Chapter 2
2. The Nature within Us
During the first trimester of Eryn’s pregnancy strange things began to happen to me. As Eryn started to experience nausea in the mornings, my own appetite, usually reliable as a plow horse, began to falter. My back started to ache, and I was so fitful at night and so bleary in the morning that I despaired of ever feeling rested again. At the time I supplied a litany of possible explanations: fatigue, old sports injuries, hassles at work. But as Eryn’s pregnancy progressed, these things became harder to explain. I began to have headaches and to feel bloated, and I developed disconcerting cravings for foods I had always disliked. I felt as if my body were being taken over by an alien force that I didn’t understand and couldn’t name. As I treated my ailments with midnight doses of dill pickles, hot and sour soup, and tequila, I wondered if I could have contracted Lyme disease or be suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. In a desperate moment I even enumerated the karmic missteps by which my health could possibly have been compromised in such a systemic way. I complained little to Eryn, though, and there was a good reason for my reticence: I felt awkward bemoaning my nausea, bloating, appetite loss, cravings, insomnia, fatigue, and headaches when she was so uncomfortable because of her nausea, bloating, appetite loss, cravings, insomnia, fatigue, and headaches.
Strange as it now seems, at the time I simply didn’t realize how completely my own physical discomfort mirrored Eryn’s. But then one morning I experienced something I had never felt before: my teeth began to hurt—not one or two, but every one of them—with a dull, throbbing pain. Along with this perplexing face ache came a more humiliating and inexplicable symptom: I was salivating excessively, which was easily the grossest of the bizarre tricks my insubordinate body had lately pulled on me. I recall staring at my own incredulous, drooling face in the bathroom mirror, the way the Wolf Man does in that helpless moment when the hair begins to sprout from his once-human forehead. Just as my disgust and confusion reached their heights, Eryn called out from the bedroom: “Ugh, my teeth hurt, and my mouth is so watery. The books say it’s pretty common for this stage of pregnancy, though.” That was the breakthrough moment. I went to Eryn and, drooling like a rabid coyote, expressed my deep sympathy with her discomfort. Then I confessed my own strange symptoms and swore that I’d figure out what was going on. Eryn was pregnant, but what was I?
Couvade syndrome, sometimes called sympathetic pregnancy, refers to the experiencing by men of some of the physical symptoms of pregnancy during their partner’s forty-week journey to delivery. The term comes from the French couver, “to hatch.” The phenomenon is poorly understood but widespread and has been observed since antiquity in various cultures in Africa, China, Japan, and India, as well as among Native peoples in North and South America and the Basques of France and Spain. The ancient Greek geographer Strabo recorded sympathetic pregnancies, as did the thirteenth-century Venetian traveler Marco Polo, who observed the strange phenomenon around the globe.
Among the first Westerners to offer detailed descriptions of male responses to pregnancy were the twentieth-century anthropologists Margaret Mead, working in the South Pacific, and George Gorer, up in the Himalayas. It turns out that many non-Western native cultures practice rituals that mimic couvade in fascinating ways. In many of these cultures, the husband of a woman in labor will occupy a kind of maternity bed of his own during the time the woman is in childbirth, as if he were the one bearing the child. Such cultural practices, which involve imitation by the man of the experiences of the pregnant or laboring woman, have been explained in a number of ways. Some believe that the practices are purely superstitious and are intended to ward off evil that might otherwise be visited upon the new baby through supernatural means. A related theory is that the man, by occupying his own birthing bed, attracts the evil spirits toward himself and away from the newborn. It appears that all of these practices involve some ritualized assertion of paternity—a symbolic participation by the man in the birth of his son or daughter.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of this odd ritual occurs among descendants of the mighty Aztecs: the native Huichol people, who still inhabit the mountainous wilderness of the Sierra Madre Occidental in western Mexico. During childbirth, the Huichol father goes not to his own bed but rather into the rafters of the family hut, where he positions himself directly above his laboring wife. Once perched there, he ties one end of a rope around his testicles and lowers the other end to the point where it is within reach of his wife. During labor the wife grasps her end of the rope, yanking it each time she experiences a painful contraction. In this amazing way the husband is made to experience his wife’s pain during labor, thus sharing the physical discomfort associated with his child’s entry into the world. It is a participatory gesture I suspect few would-be fathers would consent to. If you are unlucky enough to have a female partner who insists that you wear one of those ridiculous artificial pregnancy simulators called Empathy Bellies, you might want to pour yourself a glass of whiskey, recall what is required of the Huichol man, and then silently strap it on.
While most of these practices involve the man’s ritual imitation of pregnancy and childbirth, couvade syndrome is instead a physical response by the man to the pregnancy and childbirth experiences of his partner. Modern scientific studies have found that couvade is surprisingly common among expectant fathers in the United States, Europe, Thailand, and elsewhere. Somewhere between 10 and 60 percent of expectant fathers experience at least some physical symptoms of pregnancy, which run the gamut from changes in appetite, food cravings, nausea, insomnia, weight gain, indigestion, diarrhea, and constipation to headaches, toothaches, nosebleeds, itchy skin, backaches, mood swings, and, in acute cases, even abdominal cramps during the woman’s delivery. Symptoms tend to be more intense during the first and third trimesters, and they are more common among men who have a strong emotional involvement with the pregnancy.
Couvade may be related to false pregnancy among women, which has been documented since the time of Hippocrates in 300 B.C. Called pseudocyesis—the word comes from the Greek pseudes (false) and kyesis (pregnancy)—false pregnancy occurs when a woman manifests objective signs of pregnancy but is not in fact pregnant. Perhaps the most famous victim of pseudocyesis was Mary Tudor, queen of England, but this odd response is surprisingly common, especially among the female relatives and close friends of the pregnant woman. But if the physical effects of false pregnancy in women are strange, couvade syndrome—the experiencing of those same physical symptoms of pregnancy in men—is stranger still.
While couvade syndrome is well documented, it is not easily explained. Some researchers believe couvade is the man’s physical reaction to a feeling of marginalization in the processes of pregnancy and parturition. Some argue that the symptoms are instead triggered by the man’s sympathy for the woman’s discomfort. Others consider couvade an expression of generalized anxiety about the substantial life change parenthood represents. Yet others, drawing upon psychoanalytic principles, propose that the response is a form of “womb envy” triggered by the man’s jealousy that he is unable to be the bearer of his own child.
The etiology of couvade is likewise mysterious. Most scientists believe it is a psychosomatic syndrome, but others claim that it cannot be purely psychosomatic since it includes symptoms like nosebleeds, which have mechanical triggers. Others consider couvade a form of Munchausen syndrome, in which individuals feign or imagine symptoms in order to draw attention to themselves. Still others argue that couvade is hormonal, as studies have shown substantial hormonal fluctuations in expectant fathers as well as in expectant mothers. For example, the male partners of pregnant women experience changes in their levels of estradiol (a form of estrogen), prolactin (a female hormone associated with milk production), and cortisol (a hormone related to stress responsiveness). New fathers also have higher levels of estrogen and lower levels of testosterone than do other men. The scientific evidence makes clear that pregnancy has biologica
l and physical—not to mention psychological and emotional—effects on men as well as on women.
As it turned out, the unnatural symptoms I was experiencing were perfectly natural after all. That said, nobody wants to have a syndrome, and being able to name my bizarre symptoms didn’t make me feel much better about them—even if confused men have been drooling prodigiously since old Strabo’s day. In fact, the choice of explanations for my condition seemed vaguely threatening. I imagined trying to enlighten my male friends: “Look, man, it’s not as weird as it sounds,” I’d say. “It’s just a psychosomatic syndrome with a French name that’s triggered by my selfishness, angst, womb envy, and skyrocketing estrogen levels.” While the caveman in me felt that my impending fatherhood should make me more of a man, my body was instead being hijacked by an inscrutable second-order pregnancy characterized by a disturbing influx of lady hormones.
My couvade symptoms also highlighted the awkward hitch that only half of us are anatomically equipped to experience pregnancy. For the rest of us, pregnancy is mysterious and also strangely alienating, and if men were entirely candid about this, many of us would confess that the pregnancy of our other half seems by turns terrifying, comical, and bizarre. However much we may want to be a full partner in the experience of pregnancy and birth—a longing revealed by our odd use of the locution “We are going to have a baby”—we simply can’t be. It is a fact of nature—though one we resist admitting—that it isn’t our body that is miraculously transformed, and so there are limits to how informed our sympathies can ultimately be. Despite a good deal of hype to the contrary, the male role in the proverbial miracle of birth is marginal. We’re the sidekick, supporter, witness, cheerleader, coach, observer, assistant, and though we have box seats we’ll never have a chance to step up to the plate. This marginalized status of men is affirmed by every book ever written for prospective parents—books in which countless pages of fascinating descriptions of the development of the fetus are only occasionally broken by small, shaded boxes containing “Dad Tips,” which helpfully instruct men to do things like save the toxic outgassing fumes of the newly painted nursery for ourselves.
While men aren’t sea horses, many of us secretly wish to be. We want desperately to experience this celebrated miracle of gestation and birth, to feel it rather than simply have it reported to us, to be able to tell our children that we held them before they were born as well as after—to assert that we were more than sperm donors, foot masseurs, nursery painters, and breathing coaches. It is precisely this longing that sympathetic pregnancy expresses and addresses. Mysterious as it may be, couvade syndrome helps to narrow the inevitable gap that exists between the sexes when it comes to the experience of pregnancy and childbirth. In the odd misery of my couvade symptoms, I registered the depth of my connection to Eryn and to our unborn child. And my responses to this wonderful impending change in my life were physical, which made all the difference. What I was experiencing was the product of biology, even if the hormonal wheels inside me were turning magically on the axle of emotion.
If no egg was implanted in me, something was. As it grew, I caught my first glimpse of what all parents must eventually come to see: that their connection to their children is not only deeper than they know but deeper than they can know. It is an ancient connection that has been in preparation throughout the long journey of hominid evolution, and not only through the sprint of a flailing spermatozoon. My symptoms provided the first hint that parenthood is a form of love magnified by the deep forces of biology, a double mystery that involves both the wonderful machine of our body and the most beautiful of the ghosts that inhabit it.
My weird symptoms continued apace until the night Eryn’s water broke. We rushed to the hospital at 4:00 A.M., where we would begin a marathon that exhausted three shifts of doctors and nurses. Nearly spent after twenty hours of labor, Eryn decided to give pushing one last try before resorting to a C-section—an eventuality I had already prepared for by signing paperwork and snapping on one of those poofy green plastic hair restraints used by old ladies in the shower. When the baby finally crowned, the doctor donned a costume that looked very like police riot gear, complete with a giant Plexiglas face shield, which made me wonder if he was as scared of what was about to happen as I was. Next he attached to our yet unborn daughter’s bald scalp a suction device that looked a little too much like a common bathroom plunger, and he pulled as Eryn pushed. Under the pressure of the suction the baby’s skull distended so as to resemble the attenuated, aerodynamic teardrop shape of a bicycle racer’s helmet, and I confess that in that moment I was more frightened than ecstatic. I’m not squeamish, but a close inspection of the scene from my necessarily limited male point of view had momentarily convinced me that the much vaunted miracle of birth was in fact a terrifying mess. The sheer animal physicality of human birth was unexpected and startling, thrilling but also deeply disconcerting.
When our daughter, who in that moment of nativity and grace had not yet found her name, was finally born, she was whisked away to the neonatal intensive care unit. It would turn out that even after her ordeal the baby was perfectly healthy. As I stood exhausted, with my forehead pressed against the window of the infant ICU, looking down at her weird, bald, beautiful head—which now, unaccountably, had a pink plastic bow glued to it—I wondered where her energy, and Eryn’s, had come from during those twenty-two hours.
In some way that I have yet to fully understand, my couvade experience helped prepare me for the challenge and blessing of my daughter’s birth. Couvade was a narrow bridge that connected the nature of Eryn’s pregnant body and of our baby’s tiny, hidden body to the nature of my own body. If I was a bloated, drooling insomniac I was also a father in training, and couvade was a kind of physically enforced education in sensitivity and sympathy. I now know that this capacity for sensitivity is precisely what fathers need most. My symptoms may have been psychosomatic, but they were also an adaptive response to the growth and development of my unborn child. Parenting is physically and emotionally demanding, and while my symptoms disappeared with the birth of our first daughter, other challenges requiring sensitivity, compassion, and empathy emerged with her.
Pregnancy and childbirth are among the most natural events humans experience, and in them we recognize the naturalness of our own bodies—a naturalness that everything from clothes to makeup to plastic surgery is designed to help us forget. While I tend to think of owls’ nests and desert springs as “nearby nature,” there is no nature so close to us as the nature of our own bodies—and there is nothing that connects us so directly to the nature outside ourselves as the gestation of a child within us. To be pregnant is to hold and grow a world inside yourself, to be joined to elemental natural forces that turn the invisible wheels within wheels throughout nature. We are always in nature, but when we carry a child we are reminded in a profound way that nature is also always in us.
How then are we to distinguish between nature and the self, between physical and emotional experience, between the machine and the ghosts that inhabit it? When our body is gripped by disease we know that our anguish is real, but how should we understand the physical suffering caused by the emotional trauma of grief or the visceral feelings of pleasure sometimes produced by aesthetic experiences? For example, we wouldn’t tell an injured war veteran that he doesn’t really feel the pain in the limb that has been amputated, because this “ghost” pain is ghostly only to us; to the sufferer, it is excruciatingly real. When you feel a pleasant tingle or chill while listening to a song you love, you’re actually experiencing increased mood-enhancing endogenous dopamine transmission. When you laugh at a stand-up comic whose work you enjoy, her humor is also raising your heart rate and pulmonary ventilation, increasing your brain activity and alertness, stimulating the production of endorphins in your ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and even reducing your perception of pain.
Pregnancy’s effects on the body—even, as in my own case, its effects on the male body—remind
us of the deep reciprocity between our bodies and the body of nature. In her 1903 classic The Land of Little Rain, Mary Austin wrote of the desert that “there are hints to be had here of the way in which a land forces new habits on its dwellers.” Consider something as simple as the effects of this landscape on Great Basin flora. The high winds showed these desert flowers how to keep a low profile, while the sun taught their seeds the patience necessary to lay dormant for years, even decades, waiting for a rare wet spring. The drought-sculpted steppe shrubs learned to give one another space, while the gnarled junipers mastered the enviable trick of allowing parts of themselves to die off in order to keep their core alive during stressful times. Balsamroot and mule’s ears, those wild relatives of the sunflower, perfected the art of lifting their hairy, palm-shaped leaves and slowly rotating them on edge, tracking the desert sun throughout the day so as to minimize exposure to its desiccating rays. Many desert plants have allowed fire to prove the value of keeping their true hearts underground, the lovely part we humans see being little more than the replaceable efflorescence of a life whose endurance remains secure beneath the sand. We too are like these desert plants: the landscape we inhabit shapes who we are and who we may become. As Austin wrote, “not the law, but the land sets the limit.”
Raising Wild Page 5