Looking back on the last nine months, I don’t believe I ever considered that Katrin’s pregnancy would one day conclude with the actual birth of an actual human baby; it all seemed so theoretical. Sure, I see now that there were very few alternatives – an adorable chimp with a proclivity for typing, perhaps? But no matter how hard I tried, I simply could not imagine that Katrin and I soon would be made the sole guardians of a helpless life-form. Until recently, I wouldn’t have even guessed it’s legal.
Quite a lot of things didn’t run the way I thought they would during that time, especially at the end. For example, I didn’t think we would be making an appointment at the hospital for the delivery; the Honey-I-think-it’s-time-now trip is supposed to be a spontaneous adventure occurring at the most inopportune moments. But our doctor thought a mild case of gestational diabetes made it necessary to induce labor by the 40th week. As that time drew nearer, I imagined all sorts of scenarios involving water breaking in supermarkets or on friends’ new sofas, seat-of-you-pants taxi rides through the city, heroic helicopter evacuations from traffic-jammed Autobahns, or having to deliver the baby personally while trapped in a malfunctioning elevator, my only tools a rusty hairpin and a bottle-opener key chain. Instead, Katrin drove us both to the hospital on the morning of September 25th, observing all the traffic lights, blinking for lane changes and turns, leaving the car seats as dry as she found them.
The only urgency I sensed our first day in the hospital was to locate a place to get some dinner. The cafeteria only serves snacks after 2 pm, which, like so many other service-oriented practices in Germany, makes a lot of sense. Roaming the halls in search of a gourmet vending machine, I wondered how the doctors fought off hunger in the wee hours of the afternoon. Did they pack their dinners? Or was there a secret cafeteria in the basement which served up the local “catch of the day”?
Absolutely nothing happened on our first day at the hospital; the midwife told us that first attempts to induce labor are only 50% successful. We spent our time on the maternity ward walking the halls, climbing the steps, reading the newspapers. If Katrin so much as cleared her throat, I looked at her for some sign of contractions, or at least indigestion. Nothing. We watched women in postpartum trances carting their babies back and forth between their rooms and the newborn care station. They were all young, and most of them were probably first-time mothers. I envied them; they now knew what it was like to give birth. For Katrin and me it was still a mystery. I felt like a poser, a father wannabe on the maternity ward, like an ROTC student on a monthly field trip to the firing range. Long after visiting hours had passed, a doctor told Katrin that they would have to try inducing labor again tomorrow, and she should get some sleep. I said goodbye and walked the half hour home to wait for another day.
When I returned early the next morning, Katrin was already awake, looking sleepy and relaxed. Damn. The doctor had just given her the second treatment, offering her another fifty-fifty hope for delivering that day. But after more climbing steps and coveting zombie mommies their new status, our baby didn’t seem in a rush.
…
Men are next to useless in delivery rooms. It’s not the same kind of useless as in the kitchen or in bed. In the delivery room, we’re actually sincere in helping, in thinking of the woman’s needs.
Katrin needed a midwife right now. Someone who knew what to do next after her water broke while standing in the examination room. “Oh!” was all she said before I went scurrying about for a rag to mop up what her socks hadn’t absorbed. Her breathing became heavier, more concentrated, like a weight lifter’s before breaking the record. I looked at her for some sign of her condition, hoping for a weak smile or heroic thumbs up à la broken-neck cheerleader girl. But Katrin wasn’t looking at me anymore; instead, she was looking through me – through me and through the walls behind me. Her gaze was fixed on some point that only those about to pass a human being between their legs can see. Only an hour ago we were strolling through the halls, but the situation was quickly deteriorating, and I felt it was up to me to regain control; after all, I had attended all six of the prenatal classes. I walked over to Katrin, my shoes squeaking across amniotic fluid, and tried to make eye contact. Sweat was running down her face, and her rapid breathing was now accompanied by low, guttural moans. Within ten minutes my wife had transformed into an overheated Tibetan chantmaster. I grasped her by the shoulders; she swayed against the pressure. “Katrin,” I said firmly, searching for the right words to buttress her, “you don’t look so well.” What good are those prenatal courses, anyway?
Susanne, the on-duty midwife, entered the room on cue and assessed the situation in three brief glances:
Glance #1: Katrin – pale, sweating, rapid breathing, distant stare, low moans
Glance #2: Puddle – water broke, things moving along well
Glance #3: Chris – pale, sweating, rapid breathing, wild eyes
She assisted Katrin to a couch (Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of that?) and attached her to a CTG machine (I was about to do that myself!). With calming words delivered in a confident, melodic voice, Susanne reassured Katrin that she was fine. Katrin nodded her head. I followed them to the couch, wanting to help in some way. (Anyone want a coffee? Do the plants need watering?) Susanne flitted about with gauze, towels, syringes and antiseptics – the routine she performs several times each day – and finally lighted at Katrin’s feet to check her progress. “Oh my gosh!” I translate her saying from German, “She’s gone from two centimeters to fully dilated in half an hour,” and then she left the room. Clearly there was no time for coffee – a single espresso, maybe.
In the third lesson of our prenatal course, the women were instructed to stand with feet at shoulder width and arms stretched out to their sides in a rigid “T”. The men stood in front of their partners. The point of the exercise was for the men to motivate the women not to drop their arms, even when they desperately wanted to give up. “How are you doing?” I asked Katrin. “Fine,” she replied. I checked on her a few minutes later. “And now?” “I’m feeling it,” she admitted. I watched as her arms sagged, then rose, then sagged again. “Don’t give up,” I advised her. “You can do better than that, can’t you?” she asked. “Okay. C’mon Katrin, you can do it,” I stated. Her eyebrows bunched together in frustration. “And how is that supposed to motivate me? I mean, your words are so flat that it would be unethical even to punctuate them with exclamation points in this blog entry.” “I know,” I said, “but this feels so contrived.” Her arms sagged again. “You don’t need to be standing here with your arms out like that. You could put them down right now if you wanted to and nothing bad would happen.” They drooped some more. “You’re not helping a bit,” she said. “I don’t think I can help,” I admitted, “because you don’t need my help. Look, when the time comes, I’ll be there for you, and I’ll do everything in my power to help you in any way I can. I promise.” Her arms collapsed to her sides. “Thanks a lot,” she said.
As Katrin’s contractions grew stronger, as her moans graduated to wails, I felt completely powerless kneeling there beside her. “You’re doing really well, baby. Really well.” Her look, one of the few I elicited during the birth, told me she wasn’t doing well and I wasn’t helping. Susanne returned with some paperwork in her hands. When she saw the CTG readings, she set everything down on the desk, “We need to move to the delivery room.”
…
The birth of a baby is not a miracle. Raising people from the dead is a miracle. Changing water into wine is a miracle. Weeping icons, prophetic visions, walking on water, and shriveling indolent fig trees are all considered by believers to be miracles, summoned by a supernatural force with the snap of its magical fingers.
Giving birth to a baby is work – long, painful, dirty, exhausting work – often involving expletives not fit for most self-respecting deities. There was no command to make the baby come out early, no incantation to ease the hurting, no glove to withstand the pressure of Katrin’s hand as it squeezed the lifeblood out of my fingers. Things would happen as nature determined and not a second sooner. I just hoped these things happened before my hand took the hint and jettisoned the fingers to save itself.
The situation developed rapidly in the delivery room. Katrin’s contractions came in a roller-coaster rhythm – a wave of howls and curses followed by a brief interval of reprieve. As Katrin maintained her debilitating grip on one hand, I gave her water and wiped her forehead with a damp cloth using the flesh-colored one. I’d given up empty words of encouragement and unconvincing motivational speeches. In fact, I’d given up words all together. Whether German, English or Esperanto, she wasn’t responding to language at all anymore. Katrin had been pushing and pushing and was rewarded each time with the midwife’s praise: You’re doing terrific. With the next contraction, try pushing even harder. But I saw how this deflated her. She didn’t want to hear about the next contraction, she just wanted to get through it. Her breathing picked up. Her grip tightened; it was coming.
I growled. “Grrrr!”
Katrin growled with me. “Grrrr!”
“Grrrr!”
“Grrrr!”
To my surprise, it was working. Where words failed, grunts and snarls inspired Katrin to push some more. I pictured myself doing this during the prenatal course exercise and doubted it would have had the same effect. “There’s the head,” the midwife announced. I looked, and our son Lloyd was a theory no more. A small section of head with glistening dark hair showed through.
“Grrr!” I said again.
…
Even while eating I had to admire my wife. About an hour and a half after the delivery, Katrin and I were enjoying a complimentary meal of bread and cold cuts while the midwife and doctor restored the room around us to clinical order. Instead of sleeping, Katrin was hungry and had asked for something to eat. Her face didn’t reflect the hours of pain she had just endured. Instead she chewed contentedly on a bite of sandwich. She had returned from the Land of Labor, glowing with an aura of relief and joy. Already the violent images and echoes of the event were melding into a benign softness, to be recalled fondly at a later time as a Happiest Moment in Our Life. We were reflecting on it peacefully now, the only primitive noises coming from Lloyd, behind the glass wall of an incubator.
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