On (the Time that You Wait Before) Becoming a Father
Okay, so, where were we? Oh? It’s been a couple of weeks since I updated this little blog? Haha, well funny story there, would be reader - my wife and I just welcomed a little baby to this big, wide world full of tragedy (and hope and joy and so many things).
What’s that? You’re asking why I started this blog with the intent of writing every day when I knew full well that our baby would come this year and I’d be naturally interrupted in that goal? Haha, dear reader, you’re such a kidder. Of course I launched this blog with those intended goals. Because of the W A I T I N G.
While being a father is new to me, probably too new to write about, the absolute agony of those few but very long days that took place before the event are in the very distant rear view window of the car three cars behind us on the road of life. So that’s what we’re going to dive into in this little episode of Recursive Thoughts. That and maybe some of what it’s like to be in a hospital for five days straight for the first time and not be a patient. There’s room for all things in the articles of repeated thought.
Scheduled Delivery
Here’s a fun fact, our daughter was delivered at 41 weeks into pregnancy. Here’s another fun fact, our doctor thought that our daughter was going to be over 9 lbs at birth. Put those two fun facts together and you get some very not so fun thoughts. The heavier a baby is, the more likely there might be complications during delivery. The longer a baby cooks in the ole oven, the heavier a baby is likely to be. Babies predicted to be already quite heavy at 36 weeks should then be encouraged to come out at or before their due date to avoid those complications.
Because of all this, we elected to schedule an appointment to induce labor. Our doctor told us on a Tuesday, and I quote, “it would be smart to induce before your due date.” So we called to schedule an appointment to induce, following our doctor’s advice, only to find that the next available appointment would be Thursday of next week. We booked it.
Pictured: Me going to work before my daughter is born.
Que a montage of us going to work with the looming cloud of labor possibly hovering o’erhead for a full week. It literally feels like lightning could strike at any time and change the course of your entire life, not to mention your day. As a person who very much values a regulated schedule of activities per day (HA! dear read, HA! I say), this lingering threat of change did a number on my psyche and possibly my soul. But it was all alright - we had that scheduled appointment to induce in the books. An ending to suffering was on our calendar, we even had the exact time!
The aforementioned promised Thursday comes to be. I did not go to work that day, as it seemed like a perfect day for my leave to begin. This was the day, after all, and it seemed to be the day right up until 3:38 p.m. when the labor and delivery floor of the hospital called us to say that our appointment would not be honored. There were a lot of deliveries currently and they simply had no room for a non-emergency induction of labor. They would simply call us back when there was such room for a non-emergency induction of labor with a non-committal estimate that it could be later tonight or even tomorrow morning.
Welcome, dear reader, to the amplification of one’s personal purgatory. I wouldn’t call it hell - I’ve been through worse (OR WILL GO THROUGH WORSE, HA HA), so purgatory is a nice fit. For those unfamiliar, purgatory is a concept of some of the Judeo-Christian religions whereby the recently deceased who are in God’s graces but not cleansed of sins wait until their soul is perfected before moving into the gated community of Heaven. Some call it a waiting room. Some claim it lasts forever and is not a stop on the way to paradise. Some don’t think it exists at all and only really existed to push indulgences of a corrupt church.
Pictured: A hospital waiting room.
I don’t have the answer as to whether it exists in the afterlife, but I can vouch personally that waiting for a call from the hospital to let you know you can start moving toward your life forever changing is the equivalent of purgatory on earth.
I won’t linger here, in this earthly waiting room, so let’s just cut to the chase, to borrow a phrase. We didn’t get the call until 3:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. Go ahead, reread that. We waited three full days. And our last night of restful sleep was so rudely interrupted, but looking back, maybe that was for the best. Either way, there was a lot of time right before the event and not much to do. When your baby is 40 to 41 weeks cooking, you’ve completed all the preparations weeks ago. Nursery is ready. Supplies purchased and arranged in optimal spots. How then, do you fill the time?
A List of Made-Up “Waiting” Chores
Why, you create a list of new preparations and chores that once completed will surely signal to the universe that you’re ready for the baby’s arrival, of course. Let’s explore a list of this so called made up chores that filled the hours and days before the hospital called.
Clear off the back patio of every leaf, stick, and branch that fell during last night’s freak thunderstorm.
Charge the batteries to the leaf blower so that you can simply blow the storm debris away.
Begin blowing the storm debris away just to realize that you’re committing to bad habits and killing perfectly good grass by blowing the debris into your yard.
Blow the storm debris back onto the back patio so you can sweep it and put it into lawn bags instead.
Sweep the storm debris into lawn bags.
Forget to put the lawn bags out with the trash come trash day and now they’re sitting on your back patio as a reminder that you didn’t put them out.
Watch the lawn bags full of storm debris get wet in the rain because you forgot to put them out with the trash on trash day.
Vacuum a rug.
Finish playing The Last of Us Part II.
Write an article about finishing The Last of Part II for your silly blog.
100% Astro Bot on Playstation 5 for some reason.
Start Metaphor Re:Fantazi–Oh shit, they’re calling hold on.
We also taught my wife’s mother to play Everdell one evening, but that didn’t feel like a chore. Not that the list of video games felt like chores either. A strange breakdown happens around the third day of waiting for the hospital to call - there’s a shift in priority from “Okay, is everything 100% prepared” to “Well, if I start playing this video game, then surely they’ll call to interrupt.” You start bargaining with fate, tempting it to interrupt your good time with what you’ve been waiting for all along.
All the while, your wife is growing visibly more pregnant than you thought possible. Her discomfort grows. You start playing a fun game of, “Is she in pain?” and begin asking her what’s going on just for her to continually reassure you that nothing is going on.
There’s a fun game that all doctors and nurses who take care of pregnant people play where they don’t actually answer some of your questions. Our main question was, what does a contraction feel like? How will we know when my wife is experiencing one? And the ubiquitous answer was a resounding, “You’ll know when you feel one.” Which is a non-answer.
Pictured: A normal nurse.
There was a moment within all these chores where my wife thought she was experiencing contractions. She tracked what she thought were contractions on an app on her phone. They began increasing in frequency and the app suggested she head to the hospital because she might be in active labor. So we did what any logical people would do and called the hospital to find out if there was room for us now - it had been two days since we were told it might be later that night or even tomorrow morning.
What we met with was more of the non-answers, more of the unhelpful variety of help. The attending head nurse of the labor and delivery floor listened to my wife describe everything she was feeling, had been feeling for a while now, and about the app and the suggestion she might be in active labor. The nurse listened to all of this without a word and then said simply, “You failed the sweetness test. You’ve been way too nice to me, so there’s little chance you’re in active labor.” I quoted, but I’m paraphrasing, you get it.
So we were told to wait more, to keep track of these false contractions and this not-active labor for any changes, but we wouldn’t be heading to the hospital since there wasn’t any room for a non-emergency induction still. I started thinking of more chores to do while we waited.
Having Patience as a Non-Patient
Eventually, and it did come sooner than either of us thought, we did get the call to come to the labor and delivery floor for an induction - go time, as we called it. Go time was chill, it was 4 am on a Saturday morning, and everything felt a little unreal. My wife took a shower before we left. Things felt normal.
When we got to the hospital, I quietly transferred into my role as a non-patient. At first, there were questions aimed at the room that either of us could answer, but very quickly these questions narrowed down from the room to just my wife, justly so. There’s calmness there, in the being of a non-patient. No one ever wants to hear from you unless the patient is unable to answer for whatever reason. There’s freedom in just being there to watch and observe.
We spent five days in the hospital and in those five days, I went by a new name. Dad. Everyone knew my wife’s name - it was on her chart. It was written on a board in the room. My name was also written on that board, but my name was now Dad, a name only spoken when there was something to be done. Dad, you’ll be pushing her leg back when she pushes. Dad, you can count with us. You can come over here, Dad, to see the baby in the warming station.
We sold the rights to this story to Apple TV+ three years beyord it happened.
It makes sense, the simplification of my personage. Learning and remembering a name takes energy and effort that’s better put into focusing on Mom, on the patient. But there was an otherness to myself that I’m not sure how to describe. A beginning of the shedding of ego that I think most parents experience that enables us to take care of a child. None of this was about me in a way I hadn’t experienced in my entire life and it was my job to come to terms with this, accept it, and embody this role.
There’s little tasks that helped me in this endeavor. Dad got to learn where the hospitality room is, where to refill Mom’s water bottle or grab a juice or a snack real quick. Dad got to learn the in’s and out’s of ordering room service for Mom so she didn’t miss a meal. Dad learned how the remote worked and plugged the TV back in so that we could watch Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark over the course of four hours with commercials. These small steps help place your thoughts outside of yourself in a way that felt comforting or methodical.
Everything felt purposeful. It felt right. I’m not sure I’m doing a good job of explaining this or revealing that maybe I’ve lived my life a little more selfishly than I’d like to admit, but there was a transition from solely securing the survival of myself and my wife somewhere in that hospital stay because by the time the baby was born, I’d nary a thought in my head about myself. My wife had to remind me to go grab lunch most days. Or to refill my own water bottle.
And for reasons I still can’t explain, it all felt really, really good.
The End of the Self (and this Article)
As I’m writing this, it’s been about three weeks with our little one. That sentiment of being outside of oneself has continued in that time, but it’s normalized a bit. I’m no longer singularly focused on the wellbeing of my wife and child. I’ve found room for myself again, which is healthy, I think.
I now know why parents say that the time flies with their little ones, that you’ll blink and time will lurch forward. It’s because we spend so much energy, focus, and time waiting for the little one to arrive that when they’re here, and it can all begin, it feels like it rushes forward.
Let’s say you’re dining at a restaurant alongside the Mississippi River in New Orleans. You’re seated at a window overlooking the river and spend the time watching the various barges and boats float toward the Gulf of Mexico or chug their way up river. You’ve ordered your food, your drinks have arrived, and there’s not much to do but wait, so you watch these boats. They seem to trudge along, fighting against the current, and seem to barely make any progress. Then your food arrives and for a moment you forget the boats. You eat your food, talking as you, maybe you glance at the river, but you don’t give it much thought as there’s food here and life is good. You finish your meal. It was delicious. And in your satisfied state, you turn back toward the river and the boat is gone from view. It had continued fighting against that current the entire time you were eating, but you hadn’t noticed.
An average experience in NOLA.
This long winded metaphor is to say that time is always passing at the same rate, it’s just our attentions that vary. The time it took for us to receive the call to come to the hospital was the same 72 hours of any other chunk in our lives. It’s just the attention we gave it that made it feel slow. Likewise, the three weeks we’ve had with our baby are the same three weeks as any other time of our lives. Only it feels like it’s flying because we’re sleep deprived and on a strict feeding schedule to ensure our child grows at a healthy rate. But that’s a story for another time.
I guess if there’s a moral here or a something I’d like to impart, it’s that our attention to our perception of time is what shapes our memory of it, so if you’re in a place you’d like to remember and feel as though you’re in that time, take very close attention to what it feels like to be in that time. In that way, it will live on in you for much longer than if you just lived through it. Or something. This is bad. Okay, bye.
