Week four at the antenatal classes and I’m struggling to stay awake to be honest. It’s three and half-hours in a warm room at the end of a long working day. If nothing else it is getting us used to the first months of the kids life, when trying to stay awake will be a daily challenge.
The instructor tries to make it interactive, but as we’re all first time parents, nobody wants to make a fool of themselves by giving a stupid answer. I’d been on a training course at work the week before, which was not dissimilar to the baby class I now found myself in. Both were run by slightly smug individuals who spent most of the time asking patently obvious questions which nobody wanted to answer for fear of becoming the class pet. And both were training us for a scenario that would involve forgetting everything you’ve heard during training.
The only problem with these courses (both Baby and work related) is that they involve long periods of silence while the instructor waits for an answer to her longwinded questions. In most cases, she asks questions relating to the topic she is about to explain. This is pretty redundant and reminds me of the dark days of school when the teacher would ask “What is the capital of Poland?”, just before he was due to tell us anyway. That’s why many of the kids from my school went on to be experts at quizzes.
One of the questions she asked was “Who knows what the three day blues are”? After an age, I thought I’d venture a response. “Is it a music festival in Adelaide”?
All the blokes laughed but the women weren’t impressed. Later on we got on to the subject of breastfeeding. “How long does the average woman breastfeed for”? We were asked. Again the silence was deafening, so I answered “surely you’d do it until the baby was full”.
At that stage I think I was marked down as a troublemaker. You’re supposed to take these things seriously after all. There are male midwives apparently, but our classes were determinedly female. Childbirth is their thing after all and we men are there for support. Kind of like the little guy who runs onto the football pitch with a bottle of water and a sponge when somebody goes down injured. Nobody pays in to see that guy. They are there for the footballers.
On the third class, we got a tour of the hospital, which at least gave some attention to the guys. We were shown where to park when we rush the wife to hospital. How much it costs to park while she’s in labour (an arm and a leg) and where the canteen is. The birthing suites are nicely modern and well equipped and had enough gadgets to keep the men interested. Most of us were drawn to the TV and fridge. It made the space look a hotel room. The fridge apparently is provided so that we can bring in cooling packs and food for the expected 8 hour ordeal (only the woman giving birth gets fed by the hospital).
You could tell that all the blokes wanted to know if you could bring in a six-pack but nobody had the guts to ask.
They showed us where the baby will be weighed and measured and where the umbilical cord is cut. Many aspects of this whole fatherhood thing are coming as a shock to me. Not least is the fact that the modern man is supposed to take a pair of scissors to the cord connecting the baby to the placenta. I went white at the mention of this process. I’m an Accountant who feels faint when I get a paper cut. If I wanted to be a surgeon or a butcher, I would have trained to be one.
My squeamishness wasn’t helped when the midwife mentioned that the cord is like nylon rope and you had to give it a good snap with the scissors. When she said that some men liked to wait until the cord had stopped pulsing, I nearly passed out. I can see that I’m going to have to work on my resilience over the coming weeks.
The lowlight of the tour was when they took us to the post natal ward and explained that the mother and baby would only spend one night there. So if the baby is born at 10pm, we’ll be on the mean streets of Melbourne by 6pm the following evening with a small bundle of joy and two inexperienced parents.
But that’s life and I doubt if we’re the first parents to find ourselves in that position. The seven billion people clinging to this mortal planet all got here through similar means. Most people cope and that is what we will do.
We bought our first set of nappies last week and have started to think about all the other things we’ll need. Last Sunday we went to a Baby Expo, which was just about the most soul-destroying thing I’ve ever done. Most of the displays were designed to target your guilt or vanity. There were cots that cost as much as a small car, prams that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Grand Prix circuit and a bewildering assortment of gadgets designed to monitor a baby’s temperature and heartbeat. It seems that the modern nursery is better equipped than an intensive care unit.
After we passed a stall selling aromatherapy treatments for infants, we were hit by a sudden weariness and sat down to enjoy a coffee. My eyes were drawn to a strange green figure on a stage to my right. It turned out to be Dorothy the Dinosaur. She danced and sang a tinny tune and the kids screamed their approval. Somehow I think I’ll be seeing a lot of Dorothy in the future. I can only hope that she knows a few Leonard Cohen songs.
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