by Jim Lindberg
She looked down at her chart and realized regretfully that all of the other rooms were booked, which was punctuated by the fact that a woman was moaning like she was having her toenails removed one by one somewhere nearby, and that by some cruel twist of God’s will, we would in fact be getting the “good” room. She looked at the chart again, as if to try to come up with an excuse to put us in an X-ray room or janitor closet somewhere, so she could save the “good” room in case some more pious member of the congregation should stop in and need to deliver their baby. She sighed and realized there was nothing she could do about it, and led the punk rock heathens to their birthing suite.
Truth be told, the good room wasn’t that special, the main difference being that it was slightly bigger than some of the other rooms, and was set apart slightly closer to the nurses’ desk. I could see how being too close to another room could make yours into a “bad” room if you had a neighbor as vocal as the woman who was still filling the hallways with ear-wrenching shrieks of maternal torment. It was kind of disconcerting to be unpacking our bags and trying to stay calm and positive and setting up our little stereo and scented candles when it sounded like someone was being guillotined slowly with a dull blade in the next room.
We got all settled in, and by this time, Jennifer was having her first contractions and we were just kind of tripping out at what lay ahead of us. When you hear all your friends’ harrowing “seventy-two hours in labor” stories, you wonder what the hell could be happening that makes having a baby take so long? Do women really spend two days in the birthing room turning colors and trying to push the kid out for hours on end? Isn’t there an easier way to do this? Apparently it can take anywhere from a few hours to several lifetimes, depending on how much God hates you. Jennifer would be sitting there talking to me and then say, “Okay, here comes another one,” and then she’d kind of wince and groan and squeeze my hand until it started turning blue for about thirty to forty-five seconds, and then she’d release it with a big sigh. She says it probably feels very similar to that slow, creeping pain like when we get kicked in the balls really hard, except we’d also have to imagine having a ten-pound bowling ball lodged in our spleen, and the groin kicks would have to get increasingly frequent and violent over the next twelve hours.
We found out the reason this process can take so long was that after she was having regular contractions for four or five hours already, and I’d read all the magazines and watched a few dozen infomercials on TV, and was saying things like, “Well, things are moving along nicely, we should be getting close now,” the doc would come in and check her dilation and she’d only be at one and a half centimeters, when she needed to get all the way to ten! Then another two or three hours would go by of me wandering the holy halls of Little Company of Mary and poking through cupboards and counting the holes in ceiling tiles and going back and forth to the cafeteria just to be grossed out by the idea of eating food prepared in a place that housed thousands of people with communicable diseases, and then they would come back into our room and check her again and she’d be barely at two! Polar caps have melted faster than this.
I was agitated already and when the nurse gave us the latest reading, I reacted as if I was talking to an old, slow mechanic taking his time giving my car an oil change. “Five hours and we’ve only advanced a half centimeter? Are you f-ing kidding me? She’s had sixty-five contractions already and she’s nearly broken all the bones in my hand! Isn’t there some way we can move this along?” I thought maybe I could slip her a twenty under a bedpan somewhere, and maybe she could give her a laxative or something to pick up the pace a little.
With daughter number one, Jennifer had what’s called “pregnancy induced hypertension,” which is when you have high blood pressure during the pregnancy or just near delivery. They had planned to induce her two weeks early, but instead she went into labor a week before this. Because her contractions were weak and things were moving so slow, the doctor gave her something to make them stronger and more regular, which, of course, meant more painful. The nurse had her rate her level of discomfort on a scale of one to ten, and then, like a pusher on a downtown street corner, offered her an assortment of different drugs to help out with the pain. They gave her a shot of Nubain, a painkiller that seemed to blunt her sensation somewhat for a while, but a few hours later it wore off, and the second shot didn’t work half as well. This is when they brought in the mother of all pain relievers, the epidural, a local anesthetic injected into the spinal column that is supposed to numb the lower half of the body so she doesn’t feel the pain as severely. The anesthesiologist comes rolling in like the big pimp sugar daddy on the block, takes out a huge needle, gives her a shot in the back, and all of a sudden she was as happy and carefree as any hippie in the back row of a Grateful Dead concert.
As the labor progressed, though, Jennifer’s blood pressure was getting extremely high. I kept watching the monitor and every time it would spike up to a dangerous level, a little warning buzzer would go off and since I’d been running the phrase “died during childbirth” over and over in my head from some western history school book, I would get all panicked and run out to the nurses’ desk and yell, “THE BUZZER ALARM THING IS GOING OFF!! I THINK SHE’S DYING!” They would all just look at me weird and say it was okay and not to worry about it and they were watching it. Eventually the doctor gave her magnesium sulfate, which was supposed to help control her blood pressure but also makes you extremely hot and very jumpy. I was nervous already because it was our first child and didn’t know what to expect and I was concerned about her blood pressure, thinking her head was going to explode any minute and that I might just have to do a stage dive on the nurses’ desk if something didn’t start happening soon.
Jennifer was complaining of being boiling hot so I had to keep running back and forth to get ice chips and cold washcloths for her, and this went on for about ten hours of me being worried about her and the baby and watching the monitors and calling the nurse in when the numbers went up too high and the beeping sounds went off. Finally I’d had enough and ran out to the nurses’ desk and had a complete meltdown. “LISTEN, WE’VE BEEN HERE FOR FOURTEEN HOURS AND MY WIFE IS BURNING UP AND MY KID COULD BE COOKING LIKE GUMBO IN THERE, SO I NEED ONE OF YOU TO GET UP AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, STAT, BECAUSE THE BUZZER THING IS FREAKING ME OUT AND I CAN’T DEAL WITH THIS SHIT ANYMORE!” I’m sure half the staff and family members of expectant mothers in the maternity ward were wondering who this strange person was with the Neapolitan hair and the offensive T-shirt and why he was running up and down the halls screaming and freaking out like a mental patient.
After my marathon of anxiety and worry, the doctor came in and checked her, and then like a Delphi Oracle announced that the baby would be delivered at 4 P.M. I looked up at the clock and saw that this was ten minutes away. Was she high? Had she been taking a few shots of Nubain herself? There was no way, with the rate this delivery had been going, that our kid was coming out any time this millennium. I would be here weeks from now having my hand squeezed off with my face glued to the baby monitor.
We soon found out that while the contractions and inactive labor part takes a long-ass time, the actual period of pushing the little punker out is relatively quick in comparison. My mission was to be encouraging and tell her what a great job she was doing and that the baby was almost there. I basically just tried not to be annoying and crack any jokes or point and say, “Oh, my God, how gross!” I sometimes think guys should have a large marble shoved down their pee hole for the pushing part just to experience a little bit of what their wife is going through, but I don’t think my idea will get a lot of support from many other prospective fathers out there. I’ve heard that some women throw up and evacuate their bowels and do a Linda Blair head spin or two during delivery, but my wife just turned a few shades of red, white, and blue in the face, and then let out one loud, guttural rebel yell, worthy of any good punk band, and in a voluminous rush of blood, sweat, and tears, and var
ious other bodily fluids, our baby was born, exactly ten minutes later, just like our doctor had said.
When the baby came out I expected to experience a wide array of emotions: joy, elation, amazement, and maybe even a little nausea and revulsion. I knew some dads weep with joy, while others just do a total face plant on the linoleum and have their infant handed to them in the emergency room while their forehead is being stitched up. For some reason, at first I felt slightly underwhelmed and a little creeped out by the experience. You have to remember newborn babies have been floating in amniotic fluid for the last nine months. You know how when you sit in a Jacuzzi too long your fingers lose all their color and are all shriveled up and gross looking? When they first come out, babies look like this all over and they’re covered in all kinds of gunk, blood, and mucus. It’s hard to get the big, expected, warm and fuzzy feeling when you are the proud parent of what looks like a Spanish omelet with a face.
Weeks before daughter number one came into the world, when Jennifer was in her third trimester and you could actually see different body parts poking out from her stomach, every night before we fell asleep I started talking to the little critter, figuring me and the new addition should get to know each other a little before the big day. She would lie very still and for some reason this was when the baby became really active, rolling around, jabbing my wife’s sides, and punching her bladder like it was a tiny, urine-filled speed bag. I’d start by saying, “Hi, baby! It’s Daddy!” to her and she would suddenly become perfectly still, like she stopped whatever she was doing in there to listen to me. Then I would say the ABCs to her a few times. I did this every night without fail until my wife would doze off and wake up later to find me having in-depth conversations with her stomach about Roman architecture and saying, “What I really want to do is direct.”
When our first baby girl came out, she was all slimy and crying and freaking out and just totally pissed off to be out of her warm, safe, uterine home and thrust into the cold, harsh light of the real world. Her arms and legs were kicking the air as if to say, “Put me back where I was, this place sucks!” I was standing over my wife’s shoulder, and just like I had every night for the last two months, I said to her, “Hi, baby. It’s Daddy!” The second she heard my voice, she stopped kicking and moving altogether. She turned her head right toward where I was standing, blinked a few times, and then looked right at me with those perfect baby blue eyes of hers, and that’s when I got it, the big rush of adrenaline or endorphins or something indescribable that caused a wave of heat to course through my veins. My breath stopped for a second, and I got the first big, warm, fuzzy feeling of fatherhood looking down at my own real live offspring, a little piece of me and my wife come to life, my own flesh and blood. I thought to myself, “I made that thing. I don’t believe it! That’s my kid, dang it!” I also started thinking about what a screwup I’d been my whole life, how I made my parents’ life hell, and how part of me thought I’d never make it out of high school, but now, staring down at this perfect child, I finally got it. “This is what life’s all about. This feeling I’m having looking at my kid.” I’d been looking my whole life for some small bit of meaning in this messed-up world, for something, anything, to believe in, and here it was staring right back at me. All of a sudden, the whole circle of life idea stopped sounding cliché and made perfect sense. Although I didn’t do it for security reasons, I wanted to yell out, “HEY, WORLD! THIS IS MY KID! I’M A DAD! I’M NOT A SCREWUP AFTER ALL! CHECK ME OUT!” Then I wanted to go out and buy cigars and do all the stupid stuff dads have done for years to embarrass themselves in hospitals with big goofy grins on their faces.
This is the moment I always try to hold on to whenever I am hit with the crippling anxiety, torturous frustration, and cruel heartache of raising kids. There will be many more like them, where you are in awe of your creation and so proud of them and proud of yourself for having them that you won’t care that other people are sick to death of you always talking about the funny thing your kid said and showing them pictures because you just can’t stop yourself. But pretty much right after this first moment is when the work begins, as well as the existential worry and hair-pulling stress of parenting that puts you in the spin cycle for the rest of your life.
Two years later, we we’re in the same delivery room with daughter number two, and her umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck during delivery. She was stuck in the birth canal and her heart rate was going down every time my wife would have a contraction, and once again I was freaking out and worried but this time the doc and the people on the staff were too. The head nurse finally came up and put her hands on top of Jennifer’s stomach and started forcibly pushing the baby out from the outside as hard as she could. Somehow they were able to get her out but the baby’s collarbone was broken in the process. I think this might be why daughter number two’s such a tough chick. She had to fight and take some pain and punishment to get into this world and now she wants to give some back. Two babies so far and enough delivery room drama for our own sitcom.
Four years after that we were in the female anatomy doctor’s office again getting the ultrasound with a four-and six-year-old girl running around among the uterus charts and diagrams, so I thought for sure we’d be having a boy this time. I knew I’d been a bastard to a few girlfriends in high school, but there was no way God would want to punish me so much that he’d make me put three girls through high school and meet hundreds of boyfriends and stay up all night waiting for them to come home and then have to pay for three weddings. That would just be too fucking cruel. The doc, who had three daughters himself, kept asking me if I wanted to know the sex, but I refused. I said, “No way! It has to be a boy this time. I want to wait and be surprised.”
It wasn’t and I was. Daughter number three came into the world incredibly easy compared to the other two. Jennifer was to be induced this time so instead of being caught off guard in the middle of the night, she got to stroll in on a Saturday morning like she was going in for a teeth cleaning. When we got there they gave us a birthing suite in the new wing they’d just opened on the maternity floor, a spacious luxury hospital condo that Oprah or J.Lo would be proud to deliver in. Our nurse was a hospitable Southern girl who looked like she could have won a Miss America pageant and she treated us like royalty. The doctor was there for the entire day making calls from the hospital so she kept popping in and checking our progress. Before my wife had any pain, they asked if she wanted the epidural, and, of course, she did, and two hours later we had a pain-and stress-free delivery for once. Maybe that’s why daughter number three is so mellow.
When it came time to name our kids I thought it might be cool to give our daughters punk rock names, like Peggy Peroxide or Victoria Vomit, but my wife shot me down. I’d always wanted a cool punk name like Ratt Scabies, Darby Crash, or Sid Vicious, but apparently these don’t go over as well with kindergarten teachers. I figured that since my wife had carried the kid for nine months and then went through fifteen hours of labor, I should at least let her have the privilege of naming our children. In hindsight, we should have probably given them all conservative Republican names like Nancy or Barbara just to anticipate the inevitable parental backlash.
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THE PUNK ROCK NAME GENERATOR
You’ve heard of the name-generating systems in which you combine two things to come up with a specific name—for example, your porn star name is your childhood pet’s name and the street you grew up on (Genève Cornell, Bootsey Broadway, etc.). Well, here is how you find the perfect baby punk rock name: your middle name plus an infectious disease that you or someone in your family has contracted, preferably some kind of disgusting skin ailment, for example—
Vinnie Vitiligo
Harry Hepatitis
Eddie Eczema
Freddy Influenza
J. T. Boil
Bonnie Botulism
Alexis Angioma
Colin Cholera
Donnie Dermatitis
&n
bsp; Rita Gonorrhea
Iggy Impetigo
Stephen Ring Worm
Sally Psoriasis
Julio Polio
Rosey Rosacea
Milo Monkey Pox
Danny Dandruff
Phyllis Syphilis
Richard “Dick” Diphtheria
Alexander Acne
* * *
Our first experience in the delivery room, I was so stressed and out of my head I was probably a total pain to deal with, so with daughters two and three I knew better. I greeted everyone nicely, asked questions, took names, and put people on my Christmas card list. I joked with the janitor and told the old lady checking us in that her nurse’s smock really brought out the blue in her eyes. Everyone loved me. The reason I learned I needed to kiss some ass at the hospital is because like any other service provider it’s up to the staff to decide just what type of service they’re going to provide. If you’re nice and cordial and complimentary, you could get the “good” room, but if you come in trying to be hard and punk and antisocial, you and your wife will be sent to a desolate corner of the hospital with five hundred other wailing mothers, an army cot for a bed, and you’ll have a witch doctor from Barbados delivering your baby.