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Feb 10, 2004 When it comes to childbirth, I must admit that I’m glad to be a guy. Women will devote every waking moment preparing for the baby’s arrival; they plan baby showers, buy clothes, and drink enough chocolate milk to float the Titanic. Guys, however, just wander around and try to adjust to their role as new fathers mainly by trying to find the TV remote. When it comes to the childbirth process, we’re like horse jockeys: once we set everything in motion, we just hang on for the ride. I remember so clearly the day my wife came into the living room where I was thoroughly engrossed in picking lint out of my navel and announced with a beaming smile, “I’m pregnant, honey!” With as much sensitivity as I could muster on such short notice, I said, “You’re blocking the TV.” My wife, however, understood that this was a standard guy tactic of ignoring a big “life change” that would force me to “become a responsible adult” who would buckle down and “take care of the family” and not “sit on the couch and eat Cheetos until I’m semi- catatonic.” So, she simply inserted the words “I’m” and “pregnant” into every facet of our conversations until, after only 7 months, I began to realize that this wasn’t some kind of prolonged practical joke. “Honey,” she’d say, “We need to buy some clothes for the baby, since I’M PREGNANT” or “Would you pick up some pretzels from the store since I’M PREGNANT” or “Pass the salt, inasmuch as I’M PREGNANT.” After coming to terms with the fact that I was going to be a daddy, I decided I was going to do my gosh-darned best to make sure my baby never wanted for anything, as long as “anything” could be defined as “a mechanized water pistol.” Before you so-called “experts” start criticizing me for presenting my daughter with a toy that represents the decaying moral structure of our society and hearkens to an age of violence, let me say this: it will shoot a continuous stream of water over a distance of 50 feet! How can that be a bad thing? I even went so far as to subject the pistol to intense testing to ensure its safety for my youngster. My wife kept tabs on my progress, inserting helpful tips such as “Oh my God, that is SO stupid!” Of course, when I offered to let her test the gun for herself, she snorted derisively and stomped off to the bedroom to order another pizza. Which is another thing that happens when women get pregnant – they become psychotically obsessed with food. But not just ANY food. For example, my wife, when un-pregnant, would eat just about anything from the local grocery store. But, after she got pregnant, she decided that our local grocery stores just didn’t have enough SELECTION. “They don’t have anything I like,” she’d complain while wandering down a food aisle roughly the length of a football field. Finally, she managed to settle on something that would satisfy her appetite and deplete our checking account at the same time: chocolate syrup. Chocolate syrup started off as an addition to her meals. She would put it in her milk, in ice cream, over spinach. Finally, she realized that she just wasn’t getting the chocolate-induced sugar high fast enough, so she would suck it straight out of the bottle. Many times, I came home from work to find a pile of discarded chocolate syrup bottles on the couch; the pile would moan softly and burp. Finally, the time that everyone had been waiting for had finally arrived. That time when the course of history could very possibly be changed forever and a man could find out what it meant to watch a miracle unfold before him. Yes, it was finally time for the NBA playoffs! But I didn’t get to watch them because it was also time for my wife to go to the hospital and experience the miracle of childbirth and morphine. When we got to the hospital, the nurse took one look at my wife, who was red-faced and breathing heavily, and immediately grasped on the significance of the event. “You’re parked in the loading zone, sir,” she said with the professional aplomb reserved for snotty health professionals. However, we finally got my wife into a room and hooked to random tubes, machines, aqueducts, etc. And, immediately after waiting for nearly 48 hours, my wife sat up and began to redefine the word “push.” I leaned over her, holding her hand tight, and whispered lovingly in her ear “You’re doing great, honey.” After deliberating for almost an entire second, she seized on the response that seemed to best define her feelings. “You stink,” she said. I thought maybe she’d started speaking in tongues, so I leaned over her again and said, “You’re doing just fine, sweetheart.” “You STINK. Go OVER THERE,” she elaborated, thrusting her chin at the far corner of the room. Ever the devoted husband, I retreated amidst the giggles from the 237 nurses gathered around her. Finally, my wife gave birth to my daughter. As I held my newborn child and gazed in her tiny eyes, I experienced a moment of true clarity, a moment that could be summed up in a simple statement: “Her head’s bent out of shape,” I said. The nurses only giggled again and said that my daughter’s head would stop looking like a pinecone within a matter of hours. Since she had to have a caesarian-section, my wife was much more tactful about it. “She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she murmured from her drug-induced euphoria. Then she repeated the sentiment it when she actually saw the baby. While my wife was looking at our daughter, I noticed that one of the doctors was holding a piece of my wife’s insides. It could have been her “uterus.” It could have been her “spleen.” It could have been her “flex spending enrollment form.” Whatever it was, it looked like it belonged in her body, not carried about like a wallet, so I walked over and boldly threw up in the trashcan. After experiencing the incomparable exhilaration of watching somebody else experience enormous levels of pain, joy and medication, I waited to make sure my wife and baby had survived the birth, then fell asleep fast enough to give myself whiplash, had I been standing up. Since that day, we’ve experienced the many amazing things that only new parents can lay claim to, such as changing diapers, sterilizing pacifiers and not sleeping. But, and I think this is most important for all you people who are considering parenthood, we do NOT buy chocolate syrup any more. ------------ Email Brett W. Robertson: fast_gto@yahoo.com Comment on this column in the forum. Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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