Hey, your dad gave his best. Birth is a monumental task and as a father you feel like a helpless bystander that is watching his wife perform a fucking miracle while screaming in pain or begging for help while all you can do is hold her hand and tell her she's doing great while there's excrement and blood involved.
Your dad is LEAGUES ahead of a guy that just leaves to smoke weed and fall asleep.
You just described the birth of my first child in perfect detail. I was NOT ready for that much poop and trauma. All I can remember is poop and trauma. I thought my wife was going to die, then I thought our unborn child was going to die, then they put us all to sleep for a rest (even me!), only to wake up and get right back to the poop and trauma.
I absolutely can not believe that we went and did it a second time. I am now proudly desexed.
I guess my question as a woman is… what did you expect? It wasn’t really too shocking for me because I had been warned my whole life how horrible it would be and that I could die. But men seem so surprised as if we don’t have tons of media of women screaming in pain during labour, lol. Like, did y’all think we were just being dramatic and dying cause we felt like it??
My wife picked stupid prenatal classes for us and they gave us the expression that if the mother is just relaxed and wishes hard enough and approaches this as a self-determined, independent boss girl who is totally in touch with her feelings that this will be a breeze.
Nobody mentioned that phrases like "please, please, help me, make it stop, i can't anymore" will be said or that the entire birth will be more like a medical procedure than a harmonic hippy walk in the park.
Literally nobody told us about how hard it was going to be. It was like everyone around us, medical professionals, midwives, friends, parents were all gaslighting us and pretending that a birth is a total happy place.
Prenatal classs aside, did you not do your own research? There are plenty of live birth videos available to watch and plenty of people talking about their birth experiences. There’s a reason that before modern medicine, women often died during childbirth
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u/Ethernum Apr 24 '26
Hey, your dad gave his best. Birth is a monumental task and as a father you feel like a helpless bystander that is watching his wife perform a fucking miracle while screaming in pain or begging for help while all you can do is hold her hand and tell her she's doing great while there's excrement and blood involved.
Your dad is LEAGUES ahead of a guy that just leaves to smoke weed and fall asleep.