A couple of things to establish before going into the story of how my 5th child came to the world. First up, I don’t do well with blood and other bodily stuff pertaining to medical procedures –I know full well that this isn’t necessarily a “manly” trait, but there it is. Yes, I’m a bit on the squeamish side. During the natural childbirth classes that my wife and I took several years ago before August was born, the instructor showed a video depicting a birth, so that the people in the class could see what one was like and get a sense of how things looked. All the husbands were on the couch or to the side, intently watching the television, their (pregnant) wives behind them watching intently and behind them was me, at the door, doing my best to avoid seeing anything because I was getting queasy and feeling faint. Flash forward several years, and Ciárán is being born. August, at the time is age 4 and has never met a baby he didn’t like. He wants to be present, on my lap watching intently while I keep my eyes closed while my wife delivers Ciárán (aided by the midwife, an assistant, the doula, and a couple of other people – keep that in mind for later on in the story). I nearly pass out as my wife is getting stitches.
The second thing to note is that I missed the birth of my son August as I was out of town and my wife didn’t call me in time. She called me at 4:30 in the morning, and August was born two hour later. I got home as soon as I could, but it was about 4 hours too late. Still, missing a birth is a pretty big deal.
For this child, the midwife who my wife has been using for all her previous births knows me and the particular strengths and weaknesses I come with. Last birth she sent me away with the kids to go pick up ice cream at the store so she could stitch up my wife without me possibly fainting. Oh, did I mention that I’m afraid of needles, as in, I have a phobia where even syringes on television freak me out. We don’t watch too many television medical dramas.
My wife begins having contractions about every 15 minutes or so beginning 7:45 at night on the 14th. At no time do the contractions “lay her out” as before with the other children, in many respects these feel as if they are “warm up” contractions. We decide to go to bed and try to get some rest at about 10:00. The contractions slow considerably. For the previous three births my wife has always walked around to help keep things progressing, and it felt natural (and the right thing to do) to get some rest as well as try and slow stuff down.
Around 1am the contractions picked back up to every 10 minutes or so. At 2am they had progressed to every 7 or 8 minutes, so we decided to call the midwife and let her know that the pregnancy had progressed into labor. Unfortunately, the midwife said she was on her way out the door to another birth. Fortunately, we had plenty of time since the contractions were only about every 7 or 8 minutes apart, so the midwife’s plan was to go check in on this other couple then head over to us.
Since my wife was laying on the couch, everybody expected her labor to progress rather slowly. By about 2:45 in the morning, the contractions were every 6 minutes apart. At this time I called the doula (go look it up if you don’t know) and let her know where we were at. I called the midwife again, and she said she needed to stay where she was because of complications, but she was in the middle of trying to get a replacement for us to fill in until she got here. At 2:54am the water broke, while my wife was still laying on the couch.