Yesterday, much to your considerable chagrin, I described the source and nature of my issues with medical intervention in the crotchial region (yes it’s a medical term) and the discussion thereof. Today: how I’m going to beat this, and figure out a way to not pass out when the doctor says “Mr. and Mrs. Hearn, I’m afraid this baby has the largest head that I have ever seen in 17 years of delivering babies, and that means I’m going to have to cut you like you’ve never been cut before.”
Which, if you’ve ever measured my head and that of my father-in-law, is a very real possibility.
On Monday, Sarah and I were down at the Rehoboth Beach Outlets, doing a little maternity-wear shopping. This means that I was wandering the store holding a few items of clothing that Sarah intended to buy, while she tried on other things in the fitting room. Picture this: a very, very large man, unshaven and smelling faintly of the previous evening’s scotch, in a wool skull-cap and heavy winter coat, wandering around a maternity store fingering the nursing bras. After a while, I realized that there was a good chance that the clerk running the place might forget that I had come in with a woman and call the police, so I figured I’d better find a book to read or something.
Luckily, this store had several racks of parental reading material; What To Expect When You’re Expecting, 54,000 Hippie Baby Names, The Other Man: How to Tell Your Husband You’re Pregnant With Keith Richards’ Baby, and the like. One book in particular caught my eye: So You’re Going To Be A Dad, by Peter Downey. I had already read one book on pregnancy written from a man’s perspective, but I figured I could look this one over while Sarah tried some things on. So I flipped to a random section and began reading, and after a few minutes was guffawing uproariously. (It’s still a wonderment to my why the clerk didn’t call the cops. Instead, she offered me a chair so I could stop leaning against her display of maternity-style pantyhose.)
Anyway, I decided to buy the book, and over the course of Monday evening, read the entire thing. It’s not particularly informative, basically giving you a humorous overview of pregnancy and the first couple months of raising a child, but it did make a number of salient points, and offered one EXTREMELY useful suggestion, which was this:
If you know you are likely to have a problem with being in the room while your wife gives birth, you need to basically confront that fear head on. Anyone who has conquered a fear of spiders will tell you that avoiding them and constantly being afraid of accidentally coming across a monstrous 8-legger in your house is not going to do the job. You need to go find a spider, study it, talk to it, maybe touch it, and eventually let it crawl into your hand. You probably need to piss it off and let it bite you a few times.
From what Dr. Downey (who is, oddly enough, not an obstretician; his doctorate is in Education, and he teaches high school English somewhere in Australia) says, what I need to do is go rent (or probably buy, since I think this might take a while) a movie that has either actual footage of a live birth, or a very very very realistic depiction thereof, and watch it a bunch of times until I can get through it without getting woozy.
I’m guessing that the first time will have to be done with remote in hand, ’cause I have a sneaking suspicion that a small bloody baby will pop out and I’ll need to immediately stop the video and turn on Alton Brown or something like to prevent myself from passing out and having my wife come home to my still form on the living room floor and fearing I’ve had a stroke. But I’m really hoping that after the first few times, I’ll be able to watch the whole thing through without getting too queasy.
Of course, it’s entirely different when it’s in an unfamiliar location, like, say, a delivery room at Christiana Hospital. So I’m not sure how to get around that, other than maybe pretending to be a nurse and just sneaking in there sometime to watch some woman pop out her firstborn so I can be prepared for Sarah’s doing so. Might be illegal, though, and in any case is probably highly ill-advised, what with doctors having access to scalpels and phenobarbital and all.
Anyway, I have question for all the fathers out there: Even assuming that my inability to deal with genital medical intervention is rather beyond the normal queasiness, I’m guessing that most guys weren’t terribly thrilled with the prospect of witnessing childbirth. If you have done so, how did you get through it? Did you pass out? Did you just show up with a bottle of scotch and some crystal meth? How, dammit, HOW?
Have a superb weekend. Hopefully you won’t have to think much on birthin’ babies and can relax a bit.
