Hellobee

Well, Baby Owl has arrived.

My water broke at about four o’clock in the morning on May 20th. Well, I should say, it started at about four o’clock in the morning on the 20th. It wasn’t like in the movies, where pregnant women’s water breaks with one great gush. Rather, my water continued “breaking” until the baby was actually born. But anyway, when this happened, I went to Mr. Owl and woke him up to let him know what was going on. His initial reaction was appropriately panicky– “Oh, my God, your water broke? Right now? The baby’s coming? Do we need to go to the hospital? Are you ready to go to the hospital?”

I reassured him that no, it was not time to go to the hospital at all; I wasn’t even really having contractions. The only pain I had felt mildly crampy, and it wasn’t regular at all. Once he saw that this whole “water breaking” thing was not at all like the movies and TV promised, where the woman’s water breaks and suddenly she is dilated to a 10 and is having the baby in the backseat of a taxi, he calmed down. A lot. And with this calm came a collection of quotes that became the inspiration for the title of this post: seven things you really should not say to your wife when she’s in labor. They may not seem that bad, or they may seem utterly abominable, depending on your perspective. But I can safely say that due to the wild-eyed panic of going through labor for the first time combined with the tidal wave of hormones coursing through me during those last days of pregnancy, these seven phrases caused me to have rather strong reactions.

1. “Wallah, I need to rest. I have a headache.”

This is what Mr. Owl said after he saw that I was not really in pain and was reassured that it was not hospital time. (Wallah is Arabic for “I swear to God.”) Granted, the kid had just finished taking two major exams (for his Saudi CPA certification) in the past two days, after weeks spent studying for twelve hours or more each day, so he really was in need of rest. And when I woke him up at four o’clock, we had gone to bed just a few hours earlier. Still…this is not an appropriate thing to say to your wife when she is in labor, especially for the first time. Because no matter how much I read that childbirth is not like on TV, that water breaking does not happen in that dramatic way, the fact that it happened and then continued to happen right up until the birth, with the first few hours being pretty much contraction-free, had me more than somewhat freaked out. I think if my water had broken and contractions had started right away, I would have felt better. But it took two hours before anything really timeable–and anything significant pain-wise–started happening. So during those two hours, while Mr. Owl tried to rest for his headache, I felt like I was just sitting and waiting for my ticking time bomb of a uterus to explode.

2. “Wake me up when you start having hard contractions.”

Although he wanted to rest, he didn’t really get to. As much as he needed to sleep, the revelation that my water broke had him nearly as keyed up as I was. But this is what Mr. Owl said when, around six-thirty, he asked me how I was doing and I told him that the contractions were coming every four to six minutes, although they weren’t very painful contractions. He remembered that our midwife had told us that contractions close together aren’t necessarily a sign that labor has really gotten going yet. So he said this. And I wanted to kick him and yell, in Chandler Bing style, “I’m panicking here! Join me, won’t you?”

Actually, I think I did yell that.

3. “I’m tired, too!”

Since I too was running on a couple hours of sleep and I figured that the athletic event that is labor was best not experienced on the sleep equivalent of a bender the night before, I tried to catch quick snoozes in between those early, mildly uncomfortable regular contractions. Mr. Owl suggested that maybe I should get up and walk around, since that helps labor progress. I told him, “No, I’m tired and I want to get some rest while I can.” That’s when he offered this gem, and I snarled back, “Oh, yes, please tell me how tired you are right now. I feel so sorry for you!”

4. “I think I’m having sympathy pains–my back hurts!”

This is what Mr. Owl said when, God love him, he tried to ascertain how painful the contractions were at around eight o’clock. I think my response was something along the lines of (profanity warning) the first fifteen seconds of this clip.

5. “I’m not going to listen to you.”

As things picked up, I wasn’t the only one in drill sergeant mode. I think I trained Mr. Owl for the birth a little too well, because he knew that I needed to labor at home for as long as possible to increase my chances of being able to have a natural birth at the hospital, and that if possible, we shouldn’t go to the hospital until the contractions were severe. He also knew that a contraction is considered severe when the laboring woman cannot talk through it. And since I was still able to talk through all of my contractions, even though I had to pause and focus on them as I talked through them, he fired this one off when I angrily insisted that it was time to go to the hospital. I think this is probably the most dangerous one, fellas. Just so you know. Especially if you follow it up with, “Honey, I know you’re going through a lot right now, but I am the coach!”

6. “Okay, why don’t you go organize while I take a shower?”

Mr. Owl is nothing if not crafty, and when it became apparent that I was not going to back down on my insistence that it was hospital time, he tried to distract me. Now, granted, I understand where he was coming from on this one. The day before, I had been obsessed with getting the baby’s clothes sorted and organized into different boxes based on size; in fact, in the last few days of my pregnancy, I had been a little obsessed with organizing in general, although I wasn’t really as effective at it as I wanted to be, due to my girth. So Mr. Owl probably thought that dangling the organization carrot would be an enticing distraction for me. But here’s another tip for the men out there: you should probably run on the assumption that suggesting to your wife that she should organize while she is in labor is probably going to backfire, no matter what a neat freak she is. And if she’s not really a neat freak, as I am not (but have always aspired to be), and is hypersensitive about that (and pretty much everything else) even when not pregnant, as I am…then just don’t.

I finally managed to convince Mr. Owl that it was indeed hospital time, even though I was still able to talk, albeit haltingly, through my contractions. We left for the hospital at 9:30 a.m. My mother-in-law came with us. By 9:45, I had been wheeled into the OB/GYN emergency room, where it was pronounced that I was dilated to a 3 (my thoughts upon hearing this number: “This is a 3? This is a 3? I’m going to die”). I was then wheeled into an elevator and taken to the delivery room on the third floor. My mother-in-law accompanied me, because Mr. Owl had to take care of all of the admission and insurance paperwork, and it took longer than usual because we hadn’t yet gotten insurance approval for the birth (to be honest, we really were not expecting to be in the delivery room nine days before my due date. Silly of us, I know).

So for the first hour of my labor at the hospital, I had my mother-in-law with me as my “companion.” The hospital only allows one person to be with the laboring mother, whether that’s the husband, her mother, or whatever. And my mother-in-law was wonderful. She sat out of the way as I paced around the room, breathing and making weird noises through my contractions, reading Qur’an and praying aloud. I really wanted Mr. Owl, but she was terrific. At one point she asked me what I needed. I said, “Hugs.” And she walked over to me and put her arms around me and rubbed my back and continued to pray for me.

The contractions were making me sick. Every time I had one, I ended up running to the toilet to throw up. But there was nothing in my stomach to throw up. Eventually, my midwife gave me an injection of antiemetic drug to stop the vomiting. I think this was mostly to do with the fact that my midwife and the nurse were both trying to get me to lie still on the bed for at least a couple of contractions, so they could monitor them and get a read on them, and they figured that if I wasn’t running to the bathroom for every contraction, that task would be easier.

But the thing is, even without the urge to puke, I was no good at lying on my back during the contractions. That position made the contractions a thousand times worse. How can anyone labor on her back without an epidural is beyond me. I couldn’t handle it. I had to be standing up, I had to be moving, I had to be doing something besides lying on my back. (Later, when my midwife came to visit me after the delivery, she said, “We really wanted to keep you on the bed for a time, but we were quite impressed with how fast you moved. You let us know you were having a contraction, and then you were gone.”)

Finally Mr. Owl arrived. And let me tell you, despite the negative tone of the title of this post, he absolutely shone in the delivery room. Only one of the seven things you shouldn’t say to your wife when she’s in labor happened in the delivery room, as I was pushing, and leaning on his arm while squeezing his hand. And it was…

7. “I can’t feel my arm. I think I’m going to need a cast after this.”

Other than that, though, Mr. Owl did and said everything right in the delivery room. To prove it, here is a list of five things that you should say to your wife when she’s in labor. I heard them all. And each one means more to me than the previous seven put together.

1. “You are doing great, baby.”

Guess what? Labor is an amazing experience but excruciatingly hard, and Mr. Owl had never seen me in that kind of pain before. Every time I ran to the bathroom to attempt to throw up, or leaned over and attempted to moan into the contractions like Ina May Gaskin’s books taught me (but I think I ended up doing something closer to yelling most of the time), Mr. Owl was there, holding my hand, hugging me, or reassuring me. And despite his declaration pre-hospital, he did listen to me. At one point, he attempted to rub my back during a contraction, but that only made it worse, and I commanded, “Stop.” He did. And he still said I was doing great.

2. “I am so proud of you!”

I am so grateful that my labor actually went, as our midwife put it, “very fast for a first baby.” My dilation went from a 3 to a 9 in span of about two hours, and this is what Mr. Owl said when we found that out. Right after the midwife let me know that I was at a 9, she told me that she was going to, as she put it, “nip home for a bit.” She lives just across the street from the hospital, and her daughter was home visiting from university and was about to leave, so she wanted to say goodbye to her daughter very quickly. I had a feeling that the baby was going to come before she got back, and I told her, wild-eyed, “Please don’t nip anywhere!” (Yes! I got to use British slang during my delivery!) She assured me that she would be ten minutes, if that. About five minutes later, the nurses were calling her to get her to return, because I was about to start pushing. When they got her on the phone, she was in the elevator on her way back to the delivery room; she had hugged her daughter and headed right back because, as she told me later, “I started to worry that you really were going to go faster than I thought!” And I did.

3. “Hell yeah, you can do it!”

This is what Mr. Owl said to me right around transition, when the contractions were at their absolute hardest and I was about to start pushing. TV and movies make it seem like the actual birth of the baby is the most painful part…no. Those last few contractions before I started pushing were where I thought that either I was going to die or my baby was going to have to be cut out of me. As I leaned against the hospital bed, I said to Saleh, “I can’t do it.” He let me know in no uncertain terms that I was wrong.

4. “Wallah, every year on her birthday I am going to tell her the story of everything you did to get her here.”

As I pushed, Mr. Owl gave me updates about what exactly was going on. And then he said this. Even with the burning pain and the baby half delivered, I had to laugh. I think it’s now safe to say that he can always make me laugh.

5. “I love you both so much.”

Baby was born at 12:42 p.m. on May 20, almost nine hours after my water broke and a little under seven hours after my contractions started. She weighed 3.3 kilograms, or 7 pounds 4 ounces. As I held the baby and tried to nurse her while we waited for the cord to finish pulsing so Mr. Owl could cut it, this is what he said.

If you are an Up fan (as we are), you will recognize Baby Owl’s button as the Ellie Badge. Which means that she is officially in the club now.