Elenamary

I saw my first live birth last week. It was amazing. I’d often heard medical doctors joke that Latinas are the most amazing women to see give birth in a hospital. Very stereotypical but interesting none the less. The doctors would say that the disproportionately turn down epidurals and any pain medication and they “just squeeze those babies right out”.

The patient I saw give birth was a Latina they had given her an epidural and then put her on a machine that was supposed to slowly give her medication during the contractions and labor. The machine failed and never gave her any medication. The nurses were the first to figure it out because during the actual labor her legs were moving everywhere and the commented that if the epidural were working properly she would have felt her legs heavier and more difficult to move.

She was a funny woman and made me laugh. During one of her contractions her husband asked her if she was all right. She moaned a bit more during the contraction and he again asked her if she was fine. She turned toward him and said “I am in labor, no I am not fine!” I giggled. I couldn’t help but giggle.

The birth itself was amazing. The father looked over the mother and watched the baby’s head emerge and then its body. I’d seen plenty of baby births on video but to see it in person is something else. It was a beautiful wonderful thing and in some ways over rather quickly. There was now a new healthy baby in the world that wasn’t here just a few minutes ago. And the mother oh my goodness the mother! What strength she had. She barely screamed, she pushed that baby girl out in just two quick contractions.

The mother asked me after the birth, if this made me want to never have children of my own. I told her that no in fact it made me want to have children even more. I can’t wait to have children. I love cooking for people I love. I get a warm feeling that I can’t explain when watching people I love eat, and even more so food that I’ve made. It makes me wonder, what it would be like to breast feed. I’ve never felt any emotion like the one of watching people eat food, I’ve made for them, and then what would it be like to have my body make the healthiest food for the person I love most in the world. I cannot imagine the connection in breast feeding. Or as my father says “the oldest food in the world”.

I don’t think I want to give birth in a hospital or at least not in one like the one where I was present. The infant was immediately taken from out of the womb to cleaning; I would want to hold my baby. Couldn’t they clean her while momma was holding her? Also, not even 45 minutes after the baby was born she was taken to the nursery and the mother was told they would bring her daughter back to her in 3-4 hours. I’d want to keep my baby in my arms or at least in a little crib next to me.

The birth reminded me of a story that ran in the NY Times back in August. It was an article by Dr. Keith Ablow MD titled A Perilous Journey From Delivery Room to Bedroom.

“I mean,” he went on, “how are you supposed to go from seeing that to wanting to be with … ?” He stopped, but his eyes kept asking the question. “Right,” I said. “It gets easier with time, for just about everyone.”…

Although no one seems to talk publicly about the problem, Josh is only one of dozens of men who have confided to me that witnessing the births of their children has made it difficult for them to be attracted to their wives, at least in the short run.
And not every man gets over it. Several men have confessed to me that they never regained the same romantic view of their wives that they had before seeing them deliver children….

Women may want to consider the risks as they invite their partners to watch them bring new life into the world. …

Women bloggers spoke up and said that was just one more case of men viewing women as either sexual objects or as mothers but not possibly both (the virgin whore dichotomy).

from Bitch PhD:

I mean, sure, typically the woman giving birth is kind of preoccupied what with the small human being ripped from her abdomen and all, but truly: shouldn’t she be sparing some thought for the possible emotional damage she’s causing her man? I mean, labor is just so … icky, isn’t it? If we could only find a way to make it more aesthetic somehow. Maybe we could camouflage the birth canal with flowers or something – you know, preserve the “mystery” a little. Or maybe we could have porn playing in the background, so guys can associate birth with sex,…

and from The Tally Ho

Ablow is a psychologist (probably, he doesn’t say) who has spoken to “dozens” of men finding their wives unattractive in the short term after they give birth–not because of her weight gain, or post-partum depression, or the fact that it’s tough to take a shower while she’s doing all the feeding and diapering, but because of… the cunt.* Yes, they find it so (cough) bloody unnatural to see another human emerge from their lover’s body that they cannot see their wives sexually. Poor men.

*I tried to use a clinical term, I really did, they just didn’t fit. Ablow might understand; he never once manages to write the terms “vagina” or “vulva” in the course of his article. He can say “togetherness”, “sexual”, “retraumatized”, “placenta”, “meconium”, and yes, “post-traumatic stress disorder”. But vulva, vagina, cooch, or cunt? Nowhere to be found. The closest he comes is an insipid “birth canal”. Doctor, heal thyself.

I thought about this article after the birth and when talking with Charles about the birthing process and wanting to have children. I told him that I wanted him in the room but at the head of the bed looking at me not at my Vagina and the emerging head (the feminist in me grimaced when I said this). Charles said “If I am in the room I am going to be looking at the baby coming out. Why wouldn’t you want me to see that?” I told him about the article and how I feared that maybe he wouldn’t be as attracted to me afterwards. And then he said one of those things that reminds me how special and loving he is. “When *niña*(his little girl…I’ll use “niña”) was born, I was there and watched. I was attracted to her mother all through the pregnancy and after the birth and we had a sexual relationship during the pregnancy and after. Watching childbirth doesn’t make a woman less attractive. It makes us men realize how insignificant we are in comparison…we can’t do anything like that.”