Man vs. Baby Read online

  Skirting the issue of pain, suggestions for labor agony focus on meditation, scented candles, and soothing music. Suffice to say, you come to realize how useful these suggestions are when you arrive at the labor suite on the day of reckoning, feeling that you are about to compete in The Hunger Games armed only with a Seaside Escapes Yankee Candle and a Coldplay CD.

  So, when me and Lyndsay found ourselves standing in the reception area of our local hospital in the early hours of one Friday morning in September, we felt ill-equipped. And as we waited to be taken to the labor suite, I was pathetically nervous, but Lyns was understandably scared. We held one another and tried to draw on what we had learned from the library of books and guides we had amassed at home, what we had discovered from TV and film and childbirth classes. And we had nothing. Nothing but our fear, each other . . . and the reverberating sound of Hulk Hogan reaching ten centimeters dilation.

  So, in hindsight, what is it that I wish we’d known?

  DRUGS ARE COOL

  During preparations we spent a great deal of time hearing and reading about breathing exercises, lighting, meditation, and atmosphere. The question of cold hard drugs was raised almost as an afterthought, which is bizarre, given that 90 percent of women will ultimately find themselves midlabor and pretty keen to get wasted.

  So, for the purposes of reality: there are four main types of pain control other than the “imagine the pain as a doorway” bullshit.

  1. TENS machine: Being told about these things was the point at which I realized how painful labor was likely to be. I mean, how painful is something if electrocuting yourself is considered pain relief? That’s what this thing does. The mother-to-be has pads attached to her and the machine administers electric shocks. I had a go on this. It’s exactly the same technology as those Slendertone abs machines that lazy people buy and strap to their fifty-four-inch waists in expectation of a six-pack. From what I’ve seen, neither works.

  2. Gas and air: This is a combination of oxygen and nitrous oxide. I had a go on this as well. It’s quite a pleasant light-headed sensation. To begin with, this seems to work. The woman giving birth holds the hose to her mouth and draws gently on it, and it definitely has a soothing effect. By the time contractions are seconds apart, though, it is being treated like the last bong in Amsterdam. It’s safe to say that the effect seems to wane as things progress.

  3. Opiates: In the US, the opiates of choice tend to be fentanyl or Nubain. In the UK we prefer diamorphine. Which is basically heroin. Better known as brown, gear, horse, or skag. But the good stuff. I didn’t have a go on this because I grew up during the JUST SAY NO campaign (also, I thought as a dad-to-be in the delivery room, grabbing a syringe full of hospital-grade opiates and injecting myself with it might have been frowned on).

  So I’m not really sure what taking diamorphine (or any other opiate) feels like. According to the babycentre.co.uk website, it is an injection in the thigh that, once it takes effect, inhibits pain and makes a woman in labor feel more relaxed. The downside is that, apparently, it also makes you feel spaced out and often nauseated and confused.

  I think it’s a lot like being drunk, but without the stigma of a woman getting halfway through labor and cracking out a sixer of Keystone Light.

  (By the way, if you are also of the JUST SAY NO generation: having this one-off injection isn’t addictive. This concern did come up in our childbirth class. But don’t worry, despite what we were told in the eighties by those endless billboards and commercials, one hit of this stuff won’t lead to your ass falling off and a lifetime of shoplifting from Kmart. Probably.)

  4. Epidural: This is the daddy of pain relief. It’s basically a tube of Jägermeister to the spine, and the effect is a bit like imagining Kellyanne Conway naked, in that you feel absolutely nothing below the waist. Apparently, it can be quite painful putting the tube in and taking it out. But not having an epidural because of this is like refusing to have a screwdriver pulled out of your skull because it might mess your hair up. By that point it’s probably true to say that pain is relative.

  Whether it be a crack pipe, crystal meth, or the music of Neil Diamond, whichever type of pain control a woman chooses, there is no doubt that the experts—the childbirth gurus—regard some as “good” and some as “bad.” One of the problems with the books and the classes is that there is this huge emphasis on “natural” childbirth: an unchallenged understanding that everything was better when women gave birth in caves by firelight.

  There is a problem with this—it’s horseshit. The facts of the matter are that when humanity was entirely reliant on nature, the outcomes for women and babies were pretty dismal, and peddling this “nature” myth just makes mothers-to-be feel guilty about even considering drugs to minimize their own pain.

  And it’s not just the “natural-is-best” mafia who promote the disavowal of drugs. One of the top midwives in the UK says that “pain-relieving drugs diminish childbirth as a rite of passage and undermine the mother and child bond.” His name is Dr. Denis Walsh. He’s a dude.

  I don’t mean to question Dr. Walsh’s stake in all this, but it is pretty easy for a man to question the value of drugs for women in labor. In our childbirth class we were told that the equivalent of giving birth for a man would be passing a walnut through his penis. And, if that is even close to being true, the global population would be about seven . . . and most men (including Doc Walsh) would request an epidural on arrival in the hospital parking lot.

  BIRTH PLAN VS. REALITY

  One thing all the experts agree on is that consideration of pain relief should form part of your “birth plan.” It’s a weird thing to consider. Planning your response to pain is a bit like planning how you would react if a clown shit in your car: there is just no way of knowing until you are in the moment. In any case, a birth plan is best thought of as something similar to a New Year’s resolution or a drunken conversation. The chances of it amounting to anything in the heat of battle is approaching zero. It seems reasonable at the time you’re writing it, but you may as well be writing a wish on a cloud. So put what you want in it. Request that a baby Minotaur lick your feet during the whole thing, it doesn’t matter.

  As we were shown to our delivery room, we were still treating our birth plan with reverence, as if it were the Magna Carta. This piece of paper will sort everything out, we thought, with the blind optimism of Neville Chamberlain on his return from Germany in 1938. By the time Lyns was on the gas and air, it was stuck to the bottom of a nurse’s shoe.

  The average birth plan looks a bit like this:

  BEFORE

  AFTER

  The above may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it is amazing how little of the birth plan survives the actual event. For example, your birth plan might start with selecting a midwife to take you through your birthing journey. But, in the UK at least, unless you are royalty or lucky, you usually get allocated one at random on the day. And probably more than one.

  I always assumed that, from the moment urine hit a plastic stick, you would be assigned a midwife who would be your best friend for nine months. She’d be called Pamela. You’d get to know her kids, Michael and Tess (Michael’s a history major at U Michigan and Tess wants to do something in drama). And she’d be a member of the family, always there, before and during the birth. After which, you would name the child Pamela, even if it’s a boy, because Pamela had been great. . . . That’s not how it works. We had three midwives and they apparated in and out like the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. So the Ghost of Christmas Past was efficient but calming (Claire). The Ghost of Christmas Present (Sarah) was really cheerful and enthusiastic. And the Ghost of Christmas Future (Annie) was miserable, and had a face that looked like a cat’s asshole being burned at the stake. What midwife you get at this point seems such a big deal when you are completing your plan in the final few weeks of pregnancy. But it just doesn’t matter. So long as the person responsible for mother and baby’s health at that point is reasona
bly sober, and not Charlie Sheen crazy, nobody cares, least of all a woman in labor.

  THE WAITING

  The reason you usually have more than one midwife becomes ball-achingly obvious. Having a baby, especially the first, takes fucking ages. Time is relative, but the only thing that seems to take longer is the toaster at a hotel buffet breakfast. Childbirth is 90 percent waiting.

  And waiting some more. . . .

  But, strangely, this is unlike any waiting you have done before: it’s exhausting because one of you is in pain, and both of you are bored and full of adrenaline at the same time. It’s like watching a period drama on a plane that’s plummeting to earth. For hours.

  For men, most of the time you are in the labor suite your job is to be a one-man cheerleading team for your partner.

  Within an hour most men have run out of useful things to say like “you’re doing great,” and they are already boring themselves and annoying the shit out of their other half. (There are only so many times you can say, “Breathe,” without a woman in childbirth replying, “You breathe! You fucking idiot!!”)

  In fact, here’s an idea to pass the time that utilizes this key feature of the birth: i.e., sweary fucking swearing.

  PROFANITY BINGO

  The rules: During labor the average woman curses seventeen times an hour, sometimes extremely creatively.

  Simply check off the star in the middle if your partner invents a new swearword or uses one you’ve never heard before.

  I was able to mark off the star with the word fucktrumpet.

  Actually, Lyns was quite mild, with the occasional F, a W,II and a single quiet but menacing C. But on a trip to a vending machine I could quite clearly hear a woman chanting the word “C*nt” over and over, and another woman who shouted at her husband to “Fuck your fucking head,” which doesn’t make any sense, but was said with such demonic force I’m pretty sure the poor bastard gave it a go.

  I never saw the woman in question, the woman in room “Acorn.” But I did run into her husband in the parking lot, and he had the face of a man who had seen things that could never be unseen. As he returned to the room, I think I caught a glimpse inside of a woman upright in her bed. Her head was spinning 360 degrees, and the midwives were holding her down, while an old priest sprinkled her with water, shouting: “The power of Christ compels you.”

  According to our midwife, this poor woman had been in labor for four days, which is, to be fair, quite unusual. But, even on average, the first-time mother will spend eighteen hours in labor. I can’t stress enough: labor takes ages. After thirteen hours, I started to feel a bit dopey for the way I had sped to the hospital, running at least one red light. (Christ, I could have pushed Lyns the twelve miles to the hospital in a shopping cart and still had time to stop for a Sausage and Egg McMuffin.) It seems ridiculous in hindsight, but most of us worry about this “mad dash” more than anything else. I spent most of the time in the weeks leading up to our due date imagining how I’d get a police escort should we hit any light traffic.

  The thing is, we’ve all seen the videos and news stories of babies born en route to the hospital or caught one-handed as they free-fall out of their nine-month home, just as the parents arrive in the reception area of the hospital. But as Lyns entered the second day of labor, it felt as though Charlie was going to take so long to arrive he would come out desperate for his first pair of proper shoes. Like so many first-timers, we started to wonder if this new-human thing was ever going to happen—and the midwife and doctor were starting to agree.

  INDUCTION

  It’s around this time that everybody starts to talk about inducing. I’d heard of this before but wasn’t really sure what it involved. I’m not a complete idiot: I knew that giving a baby inducement to arrive didn’t involve hanging around the opening, waving about a bag of Haribo. But I didn’t know that it was a chemical thing, whereby the doctor gives the mother a drug to speed up labor. (I’m not really sure what the new-age cops make of this use of drugs, nor what the natural equivalent of it would be. Maybe some sort of shamanic chanting and singing until the baby’s head pokes out to tell everybody to keep it down and stop being such hippie dicks?)

  Charlie was induced during the labor, but apparently it’s exactly the same process when a baby is well overdue and shows no sign of turning up. In these instances, doctors decide it’s time for junior/junioress to make an appearance and the parents-to-be are called in and given an appointment. Like a baby eviction notice.

  Anyway, it works. As soon as this stuff hits, the baby is packing up its placenta and is on its way.

  A MAN’S BURDEN

  It’s fair to say that the next few hours are a blur, or at least my memories of them have been buried deep in a field at the back of my mind in a box marked NEVER OPEN. It astonishes me that some men say that being present during childbirth is the greatest experience of their lives. Have these weirdos never tried a Jet Ski? Miniature golf? Pictionary? The simple truth is that a man’s time in a labor ward will, more than likely, be spent watching someone he cares about in extreme discomfort. And, yes, the end result is life-affirming, incredible, and humbling, but this bit is crap. I would rather sit watching a construction worker take a shit than spend hours in this situation. Let alone sit there with popcorn, watching someone I love in pain, with a big grin on my face having “the greatest experience of my life.”

  After all the talk of drugs, breathing exercises, swearing, and candles, the main way that Lyns exorcised her own pain was by holding my hand. And when I say holding my hand, I mean trying to tear my arm off at the shoulder. The grip of a woman in labor exerts about three tons of pressure per square inch, which is the amount of torque that NASA uses to attach payload to the International Space Station. It’s as though every bone in your hand is being milled to powder. But you can’t feel it because all you can feel are the fingernails: holding hands with a woman in these later stages is only marginally preferable to holding hands with a jaguar while it’s being castrated. But one simple piece of advice to any man reading this: this is an inappropriate time for you to mention to anybody in the room how much it hurts. Don’t. The last man to do so died from toxic shock after having a Pilates ball inserted into his rectum.

  As you enter the final stages of labor, most dads have been shuffling their chairs away from the area of action. If, as a man, your attempts at shuffling your chair have been really successful, you can find yourself seated on your own on a plastic chair in the parking lot reading Popular Mechanics. But for the majority of us, the most we can get away with is to find ourselves at the very head of the bed. I’m well aware of how pathetic this sounds to a woman who has experienced or is preparing for labor. It’s not that we don’t want to witness the birth itself, but we’re squeamish and weak and at some point we’ve got confused between a stretched vagina and an eclipse, and think staring straight at either will make us blind. We’ve also been told by our non-father buddies that seeing a birth will put us off sex. (This is nonsense, by the way: by this time most men haven’t had regular sex in so long that a lady area with shark’s teeth wouldn’t scare them off.)

  It is incredible to think that according to the British parenting website babycentre.co.uk, 80 percent of men are scared of childbirth, a fear that exists despite the fact that the main pain they will endure during the process will be having to keep nipping out to put more money in the parking meter.

  According to Mumsnet.com, the four biggest fears men have are:

  1. Fainting

  This is apparently a common fear, a sitcom classic, the response that can never be lived down. Actually, I did worry about it. I knew I’d never passed out in my life. I got dizzy once when I met Carol Decker, the lead singer of eighties chart-toppers T’Pau, but never fainted. So it’s weird that this would get lodged in my head. But, if you are an expectant father with this fear, the chances of you passing out are minimal. This fear is just lost in the adrenaline and excitement. Unless you have the delicate constit
ution of a nineteenth-century gentlewoman who might get overcome by “the vapors,” or you’re one of those goats with a heart defect, the chances are you’re not going to faint. Man up.

  2. Being sick

  Another common fear apparently. Again, it’s extremely unlikely to happen. Neither of you will have eaten anything but chewy hospital toast for sixteen hours, so at worst you might dry-retch. Even if you can manage to vomit, you can’t even begin to compete with the bodily fluids already flowing in that room. No one will even notice.

  3. Cutting the cord and fucking it up

  Okay, gentlemen, when the doctor offers you a pair of scissors and that weird alien rope thing, you’re quite within your rights to say: “I tell you what, you went to medical school for seven years, you take this one, while I try to keep down the crisps I had thirteen hours ago.” Especially if you are such a moron that you think you might get it wrong. Don’t take on the job if you’re not up to it. Just imagine as you cut through that cord, the doctor shakes his head and says: “For fuck’s sake, Dad, you had one job. . . .”

  4. Sight of the placenta

  Okay. Fair enough. It’s pretty gross.

  Anyway, according to the same survey, the number one fear a woman has about labor? “Health complications.” And I think that this tells you all you need to know about why nature has entrusted childbirth to women.