by David Jester
She was due in a week, but it still amazed me how they could know such a thing. I didn’t trust my local hospital one bit; too many horror stories, too many problems. And if they could confuse a cold with cancer and struggle to perform surgery without leaving half of the surgical table in the patient, how could they be so precise about pregnancy?
“It’s fine, stop worrying so much,” Lizzie had told me.
That’s also what the nurses had told me when I expressed my concern about the birth itself, and about me being there. They told me everything was going to be okay, that many weaker men than me had made it through. Which I struggled to believe on several counts. In their infinite wisdom, they then decided to tell me all the things that could go wrong, things I had never even contemplated and would have been happy to remain ignorant to.
“Do you know you’ll shit yourself?” I had said, releasing my shock on Lizzie as soon as we arrived home from what had been a check-up for her and an eye-opener for me.
“I won’t really shit myself,” she had said. “But I will go to the bathroom, if that’s what you mean.”
“On the bed, as you give birth.”
“Yes.”
“You have a very strange definition of what a bathroom is.”
They also asked me if I wanted to keep the placenta. Several months prior to that, I might have said yes, always reluctant to turn down a freebie, but then I found out what it was. If keeping the placenta had been mandatory then I would have canceled the birth there and then.
“Some people eat it,” they had told me. “Some people preserve it and keep it for when their kid gets older.”
Of course, and some people also sleep with their siblings and shoot their parents. The fact that some people like to eat their own placenta does not tell me it’s normal; it only confirms my suspicions that people are fucking insane. It is a waste product that leaves the human body, something that serves its purpose and then departs. There is no difference between that and the crap you leave in the toilet bowl every morning, and in my opinion, if you don’t eat that, then you shouldn’t eat placenta, and if you do eat that, then why not, go for it, because eating placenta would clearly be the least disgusting thing you’ve done all day.
The pregnancy had been a crazy experience overall, and one that had us both on our last legs, but it was nearly over. Just a week left and then the baby would come and the ordeal would be over, with another, greater ordeal taking its place. But at least there would be more satisfaction, at least there would be an end result, because after a long day, we would see a cute and dimpled little smile, or hear a sweet little laugh. Whereas after a long day during pregnancy the best I could hope for was a nuclear fart that threatened to strip the wallpaper and end life as we know it.
This class was another part of the crazy experience. There had been prenatal classes, parenting classes, and pre-pre-pre-school classes, the purposes of which still baffled me. It was like being back in school. Mrs. Divine’s class was one of the most tedious of them all, an endless torrent of bullshit and cinnamon-scented smoke.
Lizzie was happy, though, and I liked to think that I was happy because she was happy, but if I mirrored her moods then our house would look like a scene from a poorly written Hallmark drama, one where tears of joy and tears of sadness were the same thing, and where the acceptable response to running out of peanut butter was to break down and declare that life was not worth living anymore. Our life had been like a soap opera—just as surreal, just as needlessly dramatic, and just as irritating. Some men say that pregnant women are beautiful, that they glow, but only because they’re worried about the ramifications of telling the truth.
“Now, are we all sufficiently relaxed?”
Mrs. Divine clapped her hands, a signal that woke up the legions of victims around her. They all opened their eyes, fixing placid smiles on their faces as they did so. The smiles were fake, they had to be. If candles, incense, and bullshit was that effective then there would be no need for drugs.
“How was that?” Mrs. Divine asked, surveying the room with a smile that never faded. It was a curious smile—not quite utter contentment, not quite deviousness, but a strange mixture of mischief and delight, like a toddler who’d just farted and was listening to his parents as they blamed the dog. If what they say is true, that if you make faces and the wind changes then they’ll stick, then Mrs. Divine had been doing something very unsettling on a very windy day.
“That was fantastic,” one person lied.
“It was, it really was,” another insisted with a nod.
It was like they wanted her approval, like they were fighting to be the biggest idiot in the room. One of them, a very annoying woman who hadn’t shut up since we arrived, was clearly the happiest and the most content, or so she wanted everyone to believe.
“I was so deep in a trance, I was so gone. It was amazing.”
She clearly enjoyed being the center of attention and excelling at everything, even if there was nothing to excel at. But the irony was that her husband, a man who looked as downtrodden and as suicidal as they came, actually looked like the one who had enjoyed it the most. The melancholy had all but vanished from his eyes. The last thirty minutes had probably been the only peace he’d had in years.
“And you?”
I was looking at the content man, as happy for him as he was for himself. I didn’t really know his wife, but she was one of those people you immediately hated, so I felt great pity for him. Only when he turned to me did I realize that Mrs. Divine was talking to me and that the class was waiting for an answer.
“Excuse me?”
“Did you enjoy yourself?” she asked, the smile still there.
“Did I enjoy myself?”
She nodded patiently.
Did I enjoy myself listening to you prattle-on like a hippie with an agenda while I tried not to choke?
“Yes,” I lied, jumping into the pen with the other sheep.
“You didn’t look very relaxed,” she noted.
I shrugged. “It’s been a difficult few months. It’s hard for me, what with the pregnancy an’ all.”
I heard Lizzie clear her throat.
“And her,” I added. “It’s probably been hard for her as well.”
Mrs. Divine nodded, Lizzie sighed.
Mrs. Divine gave Lizzie a long and sympathetic look. She clearly didn’t have kids, so she probably couldn’t relate. I’d learned that the only people who were actually excited about children, and the only people who were optimistic about their arrival, were those who didn’t have them or had never met them.
Mrs. Divine piped up again. “It’s a hard time. There’s a lot of stress, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of pain, suffering, and sleepless nights.”
I nodded. “And don’t forget the hemorrhoids.”
Lizzie was silently shaking her head as Mrs. Divine gave her another sympathetic look. “You have hemorrhoids, Lizzie?” she asked. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“No, I’m the one with the piles,” I told her, wondering why the attention had so suddenly and so rudely shifted to my wife. “And you’re right, it is a hard time and there is a lot of stress, I mean she thinks—”
I felt Lizzie nudge me. “Kieran, she wasn’t talking to you, she was talking to me.”
I turned back to the teacher. “Really?”
Mrs. Divine nodded.
And to think I was beginning to like you.
“The birth of a child is a hard time for the father, as well,” she said in my defense. “It is a time of great uncertainty, a time of great—”
I groaned again, feeling another lecture coming on. I checked my watch for what felt like the hundredth time, and I tried to drift away, but not successfully. The annoying woman and her downtrodden husband had their say at one point; she tried to convince everyone that not only had her pregnancy been the worst ever, but that her doctor had declared her to be a super specimen who was capable of birthing a million babies. Or at least that was
the gist of it. Her husband’s role in the relationship was clear: he was there to sit still and be quiet until his wife nudged him and said, “Isn’t that right, Frank?” at which point he came into his own with a nod that said yes on the outside, but screamed kill me on the inside.
Another couple looked like they were carbon copies of Mrs. Divine. They both wore equally creepy expressions and told everyone how their baby would be born with no drugs, no needles. They also made a point of telling everyone that they didn’t trust hospitals. I was with them on the last one, but I had a feeling that drugs played a bigger part in their lives than they were letting on.
Another couple sitting next to us looked more like father and daughter than man and wife. He was touching sixty and she looked around the same age as me, which was more than half his age. I have no issue with such discrepancies; I just found it odd. I could see the appeal for the man, and a small part of me, the masculine part—which was often overshadowed by the part that liked sweet scented shampoos and moisturizers—was proud of him, but what did she get out of it? The fact that they were having a baby was also odd. His retirement years would be spent changing diapers and wiping shitty asses. On the plus side, when the kid hit his or her late teens, they could return the favor.
Seeing so many relationships made me happy that mine and Lizzie’s was as sane and as normal as it was. Fair enough—we did meet when we were children, ignore each other for many years, have a fling as teenagers, and then bump into each other as adults in a psychiatric hospital—but everyone has their quirky stories. Life was crazy then and it was even crazier before then, but she calmed me down—she centered me, as Mrs. Divine and her slack-brained friends would probably put it. Life had been fairly uneventful since our marriage. We were happy together and—
I heard a noise from Lizzie and felt her grab my arm. I yelped, gaining the attention of everyone in the room. While I was in the process of hiding my embarrassment and thinking of an apology, they all turned to Lizzie, looking alarmed. I followed suit and saw the fear and the pain on her face and the sweat that had quickly formed on her brow. Her entire body had tensed up.
“Kieran, I think we need to go.” She looked down, directing my attention to the liquid that had soaked through her dress. She had wet herself before, a few drops from laughing too hard, and a few more when the act of wetting herself made her laugh even more. But this was different. I was prepared for this.
I’d worried about her going into labor early. I’d worried that it would happen when I was out, and that I wouldn’t be there to help her or to stop her from having the baby on the kitchen floor. I’d worried that it would happen in the dead of night, when I was too tired to function. I’d never imagined that a premature birth would be anything but inconvenient, but as I saw the gaping stares of many silent parents, and the worried expression of Mrs. Divine—who had finally lost her divinity—I realized that there was no better time, because it meant I wouldn’t have to endure another second of this tedium.
I grabbed Lizzie by the arm and helped her to her feet. “I’m sorry,” I told them all, even though I really wasn’t. “We’re going to have to scoot.”
“No, no, of course, please—go!” Mrs. Divine panicked.
We rushed out of the room and out of the building, puffing and panting all the way with Lizzie doing her best to waddle at speed. I didn’t drive and Lizzie was in no fit state. We had taken a taxi to get to the class and managed to hail one to take us to the hospital, as well. The driver was fairly nonchalant about the whole ordeal, looking like a man who regularly drove heavily pregnant women to the hospital. I got the sense that if we were stuck in traffic, he would roll up his sleeves, say, “Let’s have a look,” and then deliver our son in the backseat. That made me feel a bit more secure, but it didn’t seem to do anything for Lizzie.
We made it to the hospital before the taxi driver was given a chance to play the hero, and before long Lizzie was being prepped. The panic on her face and the haste at which the doctors and the nurses moved made me worry. It was finally going to happen, the moment that I had been waiting and worrying about for so long.
I had worried that something would be wrong with him and that the crushing blow of losing a child so early would end what had been a very happy relationship. I worried that I wouldn’t be a good father, that the kid wouldn’t like me or that I would do something wrong, something stupid. I was an adult, a grown man, a married man, but I still felt like a child. There had been no induction into adulthood, no point at which I was handed a certificate that said, “You’re an official adult.” There was no training, no tests, nothing. To say I was unprepared would be an understatement, and if I couldn’t handle my own ascension into adulthood, how was I supposed to handle becoming a father?
I’d had these thoughts before, but in the panic of the hospital setting, with so much furor around me—people shouting, people running, people giving orders—it made things worse. I knew I was going to fuck up fatherhood. It was inevitable.
Why did I let myself do this?
Why did I agree to this?
Is it too late to turn back?
I was still a child. I still watched cartoons. I still had no idea what APR meant.
“Are you okay?” I stepped out of my panic to see a nurse staring at me, wide-eyed and worried. “You look a little pale,” she noted.
I nodded. “I heard the doctor say not to give my wife any drugs.”
“That’s right, not yet, but—”
“If she’s not using them, can I have them?”
“You need to stay strong. For your wife. For your child.”
She left after that. No drugs, no words of sympathy. And of course there wasn’t, because this had nothing to do with me. This was about Lizzie, because as scared and as uncertain as I was, I knew that those feelings would be amplified in her. She was suffering more than I was, and she needed me to stay strong, as difficult as that was going to be.
I waited by her bed, giving her a hand to squeeze and some bones to break. I also let her scream at me as the pain took hold. She said some horrible things, but I found most of it amusing, and I had been told to expect such things. “It’s like The Exorcist,” my best friend, Matthew, had told me. He didn’t have kids of his own, thank God, but he made it his duty to know everything about women. “She’s the psychopathic little demon girl and you’re the priest.”
Not until I was standing by my wife’s bedside did I realize that Matthew had referred to my son as the devil, waiting to be purged from my wife’s body, but I tried my best not to think about it. I’d already worried about enough things—would he be sick? would he hate me? would he support Manchester United?—the last thing I needed to worry about was that he would be born with horns and religious contempt.
At some point, the adrenaline kicked in and the worry went away, replaced by a hazy veil and a sense of dissociation. I remained by the bed, and at some point, they put up a screen, which I was happy for. After hearing about the horrors of birth, I had no desire to see them. I wondered if the screen was for my benefit, but reasoned that the screaming woman beside me was probably equally averse to watching half of her insides became outsides.
When Lizzie was given the drugs, she settled down somewhat, but she was still suffering. Her face looked like it was ready to explode. I had vowed I would never see my wife, the woman I love and the woman I am very much sexually attracted to, sit on the toilet suffering from constipation, trying to squeeze one out. That image is enough to ruin any sexual attraction, which is why there is an unspoken bond between most couples that they will never see each other in that position. But as I stood next to her, watching her push out our baby, I realized that that was exactly what I was witnessing. As these thoughts ran through my head, accompanied by other random images that had nothing to do with my impending responsibilities and thus were exactly what I wanted to think about, I heard a different screaming, one that didn’t come from Lizzie.
I turned to see the n
urse bury her head in my wife’s vagina. I popped my head around the screen with a smile of anticipation on my face, but what I saw wiped that smile clean off.
They say that giving birth is a beautiful, wonderful thing. I can only assume that, seen through the eyes of an endorphin and morphine rush, the excess shit, mucus, and slime isn’t as disgusting to the mother as it is to everyone else.
Through the mess of gunk that slid unceremoniously out of a place I had once enjoyed—and never would again—was a small blue head. The shoulders and arms came next, squeezed out like an old, limp turtle trying to emerge from its shell. I’d heard people compare birth to a sunset on a tropical island, the same people who named their kids after fruit or days of the week and seemed to think that sandals were perfect for all occasions. I had also heard it compared to a drug-fueled orgy, an intoxicating mix of emotions and inebriation that climaxes when everyone in the room has had their fill. But at that moment, I realized Matthew was the closest of all.
“It’s the most disgusting, freakish, God-awful thing you could ever possibly imagine,” he had told me. He was doing something with his hands, turning them over and over, but when he realized what he was doing, he stopped, stared at them for a while, and then shrugged. “I can’t even explain it, mate,” he said with a shake of his head. “Put it this way, you remember how much you loved pussy when you were a kid? Remember all of those nights in your teens when you stayed awake just thinking about how great the female vagina was?”
I had given him a curious frown. “I think we had different childhoods.”
“Anyway,” he had continued, offering me a sympathetic shrug. “This is almost enough to make you want to bat for the other side.”
I didn’t believe him, of course, but now I had seen it for myself. The noise, the chaos, the blood. I tried to smile, tried to feel how I knew I should be feeling, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t feel anything but repulsed.
Lizzie looked relieved and was softly groaning to herself. Considering what she had just unloaded, I wasn’t surprised. Following a diet of pain pills and fast food after I had broken my wrist, my bowels had been blocked for weeks. For the first week or so I was too out of it to care, but by the second week, I began to feel it. And by the third week, it felt like a small child was hiding in my intestines. But when it finally came out, it was the most relieved I had ever felt and the joy that came afterward was like the best drug ever.
