A
conversation among a cluster of parents at a
party turned into a preemie contest. One parent
said her child was born eight weeks early and
the next one said his was born ten weeks early
and the third said hers was born before the ovum was even
fertilised.
Your humble narrator listened to this for a while and
then shared the tale of what was probably the most overdue
birth ever.
Years ago, when I was a news reporter, I covered the
tale of a little old lady in Taipei named Madam Wu, aged
76, who went for an x-ray. Doctors found a baby in her
tummy.
She had no idea how it got there. (She was pretty
sure she hadn’t eaten such a thing.) But she did remember
Shock resistant
You can’t shock a parent: We see weird, bizarre and
disgusting things all the time, says father-of-three
Nury Vittachi.
x-ray when I am 76. It would be so embarrassing if, in my
dotage, I suddenly gave birth to some fat, middle-aged
dude who thinks he looks good on a Harley-Davidson.
But then again, these little surprises happen all the
time, being part and parcel of the dizzy whirl of activity
known as “family life”.
The other day I stumbled on an ancient cutting sent
in by a reader about three families in Peru who claimed
that their teenage sons had been devilishly possessed by a
Japanese TV cartoon. Sounded legit, so I read on.
The youngsters, Christian Vilchez, 16, and Jorge Vela
and Edy Frank Castillo, both 19, had become more or less
mute, except for inconsequential ramblings about an anime
called
Dragon Ball Z
, according to the cutting from the
Terra
Notícias Populares
newspaper.
The report quoted one distraught father saying: “I beg
the authorities and the church to support me.”
Mute? Obsessed with Japanese anime?
Congratulations, dads, your three boys are suffering from a
terrifying condition called Being A Teenage Boy.
That’s the thing: You don’t need to blend in horror
stories to add to the drama of family life. It’s quite dramatic
enough as it is. I mean, the other day my daughter
stumbled on to a documentary series about bizarre
families, starting off with an episode about a young woman
in the US who has two heads, or perhaps I should say two
young women who have one body. What was weird was
that their problems were pretty much the same as those of
other families, such as having grandmas with mysterious
stomach-aches, brothers possessed by the spirit of Japanese
anime characters, etc.
If the TV folk want something bizarre, they should film
our dog. We gave her a bone and she ate the whole thing.
It emerged, complete and undigested, from the other end
some hours later. This incident went straight on to my list
of “most disgusting things I have ever seen” but it wasn’t
number one. I am a parent, you see.
Nury Vittachi writes a regular humour column at
But then again, these little
surprises happen all the time,
being part and parcel of the
dizzy whirl of activity known
as ‘family life’.
that she had once had a stomach-ache, a long time ago,
when she had been in her 20s. (What a memory – clearly
a married woman.) Doctors said that that must have been
when the baby started to grow inside her. This meant that
the male offspring, at the time it emerged, was 49 years
old. It was stillborn, which was probably a good thing. All
the 49-year-old males I know are paunchy, cantankerous
people with vast amounts of hair growing in all the wrong
places. It’s not a good look for a baby.
The day my report was printed, I had a stomach-ache.
My sniggering workmates in the newsroom told me I was
“having a virgin birth”. It was probably nothing at all,
but I pencilled a note into my mental calendar to have an
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