Spain Dad, a baby blog

This post is part of a series telling Teo’s birth story. Click here to start at the beginning.

I went downstairs to check April into the hospital, and when I got back to the delivery room, I found the doctor and the midwives chatting on the couches in the small waiting room outside. I felt like I had walked into a break room where even the doctor was just another woman sitting on a couch with her feet up.

They didn’t notice me at first, but eventually one of them got up, hushed up everyone, and explained to me that April had requested to be left alone to take a nap, but that she wanted me to be in the room with her.

The nurse showed me into the room, and I sat down in one of the two stackable chairs sitting along the wall. The room was quiet and gray, and April lay on the hospital bed with her back to me. She looked like a statue on display in a museum: her body the focal point of the room, a representation of this moment cut into stone.

I had some time to think since I was trying to be quiet and I hadn’t remembered to bring anything along with me, not that a book would have done me much good in the dim light, and so, for the first time that night, I thought about what was happening to us.

I was embarrassed, actually, to be here. Everything felt too mellow. We couldn’t actually be having a baby if April was taking a nap, and I was bored. A birth was surely more adventurous than this. It wasn’t so much that I was worried they would send us home, as much as I felt out of place in a delivery room on what seemed like an ordinary day to me. Today was so unimportant, in fact, that I didn’t even know the date. Was it the 14th or the 15th? If we were going to have a baby, the least I could do was know what day it was, I thought.

I sighed, leaned back in my chair, and closed my eyes. April was right to take a nap. If we were going to have a baby tonight, this was the last normal moment we would have for a while. I might as well enjoy it while lasted.

CONTINUE READING TEO’S BIRTH STORY: “I don’t think I knew what a “natural birth” was until it was almost over with…”