The Day My Wife Became a Mom
An Eyewitness Account
Out at the nurse’s station, a dozen highly-skilled women in scrubs huddled together, focused on what mattered most: their lunch order.
“Gimme a tostada bowl,” one of them said.
“Me too. But no sour cream,” another followed.
“Make sure you get extra chips!” came a yell from further down the hall.
Just a few steps away, inside a labor and delivery room in Santa Monica, my wife Hillary was nine hours into the birth of our first child.
How can they be thinking about food?, I raged. Life is hanging in the balance!
My wife had no reaction to their banter. Her eyes were closed. She was deep in some sort of supernatural experience into which I had not been invited.
Like everything my wife does, she was not messing around. Six months earlier, she weighed the options and decided she would be having a natural childbirth. Doing this would require both of us attending a class on something called the Bradley Method. She pulled up an online list of all the Bradley Method classes taught across Los Angeles.
I scrolled through the dates, times, and places and picked one. “This one looks perfect,” I said.
“That one is only four weeks,” she said.
“Right,” I said, happy that she had also noticed what made it the correct pick.
“Don’t you love our child?” was her follow up.
Thus began a negotiation that ended with us picking a 6-week course versus Hillary’s preferred 8-weeks.
On the first night of class, we drove to an apartment building in mid-city and brought a yoga mat, a water bottle, and our Bradley Method book. We rode up the elevator to a random apartment and met our instructor, a single mom in her 30s who doubled as a doula for an extra fee.
Two by two the other couples showed up. A smattering of granola types in crocheted sweaters and Teva sandals. We started by watching a VHS tape from the late 1980s of women having babies. Some were in bathtubs. Some were in inflatable kiddie pools in their living rooms, surrounded by way too onlookers, making me wonder if the birth had coincided with a Super Bowl party and someone figured this would make for a good halftime show.
An oddly high percentage of the women were Russian and were giving birth in what looked to be the shallow, rocky shores of the Caspian Sea. The cinematic advantage to this was that cameras could film underwater and capture the terrifying moment a baby is born and realizes it has to learn not only how to breathe on its own, but also how to swim.
Believe it or not, that wasn’t the strangest part. What took the cake was that most of the fathers in the video were also naked. The video’s hippie narrator gave no explanation as to why and when I looked at Hillary for an answer, she said, “I have no idea and don’t ask.”
Once the group was sufficiently scarred, we gathered with our instructor in a circle on the floor, then went around, one at a time, and said how we were feeling. My honest answer was, “I hate this.” Instead I went with the safer, “Excited and nervous.”
I don’t remember much about the next five weeks. But I do know I read the entire Bradley Method book. And I remember that my wife and I practiced our distinct roles until it became second nature. I also noticed that near the end of the class, a few couples were MIA because they had their babies and when we asked to hear their triumphant natural birth stories, our instructor dodged the question which should have been a red flag.
Nevertheless, when our baby’s due date arrived in early December, we were ready. Four days later, Hillary’s water broke while watching Survivor and we were off to the hospital. I had my laminated sheet of instructions, my iPod with a pre-made playlist, and my dog-eared Bradley Method book in case I needed a last-minute refresher.
Electing to keep my clothes on, I dimmed the lights and waited. When the first strong contraction arrived, I positioned myself near my wife’s shoulders, giving words of encouragement just as we had practiced in our 6-week course.
“Stop talking,” she said.
Oh. Fine. Not a problem.
When the second contraction came, I stayed silent and gently put my hand on her shoulder to let her know I was there.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
Hmm. According to my laminated sheet, “words of encouragement” and “soothing touches” were approximately 98% of my job.
I retreated to the stiff leather chair in the corner with my phone and got busy with one of my secondary duties: “communicate with family and friends.”
“I can hear you typing,” Hillary said.
I put down the phone and sat still until I started to get hungry. Thankfully, we had packed some Saltines and I helped myself to a few.
“Please stop eating,” she said.
We were less than an hour in and despite all my preparation, my role in what my laminated chart called “active labor” had been reduced to me sitting alone in the dark not making any noise.
As I did, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was what happened to those other couples in our class. Had they arrived at their hospitals or bathtubs or kiddie pools with the same lofty goals that we had, only to hit a wall of pain and trash their laminated cheat sheets in favor of that oh-so-sweet epidural?
Meanwhile, Hillary soldiered on. Every fifteen minutes, she would change positions or walk in circles or sit on the giant rubber ball I had brought from home. Steadily, the contractions grew stronger and she moaned louder until the they were so consuming she stopped getting out of bed at all. Eventually, she just lay there, her eyes closed, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth over and over and over and over and over until the blackout window shade started to glow with light from the morning sun.
I wish I could say at the time that I knew I was witnessing greatness. But looking back on it with the perspective of twenty years, that’s undoubtedly what it was. The woman was running a marathon without moving a muscle. She was Tiger Woods navigating Augusta National. Gary Kasparov taking on IBM’s Deep Blue. Back at that nurse’s station, they were watching the clock and her contractions on the monitor, expecting Hillary to hit the help button and finally beg for the good stuff.
Ten hours into active labor—shortly after the tostadas arrived—my wife opened her eyes and searched for me in the dark. I jumped up from my silent corner and moved to the bed. For the first time since she went into active labor, her eyes filled with fear. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she said.
Hearing this, my face lit up with excitement. *I don’t know if I can do this* is exactly what my laminated chart said a woman would say when she was about to give birth! And because of that, I knew just how to respond. “Yes you can! You are so close!”
Did I know for sure she was close? No. This was not the Caspian Sea and there were no cameras down there to tell me. But I took a leap of faith, figuring that if a bunch of naked husbands from the 1980s believed in their wives’ ability to have a baby naturally, then I could too.
I summoned a nurse, and after finishing her burrito, she came in to check Hillary’s progress. To our delight, my wife was fully dilated and 100% effaced. (See, I did read the book). It was time to push.
Our happy OB, who had been keeping tabs on us from afar, arrived with a smile on her face and—at last—gave me something meaningful to do. “Dad, hold a leg.” Five or six hard pushes later, our first child was born. It was a boy. I’ll never forget our doctor squealing with laughter as she held him in her arms and the 50-something nurse looking at Hillary in wonder and saying, “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
All of us have unique talents. Usually they reveal themselves slowly over time, forged in fire. But occasionally the heavens really do open up and a gift lands on us that we never knew we had. This was one of those times.
We never heard if anyone else in that Bradley Method class managed to have a natural childbirth or not. It doesn’t really matter. The truth is that pain is real and complications happen and modern medicine exists for a good reason. In fact, a few years later my wife would spend six weeks on hospital bed rest saying yes to every intervention possible to hold off the premature birth of our third child.
But that first time, on the day my wife became a mother, I was able to witness something divine. As tends to be the case, I just needed to step back, be quiet, and put down my phone to see it.
You can also LISTEN to Silver Cord Stories on my new podcast.