At all costs, you must not panic. Stay calm. A good way to do this is to play word games, such as the one where you start with a letter, and then the other person adds a letter, and so on, the idea being that you are spelling an actual word, but you don’t want to supply the last letter. For extra fun, you can say that the loser has to get out and run around the car backwards three times at a red light. Besides livening up the game, this will attract the attention of the police, who might help deliver your baby in a gruff but kindly manner, the way they do in anecdotes from Reader’s Digest. Or they might beat you with clubs.
Three Problems That Could Prevent You from Getting to the Hospital in Time
1. Your car radio could explode for no apparent reason.
2. You could be stopped by police who are looking for escaped radicals, and who think your wife’s stomach is a bomb and call in the Explosives Disposal Unit to cover her with sand.
3. You could get stuck behind a member of the Elderly People with Enormous Cars Club, driving smack dab in the middle of the road at two miles an hour in search of an all-night drugstore to buy new batteries for his hearing aid, so he can’t hear you honk.
What Will Happen to You If You Get to the Hospital
At the maternity ward, you will be greeted by kindly nurses who will do a number of unspeakably degrading things to you while the hospital operator tries to wake up your obstetrician. Then you will be placed in a little room where your husband can sit with his little clipboard and stopwatch and time your contractions, just like you learned in childbirth class, until you swat his goddamn clipboard and stopwatch across the room and demand to be killed, which is the sign that you have gone from “contractions” to “strong contractions.”
At this time, you will be taken to the delivery room, where you will be placed in the Standard Childbirth Position. Medical researchers have tried for decades to come up with a childbirth position even more humiliating than this one, but they have had no success.
While you’re in this delicate position in the delivery room, you may be a bit embarrassed, especially since there are people standing around wearing masks and watching you. So let me explain who these people are. You have your obstetrician, of course, unless the hospital operator has been unable to rouse him, in which case he will actually be a life-size obstetrician puppet operated from behind by a nurse trained to mimic obstetricians’ voices. You also have your husband, assuming he has been able to wash away the little crumbled bits of steering wheel embedded in his hands.
Then you have your pediatrician, and an anesthesiologist to stand by in case the doctors decide that the delivery is not costing enough. Also you have at least one nurse to assist each of these doctors; you have three medical students; you have one law student; and you have Billy Ray Johnson, who is actually a retired beet farmer who just happens to like hanging around delivery rooms and watch people have babies.
So that’s it, just 12 of you, unless Billy Ray has brought friends to share this wondrous moment.
The Big Moment
And what is it like? That, of course, is what you want to know: What is it really like?
I don’t have the vaguest idea, of course. But I do remember what it sounded like when my wife had our son. I was at one end of my wife, shouting words of encouragement to her head, the doctor and nurse were shouting to the other end of her body. It sounded like a group of extremely sincere people trying to help an elephant dislodge a Volkswagen from its throat:
DOCTOR: You’re doing just great, Beth! Just great! Really! Isn’t she doing great?
NURSE: She sure is! She’s doing just great!
ME: You’re really doing great, honey! Really!
BETH: AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRUU UUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG GHHHHHHHHHHH.
DOCTOR: That was just great! Really!
And so on, for quite a while, until finally Robert came out, and immediately demanded to be put back in. My wife and I were very happy. I remember hugging her head.
What to Do Immediately after Birth
Close your eyes tightly. This is in case the doctor takes it into his head to show you the placenta, which is a highly unattractive object that comes out close on the heels of the baby. In the old days, when people were decent, the placenta was disposed of quickly and quietly and was never talked about in polite society. But now people bandy it about openly in public, as if it were a prize-winning bass.
Bonding
While the obstetrician is finishing up, the pediatrician will wrap your baby in a blanket and hand it to you so that you can marvel at the miracle of birth and everything. My only warning here is that you should not hold your baby too long, or you will become “bonded” to it and have to be tugged apart by burly hospital aides.
Chapter 6
THE HOSPITAL STAY
A Reassuring Word for First-Time Parents About Hospital Baby-Identification Procedures
A common fear among new parents is that, as a result of a mix-up in the nursery, some kind of terrible mistake will be made, such as that they’ll wind up taking home Yasser Arafat’s baby. This fear is groundless. When a baby is born, a hospital person immediately puts a little plastic tag around its wrist with the words “NOT YASSER ARAFAT’S BABY” printed on it in indelible ink. So whichever baby you wind up with, you can be sure it isn’t his.
Visitors in the Hospital
Maternity ward visitors are an excellent source of amusement, because they always feel obligated to say flattering things about newborn babies, which of course look like enormous fruit fly larvae. One fun trick is to show your visitors somebody else’s baby. “She definitely has your eyes!” your visitors will exclaim. For real entertainment,
