#07 – Papacito's Birth Story
PAPACITO #07
WARNING
This one got pretty fucking long...
Even though this time we're looking at childbirth from the man's point of view, there was simply no way to squeeze this story into anything shorter.
And before anyone starts giving me shit about it, let me remind you that the alternative is arranging a coffee date with the girls weeks in advance just so you can spend hours going through centimeters, contractions, mucus plugs and, apparently, which member of the delivery room staff was lovely and which one was the biggest pain in the ass.
Papacito is only asking for a few minutes of your time — or 30.
30 minutes. Coffee in the cup and shut the fuck up.
LET'S HAVE A BABY!
You hear birth stories everywhere.
How the contractions started. When they left for the hospital. How many centimeters dilated she was. How long the birth took. Did it hurt? Was it scary? What did it feel like when the baby was finally placed on her chest? Did breastfeeding get off to a good start?
The stories are almost always told by women — naturally.
But what about us men?
Who tells our story?
As if we somehow had it easy.
Who talks about all those kilometers driven between the hospital, home and Hesburger during labor?
"8 cm dilated."
Of course.
Of fucking course you are.
Just when I'm somewhere else...
This is my birth story.
Papacito's Birth Story.
The due date came.
And went.
Nothing happened.
Apparently, the first thing my son decided to do in life was ignore the schedule he'd been given.
At the time, of course, I didn't yet understand that this wasn't an isolated incident. It was more like an advance notice of how things would be done in our household from now on.
A week later, for a moment, we thought it was finally happening. We suspected her waters had broken, so off we went to the maternity ward to get things moving.
They didn't.
Well, we did go to the maternity ward.
But we also came back home.
Since we still hadn't got any kind of proper starting signal, we asked the nurse to "provoke" things a little while we were there.
I don't know if "provoke" is the correct medical term, but the basic idea was something along the lines of:
"Could someone maybe go tap him on the shoulder and tell him it's time to crawl out?"
Apparently, they managed to provoke something.
Because that same evening my wife started pacing around the house.
And we're not talking about an evening stroll.
The contractions hurt so much that staying still wasn't really an option, and walking seemed to make things a little easier.
So off she went like Forrest Gump.
And walked.
And walked.
And walked...
Pretty much the entire fucking night.
Meanwhile, I found my own important job.
I kept time.
The contractions were coming so regularly that at some point the whole thing started resembling scheduled bus service more than childbirth.
— Next one at 9:17.
And there it was.
— Five minutes. Next one at 9:22.
And there it was.
I'd like to draw particular attention to one sentence:
"I've slept well."
"Minä oon nukkunu hyvin."
This will become an important detail later in the story.
Because karma listens — and apparently it was awake too.
At this point, it might have been reasonable to think that perhaps we should head to the hospital.
I suggested we leave.
My wife disagreed.
So I suggested it again.
And a few more times.
Eventually, after numerous rejected proposals, she finally agreed to call the hospital — the next morning...
They gave us a rather surprising medical assessment:
"Come in."
Well, fuck. That's what I've been saying.
This time we weren't going to the hospital just to get things moving.
This time we were going there to stay.
Or at least that's what I assumed.
I wasn't asking my wife for her opinion anymore at this point. I'd used enough speaking turns on the subject over the previous couple of days.
Once we got inside, things moved surprisingly quickly.
We were shown into the delivery room, my wife was put in the bed and I was appointed to that prestigious position known as the support person.
Support person...
A beautiful term for someone who has absolutely no fucking idea what's going to happen next, but is somehow expected to look like he's got the situation under control.
The situation report was promising, though.
The waters had broken and something had finally happened down in the engine room too.
Three centimeters dilated.
Three...
That was the first moment it really hit me just how fucking long the journey from three centimeters to ten could be.
Papacito has absolutely no experience with measurements of this magnitude.
My wife had been clear from the beginning that she didn't want every possible drug and anesthetic thrown at her immediately.
I'm not going to pretend to be an obstetrician here, because I can't even remember half the names anymore.
So first we tried something a little more down-to-earth.
Warm water.
Or so I thought.
When we got into the room, I quickly realized we weren't talking about some ordinary bathtub.
Jesus Christ, what a setup...
Huge pool.
Warm water.
Mood lighting.
I think there might even have been some calm background music...
Basically, the maternity ward had its own SPA.
My wife got into the pool and I appropriately remained crouched at the edge, carrying out my duties as the "support person."
Then I saw a sign that pissed me off even more:
"Support person must have swimwear."
Excuse me?
Swimwear?
So I could've got in too with the same fucking admission ticket?
AND NOBODY THOUGHT TO TELL ME THIS IN ADVANCE EITHER?!
So there I was, crouching beside the pool with my knees and back completely fucked while my wife lounged in warm water under mood lighting.
I wasn't jealous of her situation.
I was jealous of the pool.
And the service just kept getting better.
The nurses brought drinks to the pool.
Water and juice, obviously, but with a little imagination it was basically a pool bar — they kept putting cups into her hand as fast as she could take them.
At that point I was starting to regret not packing swim shorts in my own hospital bag.
And yes.
Papacito had HIS OWN hospital bag.
This is something they should really mention at the maternity clinic.
"Clothes for the baby.
Clothes for the mother.
Swim shorts for Papacito."
Would've saved a lot of disappointment.
Despite Papacito's spa envy, the pool genuinely helped.
The warm water eased the pain.
Until even that stopped helping.
Next we moved on to something a little more medical.
Laughing gas — Nitrous oxide.
The name is fucking false advertising, by the way.
Nobody laughed.
My wife tried it.
Wasn't impressed.
I tried it too.
Several times.
Purely because, in my opinion, a "support person" needs to be familiar with the equipment being used.
And nothing...
Absolute placebo, if you ask me.
If it did anything, the main effect was that the mask squealed so fucking loudly when you used it that after a while you wanted to take it off purely for the wellbeing of everyone else in the room.
So at this point there was one person in the delivery room having painful contractions and another one inhaling laughing gas trying to figure out why the fuck it wasn't working.
As if we men somehow had it easy.
So the laughing gas failed to impress our household's official testing panel.
The hours passed.
The contractions continued.
My wife suffered.
And the engine room — meaning downstairs — didn't seem to be making progress anywhere near as quickly as anyone would've liked.
The Toothless Troublemaker had apparently decided that if he was going to arrive this late anyway, there was no point rushing the final stretch either.
Evening turned into night.
And by then it was becoming obvious that juice, a bath and a squealing gas mask weren't going to get us through this.
It was time to bring out the heavy artillery.
Oxytocin and an epidural were deployed to the front line.
By now, the night was already well underway.
My wife had basically been awake since the night before last.
And so had I.
Well.
Almost.
Because eventually there came a point when Papacito simply had to rest.
Luckily, I had prepared for this — with MY OWN hospital bag.
My own pillow.
My own blanket.
A few little snacks of my own.
And then there was the delivery room chair, apparently purchased with the sole purpose of ensuring that no father ever experiences childbirth too comfortably.
Who the fuck sat in that thing during the procurement process and thought:
"Yep. These are fucking excellent."
That person has definitely never spent a night sleeping in one.
But apparently, when you're tired enough, anything will do.
At some point, I actually managed to fall asleep in that contraption.
Sitting up.
At least I had my own pillow and blanket.
I slept for maybe an hour.
Maybe two.
I don't know.
Long enough, apparently, to sleep through some of the action.
And at this point, I'd like to return to an earlier statement:
"I've slept well."
Yeah.
Karma had come to collect.
Morning arrived.
The Toothless Troublemaker was still inside, and back home another troublemaker was waiting — one who couldn't have given less of a shit how many centimeters anyone was dilated.
The dog needed to go out.
Otherwise, pretty soon we'd have been measuring the dog's dilation too.
Things seemed calm enough that I dared to make a quick trip home.
Wrong.
I'd barely managed to take the dog out when my phone pinged:
"8 cm dilated."
Of course.
Of fucking course you are.
Just when I'm somewhere else.
That was the end of the sniffing portion of the dog's morning walk.
Dog home.
Papacito in the car.
And back to the maternity ward.
Luckily, the Toothless Troublemaker wasn't in quite as much of a hurry to leave as I was to get back.
I made it.
And since I'd made it back in time, we could once again focus on what really mattered.
Betting.
My friend and I had been placing five-euro bets throughout the labor on what time the little guy would be born.
The rules were simple:
Closest guess wins, and the guess has to fall within a ± 2-hour window of the actual birth time.
We'd already gone through several rounds of guesses.
My final guess was 10:45.
My friend accidentally missed the final round altogether.
So at this point, I was basically at the mercy of the Toothless Troublemaker's sense of timing.
And judging by his performance so far, that five euros was fucking gone.
After noon, things finally started happening.
We'd already needed oxytocin and an epidural on the front line earlier.
Now the situation called for a pudendal block.
In other words, anesthetic injections down around the perineum.
Sounds like a perfectly respectable medical procedure.
Didn't fucking look like one...
The moment I saw the needle and understood where it was heading, I personally would've been ready to call off the entire birth.
My wife was lying on the bed.
I was at what I considered a safe distance on the other side of the room.
Still not far enough.
I saw and heard far too much.
Sweat started forming and my own downstairs equipment instinctively retreated somewhere around kidney level.
My wife took the injections like someone whose objective was to give birth to a child.
I took them like someone who wasn't even being injected.
We both had a difficult time.
As if we men somehow had it easy...
Suddenly, more and more people started appearing in the room, and the atmosphere on the front line changed.
Up until now, we'd been waiting.
We weren't fucking waiting anymore.
And that's when Papacito's mood changed too.
Everything up until that point had somehow still been easy for me.
I'd been able to joke about the spa.
Inhale "laughing gas."
Complain about the chair.
Walk the dog.
Place five-euro bets.
But now the person I love more than anyone else was lying right there beside me, doing something unbelievably brutal.
And there wasn't a fucking thing I could do about it.
That might have been the worst feeling of the entire birth.
Complete helplessness.
I could hold her hand.
I could stroke her.
I could talk to her.
I could be there.
But that was pretty much it.
And soon I couldn't even do that.
Suddenly there were so many people in the room that there simply wasn't enough space around one bed for Papacito anymore.
I had to move aside.
Out of the way.
And that's where I ended up.
Alone in the corner of the room.
Scared.
Nervous.
Waiting.
Probably not breathing either.
And it felt fucking awful.
Because even the one small thing I could do — be there beside her and touch her — sometimes had to be put aside.
All I could do was watch.
And wait.
For the first time, the thought genuinely entered my head:
What if everything doesn't go well?
Up until then, I'd somehow just assumed that you come here, have a baby and then go home with it.
Now there were suddenly more staff around us, instructions were being given faster, and I could see from my wife that we definitely weren't in any fucking spa anymore.
Every now and then, a little Papacito-sized gap opened up around the bed.
And I went straight for it.
Grabbed her hand.
Stroked her.
Encouraged her.
Did something.
Anything.
Until more space was needed again and I returned to my corner.
I don't know whether I was actually any use to her in that moment.
But by then I didn't even care.
I just didn't want my wife to have to be there alone.
And then things started happening that, looking back now, I can't even properly put in order.
My wife pushed.
I encouraged her.
Or at least I think I did.
I probably kept repeating something completely fucking useless like "you're doing great."
How the fuck did I know how she was doing?
I'd never been at a birth before.
But I couldn't exactly say:
"I'm not really qualified to comment on this."
Then, for the first time, I saw that there was actually a human being coming out of there.
And if the pudendal block needle had made my own downstairs equipment retreat to kidney level, this particular sight wasn't exactly encouraging it to come back.
This is probably where I'm supposed to write something beautiful about the miracle of life.
In reality, there were mainly two thoughts going through my head:
How the fuck is that supposed to fit through there?
And everything is definitely okay, right?
Then something strange happened.
In the middle of all that commotion, the whole world somehow shrank down to that one room.
There was no dog anymore.
No Hesburger.
No five-euro bet.
No spa.
There was just my wife.
Me.
And one little guy I'd never even seen before.
But who I wanted more than anything to see come out of there okay.
AND THEN IT HAPPENED.
12:28
Suddenly, there was a tiny human being.
Our son.
Papacito Junior.
After all the waiting, staying awake, walking, gas masks, spa treatments, needles and that absolutely fucking horrible chair, he was finally there.
And for the first time in a long time, I could breathe normally.
Everything was okay.
Boy there.
Wife there.
Me there.
At that point, I suppose I could've taken the opportunity to inspect exactly what kind of destruction our newly arrived offspring had caused downstairs.
I chose not to.
A fully conscious decision.
Because I really didn't want to confront the thought:
"That's definitely not the same thing — and definitely not in the condition I left it in."
Some things are better left to the professionals.
My first thought was obviously something along the lines of holy shit...
The second was probably:
That's a fuckload of hair.
And the third was definitely:
Thank fucking God that hair is BLOND.
The fourth one apparently came out loud.
I'd waited so long for this little guy that once we'd finally managed to get one human being into the world, I figured I might as well ask about booking the next appointment while the production line was finally up and running.
Apparently, the delivery room calendar wasn't open quite that far in advance.
Back to the BLOND hair, because this actually mattered.
Long before the birth, I'd already informed my wife that if the baby came out with dark hair, there was absolutely no fucking way I was acknowledging paternity without a DNA test.
For some reason, my wife didn't find this quite as funny as I did.
I later also learned that because we're already married, apparently nobody was even planning to ask me whether I acknowledged paternity or not.
The sentence had already been handed down automatically.
Quite a system.
Luckily, no investigation was required.
The little guy arrived with an enormous blond mop of hair.
Daddy's boy ❤️
And there we were.
Boy in the world.
And me officially Papacito.
I assumed my role in the actual birthing process was more or less complete.
It fucking wasn't...
Because I was given one more responsibility.
The umbilical cord.
The midwife held the cord with both hands and left a little section between them that I was supposed to attack with scissors.
Easy.
Except my hands were shaking like I was defusing a bomb.
I stared at the umbilical cord.
And mainly wondered whether, if I cut this in the wrong place, I'd get another attempt.
I got through it.
First proper father duty successfully completed.
Nobody got hurt.
Good start.
Then the placenta appeared.
Or, more accurately, it had obviously been involved the entire time, but suddenly it became some kind of tourist attraction.
I still don't know why.
But the midwives were fucking fascinated by it.
They examined it.
They admired it.
And at some point, I think even more people came over to have a look.
I watched from the side and once again tried to look like I understood what was going on.
I didn't.
As far as I know, there was nothing wrong with it.
Apparently, it was just a particularly impressive placenta.
The Holy Grail of the delivery room.
Very nice.
Probably.
Once the Holy Grail had been appropriately admired, things finally started calming down.
My son was in the world.
My wife was alive.
More importantly, I was alive.
Even the umbilical cord had been cut without casualties.
Overall, I'd call that a successful performance.
And a successful performance deserves a celebration.
The service level was once again on point, because somehow a bottle of sparkling wine appeared.
Alcohol-free, obviously.
Let's not get carried away.
And there we were.
A brand-new mother.
A brand-new Papacito.
And one extremely fucking brand-new human being.
Our family.
From there, we moved on to the family room.
The birth was over, and for the first time in a couple of days there was no need to count contractions, centimeters or wonder what was going to happen next.
There were three of us now.
And apparently we were also expected to know what to do with the third one.
Luckily, the service level didn't collapse immediately after the sparkling wine.
The nurses came by to teach the new parents some of life's basic skills.
Like changing a diaper.
We got into the action pretty quickly ourselves.
Diaper open.
Old one off.
New one underneath.
Easy.
Until the nurse immediately corrected something I'd done.
I can't even remember what anymore.
But the boy had only been in the world for a little while and Papacito was already in his first performance review.
Off to a strong start.
We ended up spending two nights in the family room.
The first one was mostly spent staring at him and thinking:
So that's actually him.
The Toothless Troublemaker.
By the second evening, things had stabilized enough that I decided I'd earned myself a little nightcap.
Because I'd prepared for this too.
Hidden inside Papacito's hospital bag was a thermos containing smuggled red wine.
Civilized, obviously.
One glass.
We weren't organizing a fucking student cruise here.
My wife had just given birth to a human being, and I'd been sitting beside her for a fucking long time.
So we'd both had a hard day.
In my opinion, the wine was well deserved.
The only minor incident occurred when the thermos decided to release some of its contents onto my coat in the ward elevator.
So there I was, sneaking through the maternity ward back to "our room" smelling of red wine.
Not exactly one of Papacito's finest moments.
Luckily, the coat was black.
Even more luckily, nobody asked, saw or smelled anything.
I'm not sure a panicked explanation of "it's just from the thermos" would've improved the situation.
After two nights in the hospital, it was finally time to go home.
And that's when one fairly significant detail started to sink in.
Are they seriously going to let us take this guy home?
I mean, they're giving us an entire human being and letting us walk out the door with him.
Unsupervised.
Quite a system, this one too.
Before that, though, there was one final exam to pass:
Basic car seat operation.
Before this moment, I'd considered car seat straps a fairly simple invention.
Baby in.
Straps on.
And off we go.
Apparently fucking not...
Suddenly I had a tiny human being in my hands, the straps tightened all the way down and absolutely no fucking certainty whether they were actually supposed to be that tight.
At one point I was already starting to suspect they definitely weren't going to let us leave with this kid if the level of incompetence was already this high before we'd even made it out of the room.
Sweat on my forehead.
Quick Google search for the car seat model's instructions.
Problem solved.
The straps loosened.
Probably something else that would've been worth practicing beforehand.
Eventually, the little guy was in the seat.
Straps on.
Blood still circulating in all four limbs.
Approved performance — Papacito Approved.
Then we left.
Out through the hospital doors.
The three of us.
And that's where Papacito's birth story ends.
One thing from the trip, however, remains unresolved — that five euros...
My final guess was 10:45
The Toothless Troublemaker was born at 12:28
Technically speaking:
Is the bet still valid if your friend doesn't manage to submit a guess for the same round?
At the time of writing, the matter remains unresolved, and no ruling has yet been received from the Supreme Court.
To be fair, nobody remembered the whole fucking thing until I started digging through old memories for this story.
Potential receivables: €5