Parenting comes with many, many questions. Most of them occur after the baby is born -- how do you change a diaper on an airplane, which restaurants don't care if you have spit up stains on your shoulder, and so on. But one question occurs on the day your bundle of joy takes his or her first sweet breath of life.
Where should dad stand during the delivery?
MomLogic asked their (female) readers "Will You Let Him Look 'Down There?'" while the proverbial bun is making his or her way out of the oven. Comments range from, "I have no problems with it. But knowing my queasy husband, he won't!" to "Absolutely, he helped start the project! But he said no."
One commenter thinks that "these men who won't look should grow a pair...Did they think the stork brought the babies?" (And what if we did? Huh? What then?) Another points out that the process is very different during a C-section: "My husband looked around the curtain and basically saw my insides sitting on tables etc, I thought he was going to pass out. He hasn't been the same since."
So what's the consensus: Should dad stand north or south during the crucial moments?Babble's Tricia Honea says that she and her writer husband Whit had agreed that he not go to the land down under while the big event was happening. "I didn't want to look, have a mirror or anything," she says. "I wanted him up by my head so that he could be of support to me." In the end, it didn't matter: "I pushed for 2 1/2 hours and then had to have an emergency c-section."
But what do dads think of this whole where-to-stand connundrum? Mike Adamick, who blogs at Babble and at Cry it out: Memoirs of a Stay at Home Dad), says, "I was actually worried about this before the birth -- whether it would be some scarring experience that I'd think about every time we, well, you know. It made me feel like I was 14, so immature." In the delivery room, though, he had a completely different experience. "Then the labour began and something happened. The baby wasn't right. Something was wrong. My wife needed help, the baby needed help. The last thing on my mind was the look of things. I have so many memories from that day, good and bad, but the only thing that has really stuck is the overwhelming sense of relief and joy."
I'm with Mike on this one. I remember being amazed at the whole process. In fact, I still am. Remember the birth scene in "Knocked Up" that got people all worked up? I didn't see what all the fuss was about. I mean, it's just a baby, right?
For the women out there -- what did your man do? And men, were you around during delivery or did you head for ze hills?