Dear Spike:
Every Tuesday and Thursday for the next few weeks, your mother and I will be sitting in a conference room at the hospital with a dozen other sets of expectant parents for “birthing class.”
Dr. Stewart recommended we do this. And it seemed to make sense that we should try it out. After all, we’ve never given birth.
OK, OK... I know we’re raising a feminist, so to be more precise, your MOTHER has never given birth. I’ve never sat, like a useless buffoon, on the side of a hospital gurney as someone else has given birth.
In any case, we take classes before doing all kinds of dangerous things. Before I was allowed to drive, I had to take a class. Before I was allowed to jump out of a perfectly good airplane, I had to take a class. And heck, back when I was in Navy boot camp I had to take a class before I was even allowed to fold my own uniforms.
So it stands to reason that, before I’m allowed to be a father — and with all the potential for screwing up your life that implies — I should have to take a class.
Of course, that’s not the case. As it turns out, the only real requirement for becoming a father is to have a single viable sperm floating around in your testes and somewhere to put it. There are no classes required and, alas, there is no IQ test.
Still, when you decide to make that slow, painful dive out of your mothers’ womb, I want to be the best useless buffoon possible. So I figured the class was a good idea.
Three minutes into the first session, I wasn’t so sure.
Here’s how it went: We all walked in, carrying pillows as instructed, then sitting around and making small talk...
“When are you due? Oh really? That’s just a few days after us! What are you having? A baby? Wow, us too!”
And then the instructor came in and had us introduce ourselves...
“Moms, I want you to tell me about what you love most about being pregnant. And dads, I want you to tell me about what you hate the most about this experience.”
Hate the most? Hello! Total set up.
To our collective credit, most of the dads successfully dodged the question, although one poor sucker took the bait ...
“Um, I don’t really like all the mood swings.”
He wasn’t at the second class. His wife is currently being held at the Salt Lake County Jail on charges of manslaughter and defacement of a corpse.
The rest of the first class seemed to go more smoothly, though it ended with a rather awkward “visualization” exercise, kind of a semi-hypnotic activity where we all spread out on the conference room’s industrial carpet and the instructor took us on a hike through our minds...
“You’re in a forrest, and there’s a stream of cool water, and up on the treetops there’s a little squirrel....”
In the right conditions — like a yoga class with a bunch of open-minded, granola-ly people vegging out on comfy yoga mats after a hard work-out — this might work.
But not with a dozen uncomfortable pregnant women and an equal number of goofy dads lying in various states of discomfort on a quarter-inch of carpeting over a slab of cold concrete in a hospital conference room with the smell of cafeteria food wafting in from just next door while a janitor in the next conference room over keeps bumping the wall with a noisy vacuum cleaner and with the hospital intercom periodically interrupting our walk through the mental mountains as a steady stream of gabbering hospital employees walk by the open conference room door on their way out to get a smoke.
The second session was better. For one thing, there were no silly visualization exercises. Instead, we practiced various positions, stretches and massages that will supposedly make labor more bearable for the mothers in our group. And the only dads that got hung this time around were the ones that hung themselves (like the guy who suggested, rather confidently, that we hold a contest to see which mother has the worst stretch marks.)
In retrospect, the driver’s education class I took when I was 15 was kind of useless. I learned to drive from my parents and my older sister. And it was several years and several hundreds of dollars in speeding tickets later before I felt like I really had the hang of it.
And sure, they told me everything I needed to know about skydiving during the pre-jump class. But that all pretty much blew out the door about the same time I jumped.
So I’m pretty sure that I’m still going to be a useless buffoon when the time comes to put all this birthing class stuff into practice.
But in the meantime, I’m visualizing...
I’m in a hospital room. Your mother is screaming. The doctor is trying to get her to push.
And up on the treetops there’s a little squirrel....”
Love,
dad
Every Tuesday and Thursday for the next few weeks, your mother and I will be sitting in a conference room at the hospital with a dozen other sets of expectant parents for “birthing class.”
Dr. Stewart recommended we do this. And it seemed to make sense that we should try it out. After all, we’ve never given birth.
OK, OK... I know we’re raising a feminist, so to be more precise, your MOTHER has never given birth. I’ve never sat, like a useless buffoon, on the side of a hospital gurney as someone else has given birth.
In any case, we take classes before doing all kinds of dangerous things. Before I was allowed to drive, I had to take a class. Before I was allowed to jump out of a perfectly good airplane, I had to take a class. And heck, back when I was in Navy boot camp I had to take a class before I was even allowed to fold my own uniforms.
So it stands to reason that, before I’m allowed to be a father — and with all the potential for screwing up your life that implies — I should have to take a class.
Of course, that’s not the case. As it turns out, the only real requirement for becoming a father is to have a single viable sperm floating around in your testes and somewhere to put it. There are no classes required and, alas, there is no IQ test.
Still, when you decide to make that slow, painful dive out of your mothers’ womb, I want to be the best useless buffoon possible. So I figured the class was a good idea.
Three minutes into the first session, I wasn’t so sure.
Here’s how it went: We all walked in, carrying pillows as instructed, then sitting around and making small talk...
“When are you due? Oh really? That’s just a few days after us! What are you having? A baby? Wow, us too!”
And then the instructor came in and had us introduce ourselves...
“Moms, I want you to tell me about what you love most about being pregnant. And dads, I want you to tell me about what you hate the most about this experience.”
Hate the most? Hello! Total set up.
To our collective credit, most of the dads successfully dodged the question, although one poor sucker took the bait ...
“Um, I don’t really like all the mood swings.”
He wasn’t at the second class. His wife is currently being held at the Salt Lake County Jail on charges of manslaughter and defacement of a corpse.
The rest of the first class seemed to go more smoothly, though it ended with a rather awkward “visualization” exercise, kind of a semi-hypnotic activity where we all spread out on the conference room’s industrial carpet and the instructor took us on a hike through our minds...
“You’re in a forrest, and there’s a stream of cool water, and up on the treetops there’s a little squirrel....”
In the right conditions — like a yoga class with a bunch of open-minded, granola-ly people vegging out on comfy yoga mats after a hard work-out — this might work.
But not with a dozen uncomfortable pregnant women and an equal number of goofy dads lying in various states of discomfort on a quarter-inch of carpeting over a slab of cold concrete in a hospital conference room with the smell of cafeteria food wafting in from just next door while a janitor in the next conference room over keeps bumping the wall with a noisy vacuum cleaner and with the hospital intercom periodically interrupting our walk through the mental mountains as a steady stream of gabbering hospital employees walk by the open conference room door on their way out to get a smoke.
The second session was better. For one thing, there were no silly visualization exercises. Instead, we practiced various positions, stretches and massages that will supposedly make labor more bearable for the mothers in our group. And the only dads that got hung this time around were the ones that hung themselves (like the guy who suggested, rather confidently, that we hold a contest to see which mother has the worst stretch marks.)
In retrospect, the driver’s education class I took when I was 15 was kind of useless. I learned to drive from my parents and my older sister. And it was several years and several hundreds of dollars in speeding tickets later before I felt like I really had the hang of it.
And sure, they told me everything I needed to know about skydiving during the pre-jump class. But that all pretty much blew out the door about the same time I jumped.
So I’m pretty sure that I’m still going to be a useless buffoon when the time comes to put all this birthing class stuff into practice.
But in the meantime, I’m visualizing...
I’m in a hospital room. Your mother is screaming. The doctor is trying to get her to push.
And up on the treetops there’s a little squirrel....”
Love,
dad
3 comments:
All in all, we found our childbirth class to be pretty useless as well. Bookworm that I am, even the teacher was impressed by my body of knowledge on pregnancy, so that info was of no use to us. I ended up with a c-section, so all the breathing exercises were for naught.
However, the one cool thing about the class was commiserating with other couples who were embarking on the same journey. On a side note, all the moms in our class ended up in the hospital at the same time, three of them with the same birthday.
Sorry, tired mommy speaking. Our BABIES ended up with the same birthday. Oy.
I really enjoyed this account. (Compare stretch marks??)
Post a Comment