Then There Were Three
       
        My wife, Deborah, decided early on that she wanted to give birth at home.  To be honest, I had no idea you could choose not to give birth at a hospital.   I imagined bedrooms and rear-seats strictly as unintentional places to do the job.  My wife, who comparatively has a stronger grasp on reality, knew quite a bit about midwifery and the art of natural childbirth.  Although unfamiliar to me, I quickly latched onto the idea.  The first thing that appealed to me was this: natural childbirth inherently challenges institutional norms, and I really get a kick out of that.  Secondly, and slightly more important, it was what my wife wanted.  Knowing we weren’t going to let the blokes at the infirmary take care of the labor, we decided to put more time into educating and readying ourselves.  In hindsight, our preparation didn’t truly show us what to expect.  Birthing a child is such a surprising and inimitable experience that books, statistics and exercises are mostly like shaking a well stuffed Christmas present.  However, they still served a vital function: mentally and emotionally counteracting all the stagy implausibilities you hear from people almost daily.                               
           You see, most everyone who sees a pregnant belly, that unmistakable bulbous protrusion, will feel the need to say something to its owner.  While typically flattering and nice, the unsolicited comments almost always run short of being useful.  That is, they consist of predictions and opinions that belong squarely in the category of wives tales.  Boy or girl, premature or late, fat or thin, tall or short.  Apparently, just about everything there is to know about a human being in utero is evident from the look of the mother’s unexamined, clothed, pregnant mid-section.  And since giving birth is a fairly common thing, everyone has a story to tell.  And they do.  Without hesitation.  They usually deal with emergency procedures, rare conditions, unholy sums of money, tearing, screaming, and pretty much everything else theatrical enough to give you the sudden urge for a bucket of popcorn and some Bon-Bons. 
           Even though I put a lot of effort into flushing my mind of those distractions, it was still a challenge to face my wife’s labor completely without nettling expectations.  Labor is an act of creation through facilitation, not something a woman is merely subject to.  Right?  I wondered whether I was naive for hoping everything would happen in an idyllic way, at home and completely unmedicated.  Perhaps there really was a reason hospitalized labors are the standard in our culture, and bringing a child into the world really is a dangerous and unnatural thing, like cliff jumping or snorkeling with sharks.  In the end – and this is the great thing about pregnancy – come hell or high water, my questions were going to be answered.      
           At two-thirty on a Tuesday morning, Deborah woke me up complaining of really bad cramps.  Bright red alerts went off in my head.  Obviously, a full-term woman complaining of cramps sounds suspiciously like “I’m gonna have a baby.”  I offered my sympathies and snuck a look at the clock.  When she complained exactly two minutes later and did not stop for a full minute, only to complain exactly two minutes from then, I thought I should give up the idea of going back to bed.  Once I decided that these “bad cramps” were indeed contractions, I scrambled through all the memories I had of pregnancy books and what they said about the “significant other” at this point.  What was it?  Ah, wait four to five hours before calling the midwife or doctor to let the woman ease into her labor from the comfort of home.  Ease into it?  It had been ten minutes and my wife could hardly stand and the contractions were falling on top of each other.  On a bit more than a hunch, I immediately called our midwife.
         This not-so-gentle introduction to the world of contractions was not our first big surprise.  Several weeks before Deborah’s due-date, our midwife went under open-heart surgery.  At that point, our only options were to go to the hospital or the local birthing center, which was operated by certified midwives.  The choice was clear, even though it meant leaving the comfort of home and, obviously, allowing a less familiar woman to catch our baby.