Looking Back at Becoming a Father: ... Labor

Written One Month Ago: 

My daughter Alejandra is 5 months old plus a few days. I thought this would be a good time to reflect back on the experience of her arrival. In reality, this is pretty much about how time has flown by since I had a moment to sit and reflect, let alone try and write it down.

Thinking of how things are not 'quite as seen on TV'...let me start with the 'Labor' portion of the experience. This is a term that often gets thrown around to describe the process of childbirth. Now, before you experience it (from the Dad perspective, for purposes of this blog; Ladies, there are ample descriptions of your experiences out there), you hear the term, you associate it with other 'labor' terms such as mowing the lawn, washing the car, laying bricks, you know.. 'labor... stuff that requires work and involves using your hands. All I can say is that it certainly requires work... but not so much on the Dad's part. Labor on TV lasts a few seconds, and culminates with a baby sliding out into the world, every now and then the mother screams a few expletives and the never-gets-old line of "you did this to me!"

Let me share how it went down for me:

Apparently, there are various types of 'labor pains' that a woman can experience. My wife had what we determined to be 'back labor'. This means, that in addition to the feeling of trying to hold back the world's largest bowel movement, your back spasms as if you were hit from the back by an NFL defensive back as you left your feet to make a grab for a high post-route pass.

I say the following with utmost sincerity and admiration: To the ladies who undergo this experience without any medication or 'au-natural': my hat is off to you, and you are indeed the stronger sex and deserving of some sort of medal or public recognition for your valor and strength.

Back to my experience: My wife, the 'back labor' and how we made it to the hospital. 

Alejandra missed her 'due date' by about 10 days. Since then, my wife was walking, jogging, eating (insert labor inducing food here) at every meal, etc... As this is our first child, we really had no idea what we were 'looking for'. On a Wednesday morning around 4am, my wife shared the news with me that she was feeling some contractions. Gentlemen, 'contractions', are involuntary spasms of your abdomen, and all I can relate them to, is when you have the dry heaves after a heavy night of partying when you really shouldn't have taken the extra shots of whiskey at 3am. I digress.... My job was to aid in the timing of these contractions and make sure we measured when they started, how long they lasted and the relative severity of them. (I did NONE of these...)

My wife is stoic, but she did let me know that she thought this may be 'it'... we did what we thought was 'normal', packed the car, loaded up the bags, and of course stopped by the neighborhood grocer for few sandwiches since we all know hospital food sucks. While waiting to check out, my wife was having trouble standing up straight, from the contractions... this apparently caused some people to comment "are you having a baby"... umm... well 'yes, we are.. hopefully in a few hours'. This is what I consider the BEGINNING of labor.

     - Alejandra's Dad