Celebrate your child's love of learning

© Wondertime

What a long, strange trip it's been.

He slips his leg over the tall, slick edge of the tub, telling himself to relax, go slowly. But he still manages to lose his footing, clumsy even in his caution, and has to steady himself with a shaky hand against the cool fiberglass. All sorts of emotions are ping-ponging through him: exhilaration, anxiety, bewilderment, and now a blush of embarrassment. This is not the graceful entrance he was looking for. But how to get into the birthing tub wasn't one of the bazillion details they went over in all those Wednesday night classes.

No one in the room even notices his gawky splashdown. All eyes are on the moaning naked woman. Sarah is sitting belly high in the tepid water, hunched over in a full-body grimace, eyes slammed shut. This room belongs to mother-to- be, mother-to-very-soon-be. The guy in swim trunks behind her played a costarring role during the steamy opening credits of this production nine months ago, but now he's no more than an extra. He looks around the glaringly lit delivery room and notices that everyone is doing a job. Except him.

The thing is, he does have a job to do. Lead her breaths with your breaths, as Vicki, the birthing instructor, told him and the other partners one of those Wednesdays. I can handle that, he remembers thinking, feeling overqualified, actually, what with all the Eastern meditation workshops he'd taken over the years. But when Vicki then said, Your wife is going to need your gentle support, he wasn't sure what she meant, exactly. He knew what gentle support meant; he's not a Neanderthal, but what was he supposed to do? Give your wife an encouraging "Good" now and then, Vicki said. All right, birth partners, let's try it together: Goooood.

So now it's showtime, and the overqualified guy, Swami Breathe Easy, is a no- show. He is technically present, but it'slike he's hovering up by the ceiling, so what goooood is he? He might as well be out in the waiting room, pacing alongside Ricky Ricardo, Darrin Stephens, and Rob Petrie, expectant father figures of his youth, all helplessly awaiting their cue to perform the only task that could be trusted to bumbling menfolk: passing out cigars. Think TV's take was simplistic? No, it was a sign of the times. Go look up the history of fathers in the delivery room — never mind, let's save you the trouble by describing it in one word: negligible. It wasn't until the 1930s that U.S. hospitals even began to experiment with allowing dads in the room.

Things, of course, shifted during the '60s and '70s. In the hippie-era home- birth videos that Vicki showed in class, the men were unmistakably a part of the scene. But they always seemed to be hanging around looking for something to do, like waiters at a buffet restaurant, pointing the way to the salad bar, maybe bringing over a clean fork. The birthing industry has since found ways to make fathers feel involved. Sort of involved, anyway. Now we're more like those billionaires who pay their way onto a space shuttle flight. It's the journey of a lifetime, but do you think the astronauts let these space tourists take the controls for even a second?

These days, the big "payoff" is getting to cut the umbilical cord. This responsibility is presented as if the guy were being handed a scalpel to perform a life-and-death surgical procedure, when in fact the cord has been safely clamped on both the baby's and the mama's ends to ensure that even the biggest screwup dad can't screw anything up. And doesn't the father's cord-snipping put a bizarre twist on his role in childbirth? At the very moment the baby emerges from the cozy womb, but even in its slippery purple nakedness, still safely attached – along comes Dad with a big pair of scissors, wedging his way in between Mom and her nine-month soul mate and saying, in effect, "Enough is enough, you two."

But back to the guy drifting up in the flickering haze of the ceiling lights. Wait a second. It's just occurred to him what he's here for. Music! He flashes back to the last few hours at home. Tara, the doula, had put in a DVD of My Big Fat Greek Wedding to take his wife's mind off the contractions (only a doula could get away with bringing the words big and fat into a pregnant woman's home). While the two watched upstairs, he was downstairs rifling through a couple thousand CDs. Every 10 minutes or so he'd notice there was no laughter, then he'd hear Tara say, "Breathe, Sarah, breathe." But even the low groans didn't distract him from his painstaking project: finding music worthy of his firstborn's entry into this world. And Sarah thought she was feeling pressure?

He'd just narrowed his choices to five discs when the women came to him and said, in two-part harmony with a choir of luminous angels fluttering around them, "It's time." How many generations of men have swallowed hard at those words? He handled it in stride though, not losing sight of the important details, like tossing his chosen CDs into the overnight bag and grabbing the boom box . . . which now sits on a table across the delivery room. Switched off. He hears himself trying to ask a nurse to turn on the music, but even he can't understand the sounds he's making. So he just points to the boom box and manages to sputter, to a nurse who's staring at him quizzically, "Could you?"

She could, and within mere seconds, the room transforms into a sandy, sunny beach shack as the first strains of Bob Marley's Exodus waft around the place like a glorious ganja cloud. There's a natural mystic blowing through the air . . . and he feels his breathing slow down, the scene no longer swirling around him like a tornado. He fixes his gaze on Sarah's weary face, waiting for her to open her eyes so they can have A Moment as she thanks him for remembering the special music. Finally, she lifts her head toward him, and with what seems like superhuman effort she grunts, "No . . . Bob . . . Marley."

This horrifying edict spills out as if Sarah were on her deathbed, with only enough breath for three dying words. And hearing "No . . . Bob . . . Marley" makes her husband die a little too. For months he's been dreaming about the day his baby would be born . . . to Bob. But this music wasn't his choice alone – he ran the playlist by Sarah in the car on the way to the hospital, and he distinctly remembers her taking a breath and saying, "Fine, fine." So he's not being selfish here.

And even if he were, what was it that people kept telling him over the last nine months? That this is going to be his birth experience too? Well, he wants Exodus to be a part of his experience. Has Sarah forgotten that Time magazine named this the album of the 20th century? So he's going to have to insist. He doesn't know any way to soften it, so he blurts out, "No, Sarah, this is the music that I want on" Suddenly there's silence. What in the name of Jah Rastafari is going on here? His eyes dart across the room, where a nurse is stepping away from the boom box.

He can't find the words to protest, so he just stares a hole through the nurse as she walks back toward the tub. He soon realizes this is the woman who caught his eye when they first arrived at the hospital – cute in a Renée Zellweger-in- Nurse Betty kind of way. He keeps watching her, sucking in his gut, no slouching. When she leans over the tub to check on Sarah, the neckline of her pale green scrubs top falls away, just a little. He doesn't look away. She's wearing a black bra, lacy, which surprises him – he would have expected something a little more practical for the workday. He stares some more at Renée and her black bra, and he wonders why she went with the lacy one, no, he says to himself, I'm pushing this whole line of thinking out of my head immediately. Here he is, on the cusp of the most consequential event of his life, the experience that will truly cement Sarah and him as a family forever, and he's checking out some nurse's cleavage? It is a very supple cleavage, and his wife did just callously reject the birthing music he'd had his heart set on, but c'mon.

It takes an especially throaty grunt from Sarah to yank his attention back inside the tub. Noises are erupting from her now with a coarseness he didn't think she had in her. "Tina!" she howls at the midwife, startling him with her first recognizable word in minutes. "Tina, take it out! Tina, please!" He's never seen anyone in this state, much less the woman he loves, and it throws him into his own state of paralyzing horror. His instinct is telling him to fix it, to do whatever a good husband has to do to ease his wife's pain and panic, but he can't. He can't move a muscle. He has to remind himself to breathe.

Meanwhile, Tara, the doula, calmly keeps watch on Sarah . . . and on him.

Back when Sarah told him she wanted to hire a doula, he didn't get it. She said she liked the idea of having someone in the delivery room whose sole job it was to advocate for her. Wasn't that going to be his job? "The birth of your baby," Tara had told them, "is going to affect both of you in ways you can't even imagine now." He just nodded his head. He wasn't sure having a doula was necessary. But he wasn't sure it wasn't necessary, either.

He knows the answer now. He's every bit as good as a midwife or doula when it comes to being compassionate, but not when it's time to be dispassionate. He can't watch his wife in pain without wanting to make it go away, yet he can't make it go away.

What he can do to help, it occurs to him, is simply make himself not go away. It finally sinks in that this is happening not to someone else but to him. That is, to me. It's time for me to be a presence. So even though the midwife and doula suggested I sit behind Sarah in the tub, my instinct tells me to get in front because they've now got her squatting and she looks like she needs something – or someone – to lean on. When we're face to face, I bend toward Sarah until our hairlines touch. Immediately, I feel the weight of her head resting against mine. I thread my arms under hers, and without either of us saying a word she slowly lifts her arms with a groan and rests them on my shoulders. Now I'm bearing at least some of her weight. I adjust my position to get as low in the water as I can, still holding Sarah tight. She takes the cue to drape herself over me. I'm doing nothing more than simply being here, but that seems to be enough.

Little by little, I sense Sarah letting go, till she's resting all her weight on me. I feel her breath grow ever more steady, until we're breathing in rhythm. We're cheek to cheek now, and I wonder if the rosy little earlobe in front of my eyes is what our baby's lobes will look like when I see them in a few minutes. I can hardly wait. I put my lips against Sarah's ear, give a gentle kiss, and whisper, "Gooooood."

About the Author: For the birth of his second child, Rebecca, senior writer Jeff Wagenheim made sure to get his fill of music while driving his wife to the hospital. Between contractions, Sarah even sang along.

Book Suggestion: Don't Just Stand There: How to Be Helpful, Clued-In, Supportive, Engaged, Meaningful, and Relevant in the Delivery Room, by Elissa Stein and Jon Lichtenstein (Chronicle Books, $13)

The Sounds of, um, Silence

Here's the labor-and-delivery playlist I worked incredibly hard on but my wife cruelly and unilaterally banned from the birthing room.

• Bob Marley and the Wailers: Exodus (Island) "Exodus, all right, movement of Jah people . . ." So what if the album's title song is about global politics, not the personal politics of birth? A kid could do worse than be welcomed into this world by the Jamaican legend, who, by the way, was the father of 13.
• Mickey Hart: Music to Be Born By (Rykodisc) The Grateful Dead percussionist recorded the heartbeat of his baby in utero, added a touch of shakuhachi flute, drums, and bass, and the result is a comforting soundtrack for the long, strange trip through the birth canal.
• Bruce Springsteen: The River (Columbia) The title song is Sarah's favorite Bruce tune, perhaps for its blissful take on parenthood. "Then I got Mary pregnant / and man, that was all she wrote / And for my 19th birthday / I got a union card and a wedding coat." Okay, maybe not so blissful.
• David Darling: Dark Wood (ECM) These solo cello improvisations go deep, way deep, with instrumental textures so vibrational they couldn't help but get that baby moving toward the light of day.
• Sarah Swersey: Nightingale (Sassy Sounds) When I told my wife I was bringing her CD, she nixed it as "too distracting." (Distracting? It's lullabies.) I took it anyway; I wanted Mom's flute to be the first music ever heard by 7-pound-15- ounce Aaron Rumi Wagenheim.