I Don’t Like Poop on my Balls
An Alternative Birth Story
The dog has decided it’s his responsible to protect this baby
One of my favorite quotes comes from the great orator Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan until they’re punched in the mouth.” Well, I do not think there’s a better metaphor for becoming a new parent. All the careful planning just goes out the window, and it turns into pure instinct of doing whatever it takes to keep a mini-human alive while also maintaining your own sanity. Jake and I set out to make this blog with the whole premise that we’re just a couple of morons who figure out how to be dads as time goes along. At the time of planning, I was just an expecting dad, but now twenty days into fatherhood, I realize how apt this is for me. And you know what? I don’t think I’d have it any other way. Indulge me dear reader and allow me to tell you the beginnings of how I got to this point.
My wife and I had our ideal birth experience envisioned for months: completely natural. We made sure to hire a doula who would coach us through the process leading up to the birth, as well as be there as our main support during labor and birth. All that careful planning came crashing to a halt when our little Ellie decided she had our own plan. We discovered at our 36-week checkup that the baby was “in breech,” which for all of you ignorant future fathers out there: this means she was sitting upright, which is a bad thing (apparently, they’re supposed to be upside down – who knew?).
OK, we thought, we can fix this and still have our perfect, magical natural birth! Let’s try to get the baby to flip – and if I didn’t see any warning signs during pregnancy before this point, this is the moment where I started to learn that EVERYBODY has an opinion on EVERYTHING when it comes to babies, and very rarely do you find two opinions that are actually the same. We tried everything from the hippy-dippy naturopathic BS like Moxibustion (men, this is where you light incense and hold it next to your pregnant partner’s pinky toe and expect it to magically cause the baby to rotate) to the medical procedure where the doctor literally tries to push the baby to flip. Needless to say, Ellie is just as stubborn as her mom and decided she wasn’t going anywhere. So, we came to the realization that we’re going to have to schedule a C-Section. Our perfect birth experience has been completely tossed aside, and that doula we paid for will now make for a fantastic iPhone photographer and mother-texter – neat!
As you may have guessed at this point, my wife and I really like to plan – it comes with the territory of me doing it for a living and her being mildly neurotic. Thus, it was pretty great for us to know exactly when our baby girl would be born, when it was time to pack up and leave for the hospital. So imagine my dismay when on delivery day, we’re seconds from walking out of the house to go meet our baby girl when my wife receives a call that went something like this:
Wife: “Hello?
Midwife from the hospital: “Derp derp derp, are you supposed to be having a C-Section today? Derp, derp, derp”
Wife: “Um yeah, our baby is scheduled to be born in a couple of hours. This was your idea after all”
Midwife from the hospital: “Derp derp derp, well looks like someone canceled your surgery. Why don’t you just stand-by while we look for staff to attend the C-Section.”
At this point, there are so many thoughts going through my head, mostly about how I can’t wait to find out exactly who is responsible for this royal eff-up, so that I can write them a very strongly worded letter, but I’m pretty sure that nobody could say it better than Jake did at the time: "You can cancel a lot of things last minute...maybe a tee time because your back aches or a scheduled massage because your dog is sick...but cancel a C-Section?? You can't just cancel the first day of someone's life and not communicate that effectively to those who are concerned. Do you think you are God? You're so important you thought it would be no big deal to cancel the literal creation of a new human into the world???" Words of a modern-day poet right there.
For about 45 minutes, we sat on our couch and waited. You could cut the tension with a butter knife, which is absolutely not the mindset in which you want a pregnant lady who is hours from major surgery to be. Thankfully, the hospital was able to rectify their disastrous mistake and we were on our way, only about an hour late. From there, it was relatively uneventful, apart from the doctors and medical staff cutting my wife open, pulling our baby girl out, and then us just hanging out as a family for half an hour while they finished the surgery. Despite its resemblance to a scene from an Alien movie, that moment where little Ellie is born was probably the happiest of my life. The doctor held her up to a screen still attached for us to look at her, before taking her to the warmer to clean her and let me cut the cord. I think there’s a reason that it’s called the “miracle of life:” it truly is a miracle seeing your spawn for the first time. Please note: this hour in the OR is where the majority of our money for the doula went: taking pictures and texting the parents that everyone was safe, so we didn’t have to. In hindsight, that one hurt the wallet.
Once out of the operating room, we spent the next two days in the hospital trying to navigate life with a new human while my wife healed. Guess what? Newborns are needy. Like really needy. I feel like this fact is amplified when as the idiot dad you’re responsible for everything except feeding. However, I read a lot of new dad material, I had been training for this very moment for months. The time came for that first diaper change, and I was ready. (Side note before I continue: not only are Jake and I idiots, but we also have insanely inflated confidence levels). I’m mentally prepared to absolutely crush this diaper change like no father before me has. So when the nurse condescendingly says to me, “Now remember Dad, since she’s a baby girl, wipe front to back.” my mental wasn’t the reasonable, “Great, thanks for the advice!” Nope. The thought that went through my head was, “Bless your heart, just because I’m a man, do you think I wipe back to front? Absolutely not, I don’t like poop on my balls!” (Aside #2 for this story: Poop is not the word I actually used, but we’ve decided this is going to be a PG blog, while our true Dad-Thoughts are probably closer to R-rated. Luckily, we edit each other). At any rate, I did crush that diaper change, and wisely kept that thought to myself and just smiled and said, “thank you.”
Finally, because we knew the date of our C-Section, we knew that we’d be in the hospital over New Year’s Eve. In what seemed like a genius idea at the time, we decided we’d sneak in a mini-bottle of champagne in our cooler (as well as a bottle of sparkling cider we gave the nurses). Our logic was that we’d be able to ring in the new year with some semblance of normalcy in a completely un-normal circumstance, while my wife would be able to have the bubbles she’d been craving for 9 months of sobriety. What we didn’t account for was how exhausted we’d be, and how wonky our sleep schedules would be for those first few nights. I’m pretty sure I fell asleep on the hospital couch “bed” they designate for the fathers around 9pm (which, by the way, WTF is that? Is there some sick policy that all new fathers should experience potentially throwing out their backs upon arrival of their new baby?). I woke up about 10 minutes before midnight, completely groggy, in a bad mood, whatever you want to call it. I tasted that champers and was pretty much grossed out by its lukewarm temp, watched the ball drop and the most 2020 New Year celebration of mediocrity, and passed right back out. Only to wake up about an hour later to take my next shift with the baby.
That next morning, we were finally able to take our beautiful baby home and let me just say – I was slightly terrified, while completely anxious to go at the same time. Leaving the hospital meant the comfort of our own home, but it also meant we didn’t have the nurses helping us with the baby. Well, once we made it home, it did not take long for me to realize that my terror was unnecessary – being at home is about 10000% better than being in the sterile hospital, where someone comes in to check on you approximately every 12 seconds. I had actually set out to write this post as a recap of the first 20 days, but I’ll leave this as a “To Be Continued,” as I had a lot more to say about our actual birth than I expected. Everything from this point of the story onward is my adventures in new dadhood.
The overall lesson learned from our birth experience is pretty easy and will be an ongoing theme for my next few posts: “Everybody has a plan until they’re punched in the mouth.” No matter how much and how hard you plan, it seems to be that the baby is going to have his or her own plan. Therefore, I’m just trying to go with the flow and enjoy every minute of my time with the little nugget.
