Don’t pass out—
you’ll never live it down
A first-time dad takes steps to make sure witnessing his child’s birth
doesn’t turn him into a big baby Essay and photos by Ryan Marshall
In these last days of my wife’s pregnancy, I’ve become
a kind of monk of maternity. My wife and I are preparing for a home birth, and as much as that carries its own
unique set of worries and fears, I’ve come to embrace the
idea that a pregnancy—whether it involves a casual cruise
to the hospital for a planned C-section or the semantics of
squatting, moaning, and pushing—always ends with a baby
dripping wet with mucus, covered with blood, and having
more wrinkles than a walnut. As a man, my job will be to
help coax this squirming little life from its mother’s gooey
insides; hold the bloody, quivering nugget in my hands; and
transport it into my wife’s arms without turning white, barf-ing, and dropping the child to the floor like a hot potato.
For the early part of our pregnancy, I wondered how the
hell a guy is supposed to keep it together when he witnesses
things like“discharge” for the first time. Then it came to me:
by desensitizing himself, because it’s better to privately wilt
to the gore and build a tolerance to it, then blurt out with
shock and fright “What is that thing?!”
