An unromantic story for Valentine's Day.

It was February 14th 2004 and I was 8 months pregnant with our first baby. My routine midwife check that week had thrown up a worry. She thought the baby’s heart rate was a little high. So I was booked into the maternity ward to spend the morning hooked up to a fetal monitoring machine while they checked everything was ok.

Valentine’s Day was a Saturday that year and so Mrbird came with me.  It wasn’t what either or us had planned. I’d considered maybe waddling round the kitchen cooking something effortlessly effortless followed by an evening with my legs elevated on the sofa. Not in the exciting way, I just had badly swollen ankles.  A day spent in a dingy delivery suite pondering the state I’d be in the next time I saw one of those was not my idea of fun.

I was worried and Mrbird knew that. He is adept at reading my very subtle signs of anxiety: the rabid swearing, bleeding nose and snarling response to all attempts at small talk. So he distracted me with much bigger talk; about the baby, our lives together, what we thought parenthood would be like, our hopes, our plans.  As we talked, the baby’s heartrate began to slow down.  We talked my cares away. I forgot about the job that was causing me so much grief and the impending arrival of Ofsted and focussed on the person who could take away the stress, and on the imminent arrival of our baby.  Maybe that’s what calmed the the baby down.

Or it could have been my singing. The little fetal monitor read showed a much calmer line during “Somewhere beyond the sea”. I loved the baby even more for being the only person in the world to appreciate my lyrical stylings; such devotion is beyond even Mrbird.

After a while, the midwives were happy with the results on the screen and we were allowed to go home. I felt like we’d weathered a storm. It was good news for the years ahead, a sign that we could cope with the demands of parenting together. Yes: we were very, very naive. We had yet to know of sleep deprivation on a hallucinogenic scale, of Force 10 vomit. And I’m glad of that.

You can stick your candlelit dinners and your fluffy Wuvhearts. You want to know if someone loves you? Spend Valentine’s Day in the hospital together (not by choice. That would be weird. Besides, the food is terrible). And you want hearts? The best one I ever saw was the one beating steadily on the fetal monitor screen.