Notes on the Second - III. Woman

Awe is the appropriate response a thoughtful man has to the woman he married. Awe usually requires a certain thoughtfulness. Being thoughtful means using your thoughts to poke through the stress and distractions and day-to-day muddle that makes everything too urgent for awe. When we can't do this, events come along to bring it out. My sense of awe, neglected like I neglect this blog, focused and compounded upon itself while watching my wife give birth. Most dads would agree with me here.

The cocktail worked so quickly that we had no time for drugs or anything else. The birth was going to be all natural, with the help from a midwife, a doctor, and a hot tub. It's hard for a man not to feel so unessential to the process, even as I brought her water and gave her a shoulder to lean on. We walked back and forth, we tried different positions and "labor massages," and in the end, pretty much anything we planned didn't really work, other than to say: "full steam ahead!" The midwife was a hero, making a little moan every time my wife yelled in agony, which apparently helped, and spoke words of comfort through the torturous fear between labor pains.

The screams came from every part of her body and soul. They contained fear, pain, determination, and love, somehow shameless and proud at the same time. In labor, there's a sense of irrational urgency, and yet a wise, determined patience. In all of these paradoxes, the culmination of the 9-month process of giving life, the woman in labor is more animal, more angel, and more human than a man could ever be.

During the final pushes, she grabbed my shoulder as the doctor and midwife directed traffic. "Grabbed" - no. She crushed my shoulder between her fingers. It hurt for a week, though that'll elicit no sympathy from a birthing woman.

At the end of it all, my daughter emerged from my wife. They let me cut the cord, and they sat her on my wife's broken body for her first meal. There were tears and greetings and pictures and weighings. We had a new person to get to know, but my wife was nine months ahead of me.

This is the third chapter of a longer post about getting to know our second child. You can read the post in its entirety here.