The masculine urge to do nothing

At our birthing class, Anna and I and the other couples were asked to do a kind of circle training to test various poses for the two of us to relieve some of the labor pain. Our job as the partner—all men, in that specific situation—was to support the becoming mother. “Talk to her,” our doula facilitating the workshop told us. I felt like Brad Pitt’s hyperactive character in Burn After Reading, „breathe, push, breathe, push, with my breath, three more, you! got! this!“ Confused by that feeling it dawned on me that the exercise was but a foredoomed attempt to bring structure into a time and place where nature will chaotically break free.

And indeed, nature broke free, there in the labor room. There is a crass contrast between the clinical surroundings and the fact that you (i.e., you women) are engaged in the most ancient and primordial of acts. Medicine can eventually control it with epidurals and scalpels, but otherwise all there is to do is to let go and let the bodies do their thing, to play the secret program that has been hidden in the reptilian parts of our fancy 21st century brains until that day.

It’s not the program of us men, though. Our minds tell us to support, help, act in some way, yet there’s little our bodies can do in that moment except for just being there, standing, holding, and even that seems to be directed mostly at the layers and layers of civilization we have dressed around female bodies in the form of selves as woman, partner, wife, mother. I was happy for having been there and Anna was too, and yet I felt humbled by the strength, endurance, and courage that I saw in my own wife yet that seemed to resonated more strongly with our midwife and our doula. And so the most courageous thing I came up with was to accept that this moment like probably many moments to come is about serving others and not thinking about me.

Every time I had walked in the streets in the days after that, and even now from time to time, I think of that moment when I see a woman with her child. There was a day she too showed that strength, endurance, and courage. And then I think of all the mothers of every person around, who also did it. Women created every person on earth, pressed almost all of them through their thin crevices in billions of these magical majestic animalic moments, screaming in pain and out of love for their soon-to-be born child.