thought?

The reason for The Face was was a simple (but frightening) one.

One Minute Before The Face: About a minute before the photo was taken, just as The Face started to settle onto my rugged and chubby-cheeked hamsterish features, I was standing alone in my kitchen, in silence, preparing to walk upstairs. I was also thinking “I wonder if I have her piss on my hands now”, which was exceedingly unromantic, but there we go.

Two Minutes Before The Face: About a minute before that urine-based thought, I was in the same room with Katie. She was smiling and trying not to laugh, while unnameable emotions danced in the hazel and green swirls of her Irish eyes. I, on the hand, was hopping from foot to foot, clutching two pregnancy tests that she’d recently peed on, and saying “Oh shit oh fuck oh Jesus where’s your mum let’s talk to your mum oh fucking hell.”

She didn’t want to talk to her mum. Not yet. She was about to go see Harry Potter with her family, and her parents were going on holiday for two weeks mere hours after the cinema trip. Now, she reasoned, was not the time to inform them we were accidentally pregnant many, many months earlier than even our vaguest plans.

I dealt with this in a manner becoming of all thirty-year-old adult males. I was cool, calm, and collected. “But but but but shit oh Jesus what if it likes football and wants to join the army?” I said, uttering what history will surely recall as my most excellent and rational sentence. A crazier thought manifested, but I never said it aloud. ‘Maybe if I’m gay this won’t be real’, I thought. But that made such little sense that even my stalling hind-brain refused to give it voice. It was too late for gayness. Much too late.

Three Minutes Before The Face: And about a minute before my wondrously eloquent outburst (and secret failure of a homosexuality escape plan), I was alone in the bathroom, having cheated and crept in to look at the tests before Katie checked them. They were wrapped in tissue paper. I was still thinking ‘Gross, she peed on those,’ as I used a shower gel bottle to roll the tests over so I could see properly. I said, very clearly, “Fuck.”

There followed a moment of silent, raw smugness. I actually cupped my balls and nodded to myself. ‘This must be what men feel like’, I thought. Did I feel a brief spark of awareness in that moment? Did I suddenly want to play football, or perhaps even more drastically, watch other men play it?

The answer was no.

The moment of powerful manliness faded. I began to hop from foot to foot. Clutching the pee-sticks in my hand, I went to tell the girl I’d been married to for two weeks that I was both masculine and virile, and she was about to spend the next year getting fat. As has been explained, what actually happened was that I mumbled swear words at her, and she went to see Harry Potter while silently panicking, and I went to take a photo of my face. The Face, in fact.

The next generation Dembski-Bowden. Week 12-13.

We call her Fuchsia. For you foreign folks, that’s pronounced Fyoosha. I mean, we’re not actually calling her Fuchsia (after Fuchsia Groan from Gormenghast, because Katie won’t let me), but that’s how we refer to her now, as her “Oh Jesus, there’s a baby inside you” name. It might be a boy, for all we know. We have names picked out, but it’s early days. We’ll save all that for later.

I’m immensely looking forward to one thing about parenthood more than any other: inflicting my bitch of a surname on yet another human being. It’s so, so, so much fun to hear Katie saying “Dembski-Bowden… D… E… M… No, there’s a B… S… K… I… Hyphen… B…” to other people, after so many years of suffering alone. My brother has the same name, but I’ve never heard him have to spell it for people, so my joy was diminished in that regard. But Katie spells it all the time, and it’s hilarious. I had no idea I looked that annoyed for so many years. I look forward to Fuchsia knowing the same delightful torture at a mental surname.

In another moment of absolute intelligence, in the name of being thorough, I asked the doctor doing the scan this morning: “Uh, so, like, it doesn’t have two heads or anything?”

Evidently not.

Look at her little feet.

Weird.

Heh.

Babies.

Oh, Jesus.