One sure way to antagonise your expectant partner when reminding her
that eating for two is not in fact NHS guidance is to add that you will
nonetheless be drinking for two.
There are, I know, partners who are sympathetically abstinent but I
can’t pretend to anything like that degree of virtue.
And so it was, following a quiet supper party at home followed by a
couple of whiskies, that I was awoken by my wife at 0430 insistent that her
waters had broken. Discretion
prevents me from sharing the test for determining whether she was right: suffice
to say she was.
Thus began labour and an experience that no book or class could ever
really have prepared us for. We
had just days before finished learning about hypno-birthing from a delightful
lady who had us happily visualising rising balloons in the comfort of our
living room while sitting on a huge bouncy ball. At the end of the class I was taught some massage techniques
including one extraordinary action she dubbed ‘Shaking the apples’. Our living room has no curtains and I
have no idea what the neighbours opposite made of me kneeling behind my heavily
pregnant wife pummelling her buttocks while our tutor looked on approvingly.
For those not familiar with labour in a typical NHS hospital it is worth
knowing that the process begins in triage where a midwife checks that labour is
indeed underway. If it is the
condemned woman (mother to be) is transferred to a ward where she labours for
as long as it takes. And it can
take a very long time. This is the
part where you are supposed to be at home listening to whale song if you are
doing hypno-birthing properly.
My wife was in a very noisy and surprisingly public ward with three
other women. One of them was a lot
further along and making that audibly obvious. Voluble imprecations to God to make it stop and insistence
to anyone who would listen that she couldn’t possibly go through this did not
inspire confidence. The other two
bays seemed to be occupied by alarmingly young women/girls who the moment the
other victim was wheeled off for the Final Countdown noisily complained about
her with one of them contemptuously saying ‘Don’t know why she was praying to
God; God aint’ gonna help her now’.
By this time my wife was herself firmly in the throes and being wired up
to a monitor I could see from the numbers when her contractions were starting
before she could feel them. This
conferred a curious feeling of being like a torturer’s assistant knowing in
advance when the electrical charge was coming. At one stage, cannula in hand, my wife and I went for a
rather testy stomp in a nearby park.
For a surprisingly long time she got by purely on Teutonic grit before
eventually accepting a canister of gas and air. Eventually a midwife of remarkable brusqueness accepted that
my wife was sufficiently dilated that we could be wheeled through to the birth
room. Here we were attended by two
delightful Spanish midwives. By
now over 12 hours had passed since the waters had broken.
It is at this stage that I
realised that if you ever want to know what labour feels like you must, of
course, ask a mother but if you want to know what actually happens then you
must ask a father. Mother Nature
is a wily old bird and the tsunami of hormones that engulf mothers in the
aftermath of childbirth is plainly designed to erase the hard disk.
In reality my magnificent wife kept her equanimity throughout and I
never got to witness the fusillade of Prussian cursing that I had secretly been
looking forward to. At one point she
very politely and calmly ventured that she might quite like an epidural. So calmly was the request made and so
clearly missing the necessary screamed prefix ‘fucking’ that I could see the
midwife was minded to ignore or even gainsay the request. However her professionalism kicked in
and she went in search of the Sunday night on-call anaesthetist. Who, 30 minutes later, we discovered
was in theatre with two emergency caesareans. So a shot of Pethidine was all she got.
Suddenly the baby was crowning and with a heroic heave was out in the
world. We were parents at
last. The theory test was over,
the practical just begun.
