Take Me Out to the Ball Game: My Vasectomy

It was the day of my vasectomy. Or V-Day, as my darling Kate enjoyed calling it. We were deposited at the hospital by a friend, as both conventional wisdom and medical protocol urged strongly against operating a vehicle immediately after having my knackers carved like a pair of munching pumpkins. Kate was there to lend love and moral support. She also wanted to watch my operation. I’d already consented. She claims she’s possessed of an intense curiosity about the workings of the human body, but there’s at least a small chance she just thought it would be a bit of a laugh to see me receiving the surgical equivalent of CBT. They didn’t let her, even after we protested that men since time immemorial have had the option of watching their partners’ va-jay-jays being destroyed by childbirth, so why shouldn’t women be allowed to watch the crucifixion of their partners’ nut-sacks?

Despite the subject-in-hand being very much on my mind as we approached the front entrance of the hospital, there was very little fear circulating through my system. I’d told so many jokes about what was about to happen to me that the whole thing felt a bit abstract. I didn’t exactly swagger through the front doors like John Wayne bursting into a saloon, but then neither was I dragged into the building kicking and screaming like a toddler.

Emotionally and psychologically, I was somewhere in the middle of those two scenarios. I entered the hospital with the bearing of a man who was heading for something simple and nice and innocuous, like an eye test. That’s how big a deal I’d convinced myself this operation was going to be. I’d had teeth removed, blood taken, toes snapped back into place. I’d never relished any of it, but then neither had I resisted it. I’d just gone with the flow. So I was flowing again. Somewhere cool. Somewhere calm. I was chilled. Serene. Until, that is, precisely seven steps into the hospital, at which point I became Mr Jelly Legs McScaredy Pants.

Into whose hands would I be putting my nuts? Edward Scissorhands? Freddy Krueger? Jack the Ripper? The nightmare scenarios just kept piling up. Would one of my knife-wielding surgeons – still a bit squiffy from a few too many reds the night before – burst one of my bollocks like a soggy grape, and force me to spend the rest of my life limping and hobbling around like the cast of Last of the Summer Wine? Would both of them turn out to be testicle-eating vampire cannibals? I needed to know!

I was so visibly nervous that the surgeon who came into my little cubicle to deliver the pre-procedural pep talk had to lower his clipboard, and start talking me down like I was a guy standing on a high ledge… but actually with a lot less sympathy than that scenario suggests. I can’t remember exactly what he said to me, but the general tone of it was very much: “Would you like me to give you some time so that you can go and find your big boy pants, Mr Andrew?” I couldn’t fault him. His position made sense. A surgeon couldn’t very well take the risk that his patient might start gyrating like James Brown the second some cold steel skiffed against his spunky walnuts. To be honest, though, I don’t think my demeanour was helped by the fact that the surgeon had clearly been mandated to list all of the procedure’s potential problems and side-effects prior to me signing the consent form.

“I can’t tell you there won’t be any pain afterwards,” he said gravely, perched on his tiny stool. “Most people are fine, that’s true, but in some rare cases, and I mean very rare cases, you may find that your testicles start to swell up, and in even rarer cases they might spontaneously combust, firing your penis across the room like a torpedo. And if you’re ever erect when that happens, you’re a bloody dead man.”

OK, I’m paraphrasing a little. My recollection’s fuzzy. In saying that, I’m absolutely positive that he went on to say: “There was this one tragic case, where there was this guy having his left ball incised, and at the exact same moment some wicked old man died on the operating table upstairs, in the stroke ward – a real bastard he was, too – and his soul floated down, and the old man managed to enter this guy’s body through his sliced-open scrotum. Well, the old man possessed this guy’s body any chance he got. The poor fucker would wake up on the ward with accusations flying at him, everything from cheating at Bingo, to chasing nuns around the hospital and biting them on the ass with a set of false teeth he’d found in a bin. In the end they had to – and I mean, this is terrible, but they had to get that ghost – in the end they had to amputate both of the patient’s balls, and at least half the shaft. Course, by then, the old man had escaped into his right tit.”

I managed to remind myself that my decision to nix my cum-flow was in the service of not only saving myself the potential hassle of changing nappies at an age where I’d probably need to start wearing them, but of protecting Kate – her body, life and sanity. After that, it didn’t take long for me to find my big boy pants, and put them on to boot. I wandered through to the operating room, carrying my real pants in some sort of bio-bag (which, admittedly, is exactly where my pants belong). There were four other people in the room with me: two female nurses and two male surgeons. The surgeons stood on opposite sides of the bed, presumably because they’d dibsed a bollock each.

“*I* want the left!!”

“No, *I* get the left! It’s my lucky side!”

I lay on the bed with my gown resting limply against my body, the flap at the bottom drawn back to reveal my junk. It’s a strange experience, getting your balls out in company. It’s a surreal outlier in your day: get up; get dressed; have a coffee; go to work; kiss your girlfriend; walk into a room with four people…erm, get your balls out; and, em… then two guys stab your balls. It’s not an itinerary I ever expected to see outside of seeking election for the Tory Party.

As momentum steadily built towards the main event, the surgical team kept me distracted with a steady release of dark banter. As they chatted, they applied copious amounts of gel to my ball-sack. It was relaxing, ostensibly because I could easily imagine that I was some Roman Emperor receiving his royal ball-massage, instead of some filthy, frightened peasant who was about to get his sack ruptured. Which is precisely what I was. The pleasing illusion lasted for almost exactly as long as it took for a needle to show up on the scene. No amount of funny jokes or enjoyably slimy testicles could detract from the sudden and terrifying stabbiness of the situation. Worse still, I could see that the needle was longer by far than my flaccid penis. Admittedly, that’s not hard.

Don’t misunderstand me, dear reader. I’m not on Team Micro-Member. Once my Clark Kent-ish penis emerges from the cocoon of its Metropolis phone booth it’s a perfectly serviceable piece of equipment. It can even shoot lasers. OK, so it wouldn’t trouble the pages of the Guinness Book of World Records, but then neither would it have women writing in to the problem pages of Bella, their hurtful words printed under the caption: ‘My hapless hubby’s hung like a seahorse’.

I’m a grower, you see, not a show-er. But the medical staff can’t tell that, can they? Not just by looking: I don’t care how many penises they’ve prodded and stabbed over the years. They couldn’t conclusively and scientifically differentiate between a grower on the one hand, and a guy with a wee tiny dwarf dick on the other. Not unless they jerked him off first – and Christ only knows what side-effects they’d have to list before they could do that. For a few shameful seconds, though, lying on that table, it somehow became incredibly important to me that the four other people in that room understood that my penis had a lot more to offer aesthetically than just newly-hatched Witchetty Grub, and cocktail sausage on a beanbag.

Outwith the one-night stands of my younger days, I’ve never really been in a position where I’ve felt the need to explain my penis to a random stranger before. It’s an eerily novel experience. I guess I felt vulnerable. Ridiculous. Like a dog that had just been shaved bald. “Hey, you know those puritanical, Victorian-era sentiments around bodily-shame and conservative social comportment your culture has drilled into you all throughout your life? Yeah? You do? Well, fuck you: get your balls out. GET THEM RIGHT OUT!”

Men: I won’t lie to you. The needle going in was painful. It was like every kick or punch to the sack you’ve ever received squeezed into a syringe and stabbed into your belly in one hit. Shhh. Shhhh. Did you hear that, men? That’s the sound of every woman reading this muttering something about childbirth under their breaths all at once. Don’t worry, though. The operation itself was fine. No pain. It felt like a really weird catch-up with a bunch of friends, all of whom just happened to be looking straight at my bollocks.

Once both balls had been ripped and stitched, everyone left the room to let me get my bearings. After about ten minutes, one of the nurses came back to run through the post-op low-down. She became increasingly agitated by all the questions I kept asking as she tried to read through the after-care blurb. At one point she did a jokey little growl, held up the piece of paper, and pointed to a section half-way down the page, pulling an exasperated little face as she did so. This was in lieu of her grabbing me by the collar and screaming in my face: “MAYBE IF YOU STOPPED TALKING AND STARTED LISTENING, YOU’D REALISE I’VE GOT THE ANSWERS TO ALL OF YOUR QUESTIONS RIGHT HERE, MOTHERFUCKER!” By the time we reached the part where she was ready to ask me if I had any questions, I only had two, and neither of them were related to the procedure. One of them wasn’t even a question.

“I was just wondering,” I said. “Say there’s a real fire, and the alarm goes off, what happens to all the patients in surgery – do they wheel them out into the rain under a big umbrella and keep operating on them, or do the surgeons just make sure they’ve got a few fire extinguishers handy and keep going?”

I had visions of fleeing doctors trying to buy themselves time to escape by hurtling gurneys with unconscious people strapped to them down the corridors like curling pucks towards the flames. And shouting over their shoulder: “I wasn’t very good at that operation. You were probably going to die anyway, Mrs Blompkamp! Thanks for your sacrifice!”

“We’ve…” the nurse said, “Em, I’m not sure, really. That’s never happened to us here. Yet!”

I nodded contentedly. The question hadn’t been answered to my satisfaction, but I’d have to conduct the remainder of the research under my own reconnaissance. On to question 2: the one that wasn’t really a question.

“When you were out of the room,” I began. “I looked down at myself wearing this hospital gown, and then around at the room, and I thought to myself, ‘There’s a strong chance that one day in the future I’m going to die inside a room just like this, wearing a gown just like this, too’.”

She didn’t quite know what to say in response to that, and who can blame her, so I filled the mounting silence between us with a mound of tension-breaking self-effacement. “And, yes,” I said, “I’m tremendous fun at parties.”

She smiled, but I could tell that I’d made her distinctly uncomfortable. She was probably thinking to herself, “Why are all of these small-cock guys such fucking weirdos?” I wasn’t finished there, though. “It’s your own fault for leaving me alone with nothing but my own mind for ten minutes,” I told her.

It was my mum I’d been thinking about. Earlier that year I’d spent her last days with her in a room similar to that one, while she was wearing the same kind of gown. My thoughts were probably the mirror image of the sadness her death inspired in me: the fear that one day it would be me. And now I’d just removed my capacity to create life. There’s a song in there somewhere.

Back at Kate’s, my balls were in danger. No creature on earth can make you feel as welcome as an excited dog. But after an operation like the one I’d just had on my baby-makers, our dog’s friendliness was a threat. Poor, sweet Lola was transformed in my mind’s eye into a furry, four-legged weapon – a propulsive ball-seeking nuclear missile with warheads ready to detonate both testicles: Hiroshima for righty, Nagasaki for lefty. There was no escape. She would appear in door-frames and hallways out of nowhere like the two little girls from The Shining. Every time she walked towards me I could hear the Jaws theme playing in my head. Thanks to Lola’s rambunctiousness, for the first hour I had to hop around the house like a Cherokee priest performing a rain dance (and making very similar noises, too) to dodge her happy-sack attacks.

They say that after an operation like this you probably won’t be able to have sex for a day or so. Dear reader, I was being jerked off at tea-time. Later that night, Kate was subjected to some of the foulest intrusions imaginable, and in their wake I found myself googling ‘Is Being a Fucking Stud a Side-effect of a vasectomy?’. Or was I like a Batman baddie, and this was my origin story?

“Ever since those goons at Gotham hospital snipped the wrong tube, this city can’t catch a break from RELENTLESS SEX MAN.”

There is actually some evidence to suggest that a vasectomy can – in rare cases – boost a man’s libido. Why didn’t you tell me about THAT one, Mr Clipboard-Face McSurgeon? Not that my libido is exactly lacking, the massive filthy bastard that I am, but there was something supercharged about the post-op situation. The volcanic power of it faded, so I can only conclude that this wasn’t a permanent consequence of my vasectomy, but some primal response to either the surgical segregation of my sperm, or the recent thoughts I’d been having about death. Which means… I had really great sex because of my dead mum? Great. Another one for the therapist.

I’ll leave you on a note of optimism, though. Men, I’m talking to you, again. Whatever pain you experience before, during and after your vasectomy, try to keep in focus the absolute best part of the procedure, which is four months later when you have to provide a sample of your gentleman juice to see if your willy’s successfully firing blanks yet. That’s not the great bit, although it’s definitely not a chore. But, come on, think about it. The sample needs to reach a lab in the hospital between 0930 and 1030 on a Monday, and it has to be fresh…which means…

Which means, my friend, you can legitimately phone your work and tell them that you’re going to be in late because you’re having a wank. And there’s not a fucking thing they can do about it. Your doctor will even back you up! (Although it might start a craze of fake Doctor’s wank-notes across the working population. “Dear boss, it was me what told him to crack one off. It was a medicinal emergence. Donut dock his wages, you bitch.”

I think you’ll find though, guys, that the work-wanking thing alone is worth walking like John Wayne for a wee while.

999: The Devil’s Real Sign

hos1It was a normal Sunday night, which I was spending staving off the reality of Monday morning by immersing myself in as much mindless entertainment as possible. As my partner and little boy slept in the room next door, I was busy jacking cars and killing cops (it would’ve been a different Sunday night entirely had those two verb-noun combos swapped partners) through the hyper-violent medium of Grand Theft Auto.

I heard a woman-shaped holler from the bedroom, and tutted. No doubt I’d forgotten to do something, or was being commanded to undertake some meaningless, non-urgent task just as my ever-precious man-hours were dwindling down to zero. I chose not to react straight-away. Sometimes being half-deaf has its advantages. A second passed, maybe two, and the holler came again, more insistent this time. This was a bad sign, like when you see the lightning flash at the same time as you hear the thunder. But I didn’t think the situation was serious serious; just serious in a ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ kind of way. I bounced the Xbox remote across the table and bounded up from my seat like an ape, growling out a surly and exasperated ‘WHAT!?’

The hollers kept coming. I loped across the room, grabbed for living-room door handle and yanked it open; in the hallway outside, a pack of words like sharp-toothed dogs were lying in wait. “SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH THE BABY! JAMIE, WHAT IF HE DIES?!” At that precise moment, my world collapsed. A hurricane of adrenalin ripped through my body. Thoughts sloshed in my head like oil; the world spun simultaneously into fast-forward and rewind. I had no language, no reason – there were no decipherable sentences imprinting themselves across my subconscious like lines of ticker-tape – but even without the power of coherence my brain knew that this moment could be an ending; and one in which I could be trapped, ever-looping, for the rest of my natural life.

I burst into the bedroom to see my little boy’s eyes rolled back and lifeless, a deathly pallor painted across his skin, his lips turning a bruised blue. “HE’S NOT BREATHING! HE’S NOT BREATHING!” Panic propelled me through the house as I thumped and flailed for the phone, my brain buzzing with blood and static. Seconds stretched like hours. I couldn’t find it, I couldn’t think. “Darling, come on, darling, mummy’s here, you’re okay, darling, open your eyes.” My partner’s pleas haunted every room of the house.

It’s too late, I thought… It’s too late.

apar

I stood in the close outside my front door hollering ‘HELP!’, and hammering on my neighbour’s door. Milliseconds later I was dialling numbers into my phone, not even aware of when it had made its way into my hand, or how. A voice – a dying echo of my own – pleaded with the emergency services: “Please help me, I think my son is going to die.” My neighbour and her friends opened their door on a wild-eyed, spluttering apparition. Wordlessly, they followed me into my house, rushing, running, racing to the bedroom, where they stood prostrate and helpless, not knowing what to do, or what was expected of them. I didn’t know either. I’d summoned their help in a blind panic, a mad-eyed monster of instinct and fear. I didn’t know what to do. My little boy was dying, and I didn’t know what to do.

The ambulance seemed to take both seconds and hours to arrive. Paramedics checked my son over; by then he’d snapped out of his fugue and was breathing close-to-normally again. He vomited, and cried. As we wiped his face and set about changing his vest, he started calling for the cat. We laughed, amused that amid all the chaos and panic his sudden illness had caused, and all the unusualness that now surrounded him, all he cared about was the company of his four-legged friend, a friend who was unable to reciprocate his love on account of being quite, quite terrified of him. Mostly, though, it was a laugh borne of the relief that he was able to ask for anything at all. Five minutes ago, to our absolute certainty, we had lost him, and had resigned ourselves to enduring the rest of our short, miserable lives as ghosts in search of a death.

The paramedics, those Vulcan-like stoics, were satisfied that he was stable, and not in any imminent danger, although he still seemed weak, hot and feverish. Mother and son rode to the hospital in the back of the ambulance, and I took the car, a decision for which I berated myself mercilessly as I sped out of the street. How could I be thinking pragmatically about our return journey from the hospital? What if he dies in the ambulance? Aren’t his last moments worth the cost of a taxi ride? He’s okay, I kept telling myself, he’s sick but he’s okay, he’s with his mum, he’s surrounded by life-saving medical equipment and he’s in a vehicle that’s speeding him to a building that’s filled with highly-trained medical professionals. Try as I might I couldn’t stem the flow of panic. Each time my brain almost managed to quell my heart with reassuring thoughts, a feedback loop sent fresh waves of adrenalin bouncing back between them both. I’m not a superstitious man, but I couldn’t extinguish the irrational notion that my very complacency could be the thing to sign my son’s death warrant; that keeping calm was an act of hubris for which I would be punished by the universe through my son. Adrenalin jolted through my body, forcing my foot down upon the accelerator. I thought about my son being in the ambulance. I thought he was okay. I was almost certain he was okay. But I didn’t know. Maybe he wasn’t.

Schrödinger’s child.

amb

I got to the hospital before the ambulance did, a fact that should’ve been reassuring. If it was serious, I tried to tell myself, they’d have overtaken me on the motorway. My brain, however, reliably pessimistic, managed to conjure a thousand harrowing counterpoints to this theory, from a spent battery to a six-car pile-up. Over the next five minutes or so, a clutch of ambulances arrived in the A&E bay, and I rushed to meet each one. My partner and little boy weren’t on board: only a cavalcade of beleaguered old ladies and grim-faced men. I knew that I should’ve felt some measure of sympathy towards them, cast them as principal characters in their own stories instead of resenting them for being unwelcome extras in mine, but their pain and autonomy meant nothing to me. I only cared about one ambulance.

Eventually, it trundled into the bay. Slowly, silently. Both good signs. But still…

The ambulance rolled to a stop, one of the paramedics opened his door and slipped out of his seat on to the tarmac. As he opened the rear doors, a soft and plaintive ‘Daddy’ sailed out of the gap. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more relief.

We spent the next few hours cradling our swaddled son in our arms in a succession of waiting rooms and consultation rooms, watching him doze, relieved but never quite relaxed. By the early hours of the morning, he’d regained something of his old Jack-ness. He wanted to explore the corridors, and we let him waddle penguin-like past gurneys and trolleys, palm-slapping walls and pushing wheel-mounted stools around like they were comfortable leather Daleks. The nurses we saw were pleased with how he was behaving and responding, but said they’d feel happier keeping him in overnight. We were happy too, on both counts. I couldn’t stay, so drove home to sleep for a couple of hours – not an easy proposition – and bring back fresh clothes, toys and food.

hos2

He had another seizure first thing in the morning, which was almost as terrifying as the first one for his mum, who had sat next to him all night in a hospital chair, worried, watching, and unable to sleep. I arrived a short while later expecting to find my son shrivelled and withered like a turtle with its shell ripped off. On the contrary. He was watching Peppa Pig and eating Quavers. He was hot, tired and clammy, but otherwise fighting fit. Thankfully, all of the tests they ran on him came back negative. No sepsis, no heart murmurs, no epilepsy. He’d simply had a fever, probably brought on by nothing more sinister than the common cold or a tummy bug, and the only remedies we were advised to dispense were TLC and Calpol.

We now know that it’s reasonably common for babies and infants to experience a seizure as a result of a high fever. It’s not the high temperature itself that causes the seizure, but rather the speed with which the temperature spikes. Any sudden and severe upsurge in temperature can send their little bodies into overload, and into a seizure that can last for six minutes or more. I don’t think forewarned is necessarily forearmed, though. One of the doctors told us that when it happened to her kid, despite having a vast encyclopaedic knowledge of infant medicine at her disposal, her heart leapt against her rib-cage like a zoo tiger rebelling against its bars. I’m paraphrasing her ever so slightly. If it ever happens to our child again – and it goes without saying that I hope it never, ever, ever does – I doubt I’ll be able to whip out the stopwatch and look calmly into his little blue face, wondering when it’ll be finished so I can get back to Grand Theft Auto. ‘One minute twenty nine, one minute thirt… come on, son, hurry up, I’ve got prostitutes to murder!’

Later that next day, my sister told me that as a child I used to suffer from high temperature spikes rather frequently, which tended to inspire hallucinations rather than full-on seizures. I once hallucinated that a swarm of bees was crawling out of my mouth. Wailing and terrified, my mum sought to assuage my panic by lifting me up to a mirror to show me that it was all in my head: a move that only served to highlight just how much she still had to learn about the nature of hallucinations. Having been brought face to face with incontrovertible proof of my own terrifying bee-ness, I proceeded to scream the house down. I don’t remember any of that. I do remember being a little older and running through to my sister’s room, and barricading myself beneath her covers, because all of the toys in my room had come to life and were trying to get me. Was that seizure-related? I always assumed I was a mental-case, or else possessed an over-active imagination.

I've managed to find 62 per cent of my childhood nightmare on-line.

I’ve managed to find 62 per cent of my childhood nightmare on-line.

Case in point. I used to have a recurring nightmare about a jester who lived in a palace that was tiled top-to-bottom in squares of black and white marble. The jester’s hat and shoes and tunic all carried the same black and white pattern. His wide, mad eyes were black-and-white swirls that pulsed and morphed and spun in his head, round and round like some hideous kaleidoscope. He’d laugh maniacally, a horrid, high-pitched laugh that was almost a shriek. Anyone unlucky enough to catch a glimpse of those terrible eyes would fall under their hypnotic spell, and find themselves frozen to the spot, laughing and laughing and laughing without end, doomed to become living statues standing in tribute to their own eternal insanity. My family would be his usual victims – my mum, my grandparents, my uncles, my cousins. They’d all be standing in the Jester’s palace laughing that same crazy laugh, their eyes swirling, and I’d be rooted to the spot along with them, free from the jester’s spell, but crying, frightened, unable to escape. I remember standing fully awake in the hallway of my childhood home around the time of the nightmare’s reign, thinking that the jester was in the living room waiting for me, and I fell to the floor and froze, unable to move for a very long time, despite my terror.

Was that a seizure, too? Did I pass on this tendency to short-circuit to my son? Or was it just a coincidence? Whatever the truth, after an event like this the over-riding instinct is to blame, if only to give a face to the culprit, a face you can plainly see and identify, and recognise for the next time. As we sat in the waiting room, I blamed the Chinese we’d had the night before, my mother-in-law’s new cat, the damp in one of the rooms in our house, assorted sneezers we’d come into contact with, myself for not realising how ill he’d been.

How the jester made me feel on that long-ago afternoon is exactly how I felt during those frantic five minutes on that terrible Sunday night. Helpless, powerless, afraid. As a Dad, I know I can protect my son from choking on a grape, I can push him out of the way of a car, I can even leap in front of a bullet for him, but there’s very little I can do to save him from the random and unseeable dangers that lurk around every corner: microscopic assailants, planes falling from the sky, bin lorries hurtling over pavements, asteroid strikes. I guess the unquenchable fear of the unknown comes with the stewardship. It’s something all of us face, whether we’re parents or not, this fear of life, and fear of death, but somehow it’s worse to bear by proxy, when that fear is distilled into the shape of your child.

There are parents out there who have to cope on a daily basis with children suffering from lingering, even life-long, illnesses; there are parents out there living through the unimaginable grief of having lost a child. I’m more grateful than I could ever express that we don’t count among their number, and I have boundless admiration and sympathy for those parents who must endure such enormous burdens. Our boy was fine. We were scared shitless, but no great or lasting harm was done. We were lucky. I know this.

However, what-ifs of relief can be almost as unpleasant as what-ifs of regret. I still get random flashes of my little boy’s face as he was seizing that send shivers down my spine. Last week I took him to the park, and as we were driving home he became drowsy and started to nod off in his car seat, fighting it all the way so his head kept dipping and lurching. I knew it was normal, cute even, but still a little voice in the back of my head was screaming: ‘STAY AWAY FROM THE LIGHT!’

When the little guy is older, he’ll never remember that this happened to him. Hell, he’d forgotten it while he was still in the hospital – coincidentally around about the same time as we discovered the play-room and its explosion of toys. When he was discharged in the late afternoon, as we were readying ourselves to leave the hospital, we asked him, ‘Do you want to go home and see the cat?’

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, before bounding off in search of a toy train.

‘Fuck the cat,’ his demeanour seemed to say. ‘This place is awesome.’

I envy him.

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A Celebration of Public Breastfeeding

Existential Nightmare at the Soft-Play Warehouse

On Being a Dad