January 16, 2008

The Birth: Seven Simple Rules

There are seven rules for fathers to know prior to going into the hospital for the birth of your child.

As an initial matter, note that none of the rules is “be there for your wife.” Of course you should try to “be there for your wife,” but either the birth will be reasonably easy, and it won’t matter because she won’t need your help all that much (and afterward, at dinner parties, she’ll describe in detail to her friends how worthless you were), or the birth will be hard, and she will “climb the sheets” (when lying on a bed and in pain, the leg motion people make when viewed from the ceiling looks like they are vertical and on a stairmaster; although actually, to me, there's also a kind of Egyptian-y, hieroglyphic-ish feel to it, so maybe there's a new term we could come up with that works in the word Pharaoh or something, but I digress...), and no matter what you do, she’ll hate you and everyone in the hospital that day and you’re screwed. So really it doesn’t matter. Your father was a lucky, lucky bastard not to have to be in the delivery room when you were born (if you can catch an illness that excuses from the delivery room, my advice is to run with it). So take Lamaze classes and do whatever your wife wants. Do your best. But none of it’s gonna matter (and get yourself used to that helpless feeling, my friend).

So skip "be there for your wife." Here are the rules that can really help you.

First, for god’s sake, don’t bring a video camera to the hospital until after your kid is born. In fact, if you were considering bringing a video camera to film the emergence of the child from the ladyparts, please stop reading this and fucking jump off a bridge or something. Second, stay near your wife’s head during this process (trust me on this one, particularly if you plan on having sex at any time in the years after the birth). Third, the nurses secretly grade you on how supportive you are, so make sure you are reasonably nice to your wife, at least when they are around, so you can get good grades. Fourth, apparently there is a shortage of help at hospitals or something, because you might get asked to hold a leg (probably your own wife’s) when the baby is about to come. If you decline, you will get a worse grade from the nurses, so you pretty much have to do it. Fifth, let the doctor cut the umbilical cord. Do Delta’s pilots open up the cockpit door after a landing and say to you “do you want to taxi the plane over to the gate?” No, they don’t. So why doctors get all lazy and want you to do part of their job, I don’t understand. Sixth, tell the nurses to clean the goddamn baby off before they hand it to you. I know it’s your child and everything, and you love it but that’s still blood and, for lack of a better term, vagina snot that’s dripping off the kid. The nurses are gonna clean the kid up anyway. You've gone 9 months without holding the kid. Two more minutes ain't gonna hurt. Let them earn their pay before they do the handoff. I mean, you might want to wear that shirt again.

Seventh, and most important, have a song ready to go to sing to your child, as you likely will be left alone with him/her in the 20-90 minute period after everything is taken care of, the child checks out as healthy (knock on wood), and they are getting ready to move you out of labor & delivery and onto the new mothers’ floor. This is the most important rule. Your wife will be exhausted. She’ll kind of want to hold the baby, and will do her best for a bit (and maybe try to breastfeed). But she’s actually absolutely exhausted and, to her, what’s important is that someone hold the baby, so if you do it, she feels OK resting.

If this is your first child, you will get to start to practice that ridiculous sing-songy voice (“how is baby doing today!”), but there’s no way to keep that shit up as a rookie father for more than 2 minutes without feeling like an idiot, even if you were to do it alone, in your basement with no one else in the house and all the lights off. Singing is marginally less painful than goo goo-ing (at least you’ve done that before in your life), so go ahead and sing. And you want your kid to be cool, so you gotta plan and have the right song ready to go. In the modern age, centuries after Mozart, Bach and Beethoven, you don’t want your child’s first cultural experience to be Mary Had a Little Lamb.

I figure there are a couple of styles of songs you can go with. Old, 1930-1950’s songs. Maybe some Sinatra. Little Richard. Cab Calloway's Minnie the Moocher. That kind of thing. Something common enough that they'll hear it later in life and think warmly of their old dad. Or you could pick a solid rock song that won’t stress your vocal chords. Something Eddie Vedder could handle. This is likely, however, to sound ridiculous to others that are listening to you sing, particularly if you are singing “Jeremy” or “Better Man” or something like that to a 20-minute old person. Also, remember that if you imprint a song on your child, you probably will have to break this song out in public from time to time in an effort to calm the child down. Accordingly, it may be safest to pick a nice ironic song that your friends will recognize as such. Singable metal works here. “No More Tears” by Ozzy Osborne. “More Than Words” by Extreme. Something like that. Something that once you start singing, your buddies will smile at you, your baby will smile at you, and you won’t feel bad about continuing.

Don’t brush this off.

This is not a joke.

This is the FIRST CULTURAL EXPERIENCE OF YOUR OFFSPRING’S ENTIRE LIFETIME. Are you ready for it?

Do NOT underestimate the importance of this. I did not plan properly and sang a Broadway showtune to my son and now there’s a 50/50 shot he’s gay. I literally halved the boy’s testosterone with three minutes of singing. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

More about the birth here.

3 comments:

Ryan said...

Note: I consider putting "not that there's anything wrong with that" in a predictable place in the above. And I certainly don't mean to imply that the potential gayness of son is some awful, sinful tragedy. but i am saying that life as a straight person in this world is easier for a lot of reasons, both fair and unfair, and i tend to have more in common with straight people, and i'd love to be friends with my son someday, so if i had my druthers...

Anonymous said...

Great...now I've got something else to worry about. I had planned on singing a Steppenwolf song after the baby was born. It's high in drug references though. I don't want to risk encouraging addiction at such a young age, or prompting a call to social services before we're even out of the hospital.

Anonymous said...

Great advice, bro. I went with "Mack the knife" on my baby girl's first day. So what if there's references to bloodied bodies and murder - she's too young to know, right? Now she has a wide-eyed fixation with our kitchen cutlery. Look out, old Charlie's back!