The Birth (Continued) and the Maternity Ward

Y’know, I said that there were seven rules to know about the birth of your child, but I actually forgot the biggest job you have during the birth. During the birthing experience, you are Bad Cop. Your wife gets to be Good Cop. She's the pregnant one, she gets to pick, and wives always want to be Good Cop.

It works like this. When your wife feels like something pushing or leaking or hurting too much, or if she doesn’t think the drugs are working, she will tell you it hurts. And you will say “should I get the nurse” and she will say “ummmm…. no.” And then she will squeak and moan and wail in pain some more. And then, after 10 minutes, you will say “I’m getting the nurse” and she will say “well … ok.” So you will go out the door and there will be 4 nurses sitting around talking and eating out of clear or orange Tupperware containers, but none of them will be your nurse, and that means they cannot help you in any way, and you will walk down the hall looking into rooms for your nurse, and looking into those other rooms you very likely will see much too much of your wife’s fellow patients, which is not at all a good thing on a labor and delivery floor, and you’ll eventually find your nurse and you will hang in the doorway of some other lady’s room and you'll try to say, authoritatively, “my wife needs you” and they will say “one minute sir” and you will wait and after 3 minutes you will say “we need you to come over here please, my wife really needs you” in a gruff voice and the nurse will follow you back to the room, and you won’t talk the whole time, and you are not friends with this nurse. And when you get back to the room, your wife will bury you. She will say “awwww… did you come here for me? Did my silly husband get you?” IF THIS HAPPENS, you should feel doubly bad, because if you’re wife is able to pull off a cover-up like that, then you’re easily several hours from the birth. Only when her Good Cop façade breaks down are you ready to go.

And that’s your job for 6 or 12 or 24 or 48 hours or however long it takes. Barging around the hospital, getting people’s attention, getting your wife drugs and ice and popsicles and making sure people are checking in on her, pissing people off if necessary. You’re the advocate.

Your role changes when the kid's out and you move upstairs (and the maternity floors are always upstairs, on a higher floor than labor and delivery). Now you are part PR machine (calling (and now texting!) parents and siblings on both sides, maybe aunts and uncles, then friends), part Paparazzi (taking movies and pics) and part Fido. Your wife will say “I need …” and you will snap to attention and spring out of your chair. Realize, she’s been training you and having you do shit for her for 9 months; you’re at the absolute peak of your obedience powers and she’s at the absolute peak of her ability to order you around using a tone of voice normally heard in Civil War era movies when white ladies are ordering around their slaves (but you don't mind; you're well-trained). And you fetch things like, like … Big Macs and fries (I was sent for a value meal less than an hour after our first child was born), and pillows and blankets and diapers and bandaids and wipes and papertowels and more ice and water and giant fucking adult diapers for your wife and this kind of bizarre fishnet stocking underwear for her and …. maybe even creams and other things having to do with an episiotomy. And, y’know, honey, maybe its time for your mother to come up and visit. I need to go home and shower, babe.

And you will have great fun at the fishbowl nursery window! Early on, while you’ll want your baby to be with you, just having the kid in your room will triple your adrenaline levels and stress levels, so you’ll drop them off in the fishbowl nursery and then 10 minutes later you’ll go get them again, and then you’ll put them back in the fishbowl and your wife will nap and you’ll just stand at the window for a while and watch the kid, and you’ll see another new father and you’ll think to yourself “look at that bozo; that guy is just staring like an idiot” and he'll look over at you like "dude, don't try to bond with me just because our babies just happened to be born at the same time" and you will think "I wasn't trying to bond with you, I was making fun of you in my head" then you will stare like an idiot in the window at your kid and then….

… you’ll notice that this one kid in the fishbowl (the one over on the right in the back) is a lot taller than your kid.

… and you’ll notice that another is well-behaved and not screaming all the time

… and that one over there is cute (and you don’t think any babies are cute, especially coneheaded smush-nosed, stretched-out-eye newborns, but, as far as ugly babies go, that’s a cute one)

The women don’t see this. They are normally bedridden or semi-bedridden during this phase. They sit in the room all day while you take the baby back and forth in those silly wheely carts (the hospital dudes will actually yell at you if you carry the baby in your arms in the hall, which makes perfect sense because, I mean, who carries a baby in their arms at home; so of course you can’t walk around and carry a baby at the same time in a hospital). The moms don’t see all of it, and there’ll be a split, maybe the first split, in how you and your wife see this parenting thing. Women, not seeing any kids but their child, coddle and comfort the child. Men, having sized up the competition, realize it’s a rough world out there and our kids gotta toughen up. The difference in view isn't genetic. It’s all about the fishbowl.

Of course, none of this applies to your third child (or more). For your third child, the sign may say “Maternity Ward” but it looks to you like it says “Free Babysitting for 48 Hours!!” Well, it’s not free, but you’re paying for it anyway so you might as well use it. When our youngest daughter was born, I actually put my 3-year old in the wheeley cart with the baby and tried to check them both. Tabs were kept for the remainder of our stay.

FINAL THOUGHT: Hospital staff seem to be under the impression that they are wardens and jailors and that you MUST NOT LEAVE THE HOSPITAL and you CANNOT LEAVE THE HOSPITAL until you are DISCHARGED by the hospital equivalent of a parole board and being discharged is extremely important and that, in essence, they can kidnap you and make you stay as long as they want until they decide to discharge you, which basically depends upon when the doctor decides to show up. Despite my intense desire to follow in the footsteps of Thoreau and march me and my brood defiantly out of the hospital pre-discharge (gasp, not in a wheelchair!) and strike a blow for liberty and freedom and all that is right and good, my wife told me to shut up and go fetch the car, so I did it real quick.