Delivering baby not quite like TV

Jon Rabiroff smiles holding his son in his home.

By Jon Rabiroff

Childbirth is easy, or so I thought.

As I counted down the days to the delivery of my first child, there was one thing I knew to be true thanks to my 55 years of life experience ― that while having a baby can be painful for the mother, the experience is relatively routine.

In my mind, it was something akin to a trip to the dentist. Yes, root canal or getting teeth pulled can be painful, but when you leave the dentist’s office you have a new and improved smile on your face.

I knew all this about childbirth thanks to the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of babies I had seen born over the years in movies and on TV shows.

The delivery process usually starts with the pregnant woman acting surprised, like someone pinched her, and saying that her water has broken. Cut to the delivery room, where the woman contorts her face as she pushes three or four times in the 45 seconds it takes for the arrival of her baby ― who usually comes out looking like a member of the production crew’s chubby-cheeked 3-month-old, who someone has covered in olive oil.

I know this is all make-believe, but the underlying message is almost always the same: Delivering a baby is a wonderful experience, and certainly not anything to dread.

Armed with all this pop-culture knowledge, I was sure the arrival of my son was going to be a pleasant, perhaps even fun event. That was, until my wife’s first contraction.

When she initially doubled over in agony, I knew exactly what to do thanks to my vast background in on-screen labor, not to mention a video my wife and I saw at a birthing class where real-life husbands tended to their expectant wives, giving them backrubs and showering them with calming and loving words of support.

So, I confidently started to rub my wife’s neck, only to have my hands immediately slapped away with a chop the likes of which Bruce Lee would have been proud.

Undeterred, I proceeded with my soothing words of comfort, delivered in the calm voice of an NPR commentator and the encouraging optimism of a boxing cornerman: “You’re doing great, honey.” “It won’t be long now.” “Just keep telling yourself the pain isn’t that bad.”

It was at that point that my wife turned to give me what I was sure would be a loving look of gratitude. Instead, when our eyes met, her expression was telling me something more like: “Would you please just shut up?!”

This heartwarming scene more or less repeated itself again and again over what would become two full days of agony for my wife, whose contractions were too erratic and far apart for hospital admission.

Finally, her bouts of misery started to come less than four minutes apart and it was time to head to the hospital. When I lovingly pointed out ― as my wife threw her coat on over an outfit that included a ratty T-shirt, pajama bottoms and fuzzy slippers ― that she might not be properly dressed to walk into a public place like a hospital, she snapped: “I don’t give a darn.”

She may not have said “darn.”

Into the taxi we went, me sitting in the front seat next to the driver so she had room enough in the backseat to literally rest on her hands and knees, one of the few positions she found comfortable in her state of pain. During our ride to the hospital, my attempts at reassurance continued to fall on deaf ears, so much so that the driver ―who was calmer than both of us, and seemed nonplussed at having a laboring, moaning woman contorted in his backseat ― thought he would fill the void by advising my wife to “take deep breaths.” Of course, she listened to him.

Cut to the hospital where, surprisingly, my wife’s labor would not have fit neatly into a sitcom timeslot. In fact, more than 24 hours passed from the time her water broke to the time our son arrived, the last few hours of which featured her pushing with the fury of someone trying to squeeze a mattress through the door of a tiny apartment.

As if all that was not dramatic enough, after one contraction/push, the baby’s heart rate dropped and took several long seconds to return to normal, prompting the medical personnel in the delivery room to scramble into what appeared me to be emergency mode.

“Your baby has to come out now!” the doctor said firmly, as she directed others in the room to get the tools for a vacuum-assisted delivery, and to get a pediatrician there, stat.

For once, my age and experience actually was a benefit as I knew it was time for me to step up and help my wife and son get through what I thought might be a life-threatening situation for one or both of them.

It may not sound like much, but I took the lead in directing my wife through each subsequent contraction/push ― getting in her face and counting down from 10 during each attempt, as the doctor and nurses kept urging her to “push, push, push.”

The panic soon passed, and shortly thereafter our son came into the world without the need for any extraordinary assistance in a birth the doctor and nurses later insisted was routine, despite the drama.

As the medical personnel tended to my exhausted and relieved wife moments after delivery, I went over to where nurses were cleaning up my son, who it turns out was not covered in anything close to olive oil and who looked more like a very little old man than any plump, made-for-TV Gerber baby.

When I started talking to him, he instantly stopped crying, looked in my direction and extended his arm toward me. A nurse said he must have recognized my voice from his time in the womb. While I cherished the possibility, I thought it was just as likely the boy was momentarily astonished by the movement of his own hand.

Now my wife and I move on to the wonders of raising an infant, which TV shows and movies tell me is a relatively simple matter, where even the crankiest baby can be instantly calmed with a bottle or a gentle rocking back and forth.

That is how it works, right?

Jon Rabiroff is a copy editor at The Korea Times who writes an occasional column about the challenges he faces as a first-time father at the age of 55.