Childbirth - A Dad's View

I was poking around a few old directories on my desktop computer when I found a little piece I had written in 1993.

As I read it, I had to smile because it brought back bittersweet memories.

It was a small article I wrote about the birth of my eldest lad, Stephen.

At the time, I was married to my ex-wife, the mother of my two boys. I shall refer to her as W.

The memories conjured up by my words are bittersweet simply because I was overcome with joy at the birth of my first born child but, as you will no doubt have guessed, our marriage didn’t last and ended in some acrimony.

Nevertheless, both myself and W appear to have come to terms with those dark days and now we get along reasonably well. We both made a pact to put the boys ahead of anything else and, despite initial bitter recriminations we are philosophical about it all; we still continue to put the boys welfare above all else.

We split up almost twelve years ago – it seems like such a long time.

Anyway, I’m not one for dwelling on the past so I am going to use this post to show off my kids a little.

My eldest is Stephen and he is 17 – which incidentally makes me feel very old. My youngest lad is Michael and he is 14. Both of them are wonderful and I am so proud of them.

I find it very hard to treat them as adults and spend all of my time with them fooling around – so much in fact that I have been told to “grow up” on numerous occasions (you can read about it here). It is difficult for me to grasp that Stephen is 18 in June next year and will, hopefully, disappear off to university soon afterwards.

Anyway, here is the article I wrote and I apologise in advance to Stephen for this account of how he entered the world. He has been known to read this blog and even make the odd comment.

In my defence, at the time, I was almost certainly an absolute wreck, riding a rollercoaster of conflicting emotions. The experience obviously had a profound effect, hence my desire to get the words down way back in 1993.

Here's the article:

I thought that I was fully prepared for fatherhood until I walked in the house and found my wife, W, in labour. I had been to all of the ante-natal classes, read books on the subject and even seen a video of a birth. Naively, I believed that the delivery of our first child would be relatively straightforward and that I would easily be able to cope.

How wrong I was.

One of my main problems was seeing how uncomfortable W was. I understood that child birth could be painful but when I saw her, I didn’t know how to react. My original plan was to reassure her and calmly drive her to the hospital. What I could not predict was how I would feel about it. Rather than trying to comfort W, I found that I couldn’t think straight and spent a fruitless ten minutes rushing aimlessly around the house trying to sort everything out. In fact, W seemed more composed than I was and, in between contractions, helped me to organise everything.

Up until that point, I had felt as if I was not participating in the pregnancy. W had carried our baby for nine months and, although I had seen the baby grow and felt him kicking, I considered myself to be an outsider. After all, W had carried the baby, suffered from morning sickness and spent several uncomfortable months with backache and sleepless nights. My only contribution was to take over the housework and do the shopping. Now was the time when I would be involved and I was filled with apprehension.

When we arrived at the hospital, I was relieved that W was now in the hands of the experts, though I was still extremely nervous. We had a scare because W’s waters broke shortly after she had been examined for the first time. The baby became distressed and W was almost rushed into the operating theatre for an emergency Caesarean section. Fortunately the baby’s condition stabilised.

We started the long wait in the delivery room. A foetal monitor echoed the baby’s heart beat. It was the first time I had heard the rhythmic electronic pulse from the machine and it brought home to me the fact that there really was another member of our small family on the way.

In many ways, the waiting was the worst thing. The midwife told us that the baby would come when he was ready. I was hoping he would as impatient as I was and would make an early entrance.

W and I passed the time listening to music, reading and talking, although I have to confess that my mind was elsewhere throughout. I couldn’t help thinking about things which could go wrong and worrying about the condition of my wife and child. In contrast, W seemed remarkably at ease under the circumstances. I wondered how she could talk to me and smile during those long and painful hours.

Eventually, a midwife persuaded me to go and get something to eat. As I sat pushing my food aimlessly around the plate in the hospital canteen, I reflected on how the arrival of our child would change our lives. I wondered how we would cope with sleepless nights, bottles and teats and dirty nappies.

Had we got the right equipment?

Would I be able to hold the baby correctly?

How would we bathe him?

What if he became ill?

In the end anxiety won the battle over my appetite and I went back to the delivery room with half my meal untouched.

There were times when I thought that W was not getting the attention she needed. I felt that there should be somebody monitoring the situation constantly. However, when something did happen, the hospital staff were there in force. In what seemed like seconds, the delivery room was filled with doctors, anaesthetists, midwives and paediatricians. The moment seemed to have arrived.

Everybody in the room was playing an important role, that is, everyone except me. At that moment, I felt more inadequate than I have ever felt in my life. I was completely helpless, my only contribution being to hold W’s hand and look extremely worried.

W had wanted to give birth naturally but, when it came to the final push, the baby was just too big. The doctor said that an emergency caesarean section was necessary because the baby was becoming distressed again. Husbands can be present at these operations but because this was an emergency, I was told that I had to wait outside.

A midwife said “Say goodbye to your wife,”

And I did with tears in my eyes.

I’m sure the midwife didn’t mean to make it sound as if this was the last goodbye – but that’s the way her words registered when my addled mind tried to make sense of them.

All I could do was watch as W was wheeled into the operating theatre, the doors shutting behind her with a firm bang that seemed to confirm my mind’s interpretation of the situation.

I remember seeing old films with men pacing up and down the hospital corridor, chain-smoking packets of cigarettes while waiting for the nurse to come out with news of the birth. Looking back, I was just like those men, except I was guzzling glasses of blackcurrant juice rather than smoking. Every time a door opened I would whirl around thinking that the midwife was coming out to give me the news. I felt like the operation took two or three hours, when in reality it took probably half that amount of time.

Eventually the midwife led me into a small room to see my son for the first time. My first thought was that he looked pink and healthy, although his head was slightly misshapen and bruised. All I could do was stare at him with an inane grin on my face. The midwife told me that he was a big baby, weighing 8lbs 10oz, and asked what he would be called. W and I had disagreed about the name but at that moment I was so proud of her that I gave the midwife my wife’s choice: Stephen.

Shortly afterwards, I was allowed to hold Stephen while W recovered. All my fears about how to hold a baby were vanquished as I cradled Stephen in my arms. Wrapped in a blanket and wearing a little hat, Stephen looked at me and his surroundings with his big blue eyes. I held him close and spoke gently to him.

At that point I was the happiest man on earth and couldn’t wait for the next chapter in the life of our family.

Thankfully, Michael’s birth was far less traumatic. Because Stephen was born via an emergency caesarean section, Michael came into the world in a nice orderly planned caesarean section. I was there, in the operating theatre when it happened and there is nothing more to tell apart from my being so scared at the prospect of blood that I almost passed out.

Finally, I want to apologise once more to Stephen and now extend my apology to Michael.

Why?

Because I am going to publish a couple of embarrassing photographs below.


Stephen in the bath - as you can see, I gave him a great hairstyle.


Michael thought he had got away with it - how wrong he was.


Michael on the beach.


Stephen at his fifth birthday party.


Michael, Stephen and me at Blackpool in 2006.


Last year in Majorca - crikey I feel old!!

So, lads, if you are reading this, I'm really sorry for publishing a couple of embarrassing pictures.

I will grow up one day - honestly.

Where Do I Come From?

There is a question that strikes fear and terror into the hearts of most parents today. That question is:

Where do I come from?

Many parents will stare at their five year old cherub, whose innocent, beatific face is beaming at them, and feel the urge to run screaming from the room. Most people will react instinctively and blurt out a veiled explanation involving birds, bees and storks. Others will stutter and stumble and then blind their child with science. Some will probably say “Mind your own business” and walk out of the room.

And there are those that will invent a preposterous tale about fantasy creatures.

When I consider the miracle that is the creation of life, I am simply shocked that parents tell their children such lies about this beautiful concept. I heard a few of these bizarre untruths when I was an innocent five year old and frankly one or two of them scared me to death.

The first lie I was told was “the stork brought you”.

“What’s a stork?” was my next question.

If you think about it, telling a child that they were carried to their parents by a big bird is an awful thing to do.

Just think about it for a second.

When my mother told me that I was delivered by a bird, I asked my granddad what a stork looked like when I next saw him. This was a relatively easy question for him and one that wasn’t accompanied by the embarrassment that sex invoked – he didn’t know what had prompted this strange question.

My granddad loved my inquisitive nature and so he took my hand and led me to his bookcase, full of dusty old tomes on a variety of subjects. He selected an encyclopaedia of birds, lifting it from the shelf, blowing away the cobwebs before opening it on the table. With me perched on his knee, he flicked through the book and opened it at a page with a picture of a huge ugly bird.

A stork is a big wading bird that can grow up to five feet tall and has a wing span of six to seven feet. To a five year old child that is absolutely huge. Even worse, it has a huge pointed bill and long skinny legs.

So imagine how that hideous, winged brute looked to a young child like me. Something like this:



I recoiled in horror, particularly when I saw the sharpness of the bill. I had visions of an enormous bird flying over me, staring at me with its black eye, before swooping down towards my naked and helpless form with its monstrous sword like beak ready to pierce my flesh. My imagination ran amok.

Would I be stabbed?

Would it open its mouth and swallow me before somehow regurgitating me into my mother’s stomach?

“What’s wrong?” asked my granddad.

I told him what my mother had said and suddenly his enthusiasm for my questions vanished, only to be replaced by the primeval fear that had gripped my mother when I asked that first fateful question. So what did my granddad do? What did this wonderful old man, whom I loved and depended on say to me to appease the situation?

He lied to me. This was the second lie.

“The stork brings you wrapped in a sheet,” he said. “It’s just like a postman. It flies along and delivers you to your mother. It drops you down the chimney.”

His lie had made the situation far worse. My weird imagination, which was almost as crazy as it is today, flew into overdrive, carrying me into new realms of horror. The massive revolting bird in the book, somehow smothered me into a sheet as a baby, and then whisked me up in the air, carrying me to my mother’s house. When it arrived, instead of soaring down, knocking on the door and handing me to my mother, the feathered beast simply dropped me from a great height, into the chimney.

What if it had missed the chimney?

What if the chimney hadn’t been wide enough and I had got stuck?

What it I had bounced off the chimney and rolled down the roof?

Would my mother be there at the bottom of the chimney to catch me?

What if she forgot and I landed in the fireplace?

Would the stork have warned her that I was coming?

What if there was a roaring great fire waiting to incinerate me when I reached the bottom?

I was distraught. My poor granddad and mother wondered what happened. Both of them had forgotten how children interpret the facts that bombard them in the first ten years of their lives. Imagination is a devious thing and each person on the planet interprets facts differently. And as I have said before – I have a very weird imagination.

As I stared at the stork and pictured myself being kidnapped by the thing, another question occurred to me:

Where did the stork get me from?

Surely I must have existed before the stork got me.

I asked my granddad and by now he was wading through a mine-filled quagmire of deep panic. My granddad was one of the most articulate men I have ever known, yet I had reduced him to a gibbering stuttering wreck.

I imagined a huge commune of babies lying there in blissful ignorance in a creepy location that was a bit like a postal sorting office, until an army of storks arrived and selected one each (or two or three if the poor parents were lucky enough to have twins or triplets). In my imagination, when the storks swooped down, I pictured babies putting up a fight but being subdued by white cloth.

And then I thought; who put the babies there in the first place?

My granddad had an ace up his sleeve for this one. His distraught face suddenly changed as dread evaporated. He smiled benignly and said: “Babies come from God.”

As far as I was concerned, that was it; question answered. My granddad was a strict Roman Catholic and managed to pat himself on the back for answering my question and also sew the seeds of religion in my mind in one fell swoop.

I’ve often wondered where the stork story originates. As a five year old child, I saw a stork as a monster; my opinion has changed.

Now that I have (sort of) grown up, I see them for what they are; graceful creatures and very beautiful. The stork depicted in cartoons carrying babies, is in fact the white stork, a pure white bird with black feathers on the wing. In flight it is a majestic sight, so the symbolism of this lovely bird carrying a fragile young baby in a sheet does conjure a charming and people image. Furthermore, the stork is seen as a symbol of happiness, luck and fidelity and, because they sometimes nest on chimneys, could easily lead to the popular tale that this wonderful bird is responsible for delivering a child to a mother.

Nevertheless, one question remains unanswered for me, even today:

Why would parents and grandparents go to such great lengths to avoid answering a very simple question?

I suppose, considering this for a second, that telling a young child exactly how a baby is created is probably enough to traumatise the poor blighter for a good few years.

Honesty, in this particular case, is definitely not the best policy.

I can imagine the look on a child’s face if a parent to go into the finer details of sexual intercourse, not to mention the next part, where you have to describe an army of tadpoles and an egg.

When I discovered for myself what happened, as a teenager, I was shocked but amazed.

The creation of a human being is a miracle. There is simply no other way to describe it. Let’s skip the act itself (for now at least), and move onto the aftermath of the sweaty, post-coital activities of the new players on the stage; the sperm and the egg.

During sex, a man unleashes an army of up to 200 million sperm. Think about that for a second.

200 million sperm.

A single sperm resembles a tadpole, complete with a head, a neck, a middle bit and a tail. As soon as this army of sperm are released, they enter a race to reach their ultimate goal, their Holy Grail if you like. Can you imagine 200 million tiny little tadpoles swimming through the cervix and into the uterus, battling away with each other until they reach the egg?

However, this is no ordinary race; it is a quest full of hurdles and dangers that Indiana Jones would think twice about embarking upon.

First of all, the female immunity defences immediately target the army that has just invaded the body, resulting in a huge number of them dying really quickly.

Eventually, as the army races towards its objective, the number is reduced further, so that by the time they reach the egg, there are only a couple of hundred left. That’s almost 200 million sperm that died on the way.

Finally, one lucky sperm manages to penetrate and fertilise the egg, presumably leaving a whole bunch of totally pissed off sperm hanging around outside waiting to die.

This means that you and I, dear reader, are created as the result of an epic struggle of one unbelievably heroic sperm winning a race of life and death against 200 million others.

How brilliant is that?

It makes me wonder what would have happened if the leading sperm had somehow tripped up or incapacitated on the way. Would I have been a different person? I would assume so; I would guess that perhaps my appearance and personality would be different in a subtle way.

I could have been a girl. Imagine that if my manly heroic sperm had lost the race to another equally heroic but altogether different sperm that turned me into a woman.

Basically what I’m saying is that it is an absolute miracle that you are the person you are and that I am the person that I am.

I could have been so much different; I might not even have made it. What would have happened if, for example, all of the sperm had faltered and failed on the occasion of my conception?

Perhaps I wouldn’t have existed at all. Perhaps you would be reading some other drivel instead of this post.

I can sort of understand that explaining the miracle of birth to a small child is not only a question of embarrassment. Most parents would struggle to cope with the mind-boggling enormity of it all.

I’m awestruck just thinking about it now. Any number of factors could have prevented my conception resulting in a different person being here – or no person at all.

Perhaps I might have been a handsome bulldog of a man with charm and intelligence, living a luxurious life in a colossal house on a sun drenched tropical beach, with so much money that I used it as wallpaper for my billiard room. I might even have started a blog called the Plastic Billionaire or the Plastic Hawaiian.

Knowing my luck, I would have ended up as a Jeremy Kyle contestant, pouring out my troubles to a drooling audience of car crash TV fans.

For that alone, I thank my lucky stars that the correct conditions prevailed to produce the author of this nonsense you are reading.

May the stork be with you.