A longtime friend of mine and I were up on the river the other day having a nice, leisurely lunch when all of a sudden, he started going on and on about the recent natural childbirth of his first granddaughter. Being the wonderful friend and good listener I am, I put up with it for about as long as I could before finally blurting out, “Hey, I’m trying to eat here!”
“But you should have seen it, Daryl,” he continued. “It was really something. It was so, well, so spiritual.”
“How come they let you in?” I asked, pushing away what was left of my chicken chow mein.
“My daughter insisted on it,” he explained with pride. “In fact, we had most of the family right there in the birthing room.”
“You’re putting me on?”
“No, I’m not. And my son-in-law was really something. He attended all these special classes where they taught him how to coach my daughter with her breathing. When they got done with him, he was an expert on everything from Fallopian tubes to the uterus. And my daughter just loved having him with her throughout the whole process. Right before the baby came, she must have whispered to him a dozen times how much she loved him.”
“Really?” I said, recalling a somewhat different response from my wife just a few minutes before the birth of our fourth and final child. In fact, if my memory serves me correctly, I believe her final loving words to me as they hauled her into the delivery room were, and I quote, “Don’t you ever do this to me again!”
“I sure wish having a husband in the birthing room had been popular back when our wives were having their babies,” continued my friend. “Don’t you feel like we’ve really missed something?”
I nodded my head in agreement, but silently thanked God for putting women in charge of giving birth, and men in charge of such things as changing the oil in the car or cleaning out the rabbit cage.
Anyway, even though I never got around to witnessing the actual birth of any of my four children, I do have a number of very vivid recollections which are burned into what is left of my memory banks. For instance, there was this sadistic nurse in charge of cleaning up newborns who kept scrubbing my screaming daughter’s head with a wire brush. When I finally threatened to rip it out of her hand and use it on her, I was politely asked to step outside for awhile; and when my first son was about to be born, my wife told me that whatever I did, not to allow the doctors to give her any drugs. Then, as I assured her that I wouldn’t even let them give her as much as an aspirin, a very unpleasant contraction suddenly began and she screamed, “I want drugs and I want them now!”; and when, just before my second son was born, my wife’s contractions were only minutes apart and her fingernails were digging deep into my forearm, I distinctively remember thinking to myself that when husbands roll their pregnant wives into the hospital, they all ought to be immediately issued a pair of those thick leather gloves that wildlife experts use on birds of prey; and right after my last son was born, I remember how my wife’s obstetrician suddenly appeared out of nowhere, handed me this little piece of paper and whispered, “Here, your wife would like you to have this.”
“What is it?” I asked him with interest.
“It’s the name of a really good doctor I know who does vasectomies,” he said.
“So, Daryl, you never had the urge to go into the birthing room?”
“No, not really. I kind of take after my father who said that the closest a man should ever get to the delivery room is the bar across the street from the hospital.”
“In other words,” said my friend, “you were gutless.”
“Exactly,” I admitted.
“Well, if you’re ever interested in seeing what you missed, feel free to drop by my place any old time. I’ve got the whole birth on tape, every single second of it, from the time her little beautiful head popped out to this really great shot of the placenta.”
Well, so much for ordering dessert, I thought to myself.