OK, my wife says she couldn’t have done it without me, that she nearly lost it whenever I left the room, and that she is really sorry she called me Robert. After all, I was the timer of the contractions for the first four hours at home. I suppose that telling some one the length of time between the most intense pains they’d ever felt is probably very helpful.
I did get us to the hospital, and complete the emergency room check-in process. Being able to read the numbers from her BC/BS card, that was wicked helpful. I suppose I was most helpful during the hours she spent in the hot tub. I was the one mopping her brow and giving her ice cubes to suck. Once, I reminded her to breathe.
Over the previous months, Lisa’s mantra had been, “I am an animal and animals do this all the time … without drugs, forceps, or fetal monitors…and without coaches!” In the hot tub, she was that animal, howling at the night, hunched like a biker, drenched in her humidity. Supporting her upper body with elbows perched on the sides of the tub, her fists pulled in opposite directions on a washcloth I had provided. She couldn’t have done it without me.
Around seven, I was able, on my own, to call our mothers, two ladies who each had managed seven semi-conscious births. They wanted to know how she was doing. I wanted to say, “She’s an animal!” As far as I knew, she was exhausted, going through hell, busting at the seams. I guess that’s what I meant when I said, “It’s rough, but everyone says she’s doing fine.”
As the hours passed, the questions, which torment new fathers under these circumstances, began to pile up. How did my relationship with my mother get so screwed up? How did they create that effect at the breakfast table in the first Alien film? Will the baby – if it’s a boy – be able to dribble with both hands?
There was no pattern to the contractions. They were hard, short, long, sometimes seeming to come one after another for eight or ten minutes at a time before letting up. During the breaks, I held her head, fearing she might plop over and slam against the side of the tub.
Once or twice we smiled together at the sound of some other animal in the next room. She had her own screeching melody and cadence, perhaps from another culture but clearly of the same specie. In the middle of one quiet time, Lisa turned and in the softest, most desperate voice, whimpered, “I just want to go to sleep.” With that simple request and in the face of her beauty, soaked and stretched to the edge, I looked for words but could only cry. She brought her wet face to mine and we cried together. We had no idea if we were at the beginning, middle or end of it all, but in that moment, it didn’t matter. We sobbed, we kissed, we held on. We were together for that precious moment.
She broke the damp silence by assuring me that, “it’ll be OK” and suddenly our roles shifted. The animal became the comforter and the coach became the client. Lisa, in this subtle move, slid into her natural strength as hand holder, and I was relieved to have finally found a way to help. Somehow, knowing that it pained me to witness her struggle, somehow that helped her to deal with the pain.
Perhaps, that’s what loving – if not coaching – is about.