Hunter Gathering? by Annabel Howarth

As I sat in a much coveted chair, resting my aching back and swollen feet, I wondered at the man parading as my husband.    We didn’t know it then, but our first born would be safely arriving into the world in less than 24 hours.  I had been nesting, it was true, cleaning out all the kitchen cupboards and scrubbing the floors on my hands and knees until they gleamed, which was unusual, but not completely out of character.  The impending birth had had a much more dramatic effect on my husband.  He was shopping!

Anyone who knows my husband well, is aware of his generosity.  He thinks nothing of paying for everyone’s meal when we are out for dinner, taking family members on holiday, buying lavish gifts, but when it comes to buying a more tangible, practical item, particularly anything for himself, it is generally an agonising experience.  In the days when we first lived together, a day shopping for furniture or another item for the home would probably end with me having a complete meltdown in the middle of the store, on my knees, with my head in my hands in sheer frustration - and after having spent hours looking at and debating the same items, we would invariably go home without any purchase.  I would be left feeling exhausted by the energy I had invested in the excitement of the pending purchase, disbelieving at the number of hours we had wasted, and as empty as the boot of his car.

I am not the best shopper.  I don’t particularly like shopping.  Unlike my sister, who can spot the perfect pair of earrings for THAT dress from the opposite side of the store in the next street, I can spend hours searching for something and come away from a long day pounding the streets, with absolutely nothing.  But for me, shopping is simple.  If you see something you really like and you can afford it, just buy it, as the chances are if you think about it too much it will have gone while you are deciding.  

My husband, however, takes the game of shopping to a new level. There are usually three elements to purchasing an item with him.  He first needs to be persuaded that he might WANT a particular item.  Once that is established, he then has to go back to the same shop (or now, website) several times and discuss and debate for hours, days, weeks, before he can persuade himself that he actually NEEDS said item.  This is particularly important, in order to live with his methodist influenced conscience.  Honestly, he struggles to even buy himself a new pair of jeans.  The last, and most infuriating step, is that he then has to go away and RESEARCH every other possibility available before he can go back to buy the item he thought he might quite like to buy in the first place.  This process has been known to literally last years.     

Imagine how surprised I was when in the last couple of weeks running up to my daughter’s birth my husband became like a man possessed.  Not with buying things for the baby though.  Suddenly he seemed panicked by the notion that he had to buy all of the things he had been thinking about buying for the past three years as soon as possible, before the baby was born, as after that he would never be able to buy anything for himself ever again!  

Shockingly, and without much warning, my husband had already ordered a digital mini grand piano.  We had a week to wait for its arrival, and I felt excited by the prospect of spending gentle hours playing the music I used to play when I was at school and practising new pieces until I could play them perfectly and by heart, in a way I had never done as a child.  Meanwhile, my perfect little child would be sitting, contentedly playing on the rug.

Half an hour earlier, we had been sat in our favourite cafe chatting to the owners about the impending arrival of our baby.  When a slight feeling of panic had struck.  My due date was 11 days away and I was confident that my husband’s child would be late.  I had been two weeks late, my husband was always late.  Smug in our certainty, there was no bag packed ready to go off to hospital, although all the books said I should have had it packed two weeks previously.  “I think you should have your sandwich in the freezer by now!” said the owner.  We laughed, but his serious face made us stop and stare at each other for a moment.  “You don’t think....we had better go,” my husband said.  

So that was how I found myself, not panic packing my hospital bag.  That process happened at about midnight after my waters broke.  We were now panic shopping, for electrical items of course.  The last boys toys before fatherhood.  There were three items purchased without much agonising that afternoon: (Although to be fair, my husband had been at the “contemplating whether I want it” stage for some time previously)  a large flat screen HD ready TV; a blu-ray dvd player; and, something I really wanted, a new Dyson.

The hastily bought items arrived two days after our daughter, and I will never forget the look on the midwife’s face as she was weighing our tiny little baby on a winter’s day and the alarmed raise of her eyebrows when the patio doors were opened so that a piano could be delivered into the room.  

We did enjoy our new toys for a few months.  My husband would put on his ear phones and slide into a different world at the piano, and I could mask the sound of the pedals by turning up the TV, marvelling at the blu-ray picture curled up in a little love nest with my beautiful baby.  Our carpets were beautifully fluffed and cleaned by the cyclone suction of our stunning new vacuum cleaning machine.

But as you might expect, seven and a half years later, the piano is mostly collecting dust, apart from the days when a group of excited children might huddle round to test out its different sounds and tell each other “you’re doing it wrong”.  The TV and DVD player are no longer ours.  Moments of my husband’s life worrying whether I had let the baby put her hand on the screen or feed food into the DVD player are way behind us.  He gave up long ago.  The Dyson is still mine, and way past its best, despite having spent  most of its life so far as a clothes horse.

After this bank holiday weekend however, I am wondering if we might be having another baby.  Granted, I have been dropping heavy hints for a few years now, but it has taken less than 48 hours to look at and order a sofa and an armchair.  Never in the history of our 18 years together (apart from the pre first baby birth incident) has any item been viewed for the first time, ordered and paid for, at such speed.  It takes us longer to do the weekly food shop!  Time to get my order in quick for a new vac...