No matter how prepared you think you are for witnessing the terrifying miracle of childbirth, you aren’t. Here are a few pointers for birth partners you won’t find in the medical texts:
1. Gas & Air is not as good as poppers
Don’t get me wrong, it passes the time and if you stick at it for a good few minutes, you will get high. It’s just a sort of early-nineties-speed-and-hash high, rather than your 21st century coke-and-plant-food high. Just don’t expect any euphoric moments of clarity.
2. Your wife will look like a crackhead
If she – and I highly recommend she does – decides to go for an epidural (a spinal injection of anaesthetics), she’ll be hooked up to a drip. She’ll also probably have a heart rate monitor for the baby and various other bleeping, clicking and whirring medical machines protruding from every accessible vein. Couple this incapacitating reliance on hospital gadgetry with crippling fatigue and violent mood swings and you’ll soon start to believe that the midwives have swapped your loved one for a pre-priory Amy Winehouse. See Tom Hanks towards the end of Philadelphia for reference.
3. You’ll look down the business end. You just will.
Perhaps the scariest element of preparing for a birth is the thought of seeing your partner’s minky stretched wide enough to allow passage of a living, breathing human. But no matter how terrifying a sight it may be, there is a part of you that will simply not be able to resist having a peep. It’s the same part of you that wanted to watch those Ken Bigley videos back in 2004.
4. You’ll get bored
Miracles of childbirth aside, 27 hours of standing by a hospital bed can get really fucking tedious. The midwives will occasionally chip in with some chat but it won’t stop you secretly willing the mother of your child-to-be to jack it all in and demand a c-section on the spot.
5. You’ll smell of meat
Uterus, vagina, placenta, umbilical cord. None of it is pretty. And it’s only when you finally make it home that you realise your clothes and hair now smell like a mouldy butcher’s apron complete with flecks of stale fanny curd and coagulated menstrual blood. Miracle indeed.
