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 don’t think I knew what a “natural birth” was until it was almost over with. In terms I suppose only a man would use, a natural birth meant that the doctors and midwives left us alone to have the baby until we needed them.

The delivery room had machines on carts for furniture, and the existence of these machines suggested to me that we would need them to have the baby, and logically, we would also need an expert who knew how to use them to get the baby out.

I was surprised, then, to find the two of us alone in the bathroom. I was sitting next to the tub while April soaked in a bubble bath. During contractions April winced and yelped, and I held down her legs like the butterfly stretch because she asked me to, and it was extreme, but between contractions, she would slide down into the water and close her eyes, and it was like she had gone to another place.

I don’t think either of us took laboring in the bubble bath very seriously because when one of the midwives cracked the door, watched April for a while, and then said, “The baby could come at any moment. She can start pushing if she wants,” we didn’t believe her. April screamed and cried and said, “Is she telling the truth, or is she just trying to get me to keep going?” Not that April hadn’t worked hard enough, but it was just the two of us in a bathroom without anyone else around. We were amateurs. How could we have gotten this far by ourselves?

The midwives and the doctor piled into the bathroom with us, and a few minutes later the doctor lifted the baby out of the water. April sat at the edge of the tub shivering, propped up against the wall and clutching a pile of towels with a little purple creature inside nuzzled under her chin. “Shhh…shhh…shhh…,” April whispered. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

I had no idea having a baby could be so unsophisticated. The simplicity of it all was beautiful.

Come back soon for more of the story…