Oulu is full of advice for expectant mothers but what about the father to be? Ed Dutton looks at the birth-giving process and the World War I-type violence it involves.
I know I said I’d do a regular ‘becoming a father in Oulu’ slot to parallel the ‘becoming a mother’ one. But as I got into it, I began to realise that the woman does play a slightly more significant part in the pregnancy process than the man and there was no way I could squeeze seven articles (article septuplets if you will) out of it. There may, however, be some potential for the aftermath . . . at least enough for twins.
If you are an expat who has impregnated your wife, you will probably find the free antenatal classes – which you will be emotionally blackmailed into attending – fairly amusing. I had to attend three, none of which prepared me in any way for the trench warfare-type horrors of birth-giving . . . but more of that later.
In the first class – in addition to the nurse – there were four other couples. For some reason, we had to introduce ourselves and tell everyone where we lived ‘in case we wanted to keep in touch.’ We then had to stand in order – north to south – of where we came from and I, being from England, was pushing against the window. The nurse invited us to, ‘Tell us about a time in your childhood that you fondly remember.’ In the heat of the moment I mixed ‘toinen’ with ‘kolmas’ and so ended up saying, ‘I used to like it when my Grandfather would tell me about when he fought in the Third World War.’ Cards were then spread out on the floor depicting a bear experiencing assorted emotions and we had to pick-up the one that best represented how we felt about the forthcoming baby. And then there was a vicar – who looked a bit like an actor from Baywatch – who, for reasons that were never explained, gave a little speech about having kids: he was a single dad to seven year-old girl but that that was nothing to do with why he was there. He was there because he was a vicar.
There was a video about giving birth. This was, as I later discovered, a sort of censored version which bore no resemblance to reality whatsoever. I had assumed that the mother was actually giving birth and just liked the idea of it being filmed and shown to thousands of Finnish expectant parents. But looking back on it now, I wonder if it was actually actors. I won’t bore you with the details of the other two antenatal classes – the great thing about them being in Finnish (at least for me) is that I have to kind of ‘tune in’ to a different wavelength to understand Finnish and accordingly I can tune not. But, gentlemen, you will be unsurprised to know that when they divided us into groups according to gender to ‘come up with questions to ask’ those in men’s group came up with amusing ideas such as, ‘At what age should you tell them that Santa definitely doesn’t exist?’ And they all said that they’d been dragged along at sulk-point.
But the birth itself. The baby was supposed to be born on 3rd January and so by the 6th we were waiting nervously, assuming that the baby would have to be induced. At about midnight my wife started having contractions. They got worse and longer but the internet informed me that this did not mean she was going into labour. At 3am I rang the hospital, described the symptoms in Finnish.
‘You don’t need to come yet,’ said the nurse. ‘Only if the contractions are every five minutes.’
They were every ten. My wife and I, at this stage quite happy because she wasn’t having a contraction, agreed that we’d just go to bed and see what happened tomorrow. Accordingly – by now it was 3.30am – I knocked myself out with a sleeping pill I had brought back from Turkey (they’re prescription only here you see, Turkey’s the place to get them).
This was a terrible mistake as within half an hour I was awoken.
‘Ed, they’re every five minutes. I’ve been timing them.’
It was happening.
I felt surprisingly calm about this . . . but then I had taken a depressant drug so I was effectively stoned. We got a taxi to the hospital, we were in some room for hours (but I hardly remember a thing). Then we were in another room – the ‘birth-giving’ room and I realised that we definitely weren’t going to be sent home. It was going to happen today. I kept falling in and out of consciousness – I remember being given heavily watered-down pineapple juice which was referred to as ‘juice’ but little else - until about 9am when the nurse jolted me awake by declaring – in English – ‘The baby is coming soon.’
The baby was born within less than an hour and half but it seemed to go by so quickly. It was surprisingly clinical and dull in a way. I’d expected something dramatic and emotional – this is what happens when kids are born in bad American sitcoms but not in Oulu. Though still sedated, I remember being horrified by the amount of blood. I’d never seen so much of it! It was like the computer game DOOM on the ‘Nightmare’ level or the Battle of the Somme. My wife was clearly in agony, though not making much noise, and the midwife kept saying ‘hupa hupa hupa hupa hupa!’ That is what I misheard anyway and nobody knows what it means.
At one point, I was very concerned because when – in response to demands to ‘push’ – my exhausted wife pleaded, ‘I can’t’ and the midwife snapped back, ‘You must! The baby’s heart-beat is slowing down!’ She handed me an alarm button and said, ‘Press this when I tell you to’ (she then said, ‘5 minutes’ to her colleague, in Finnish) and with the pools of blood everywhere I wondered if there were serious complications and the alarm was to get a doctor in. This wasn’t the case but I could not believe how much blood was coming out and I briefly remembered that loss of blood is the main reason why women die in child-birth . . . and some still do even in Finland. And I was very impressed by how involved the midwife got in the whole thing. It was as if it was calling rather than a job.
But there wasn’t time to think about anything as within 5 minutes the baby was out. ‘It’s a girl’ I told my wife. She couldn’t really see a thing. Somehow we’d both known it would be a girl and long debated over what to call it if it was.
‘Would you like to cut the cord?’ the midwife asked.
I demurred, concerned that I’d mess it up. I then rang the alarm as instructed and another midwife came in to deal with the baby. And after a few minutes, my wife gave birth to the placenta, which seemed almost as painful as giving birth to the baby – who had an extraordinary amount of black hair. My requests to keep the placenta so I could cook it were met with bemusement.
‘What did he say?’ I heard the midwife ask my wife in Finnish.
I was taken over to bathe the baby while my poor wife was knocked semi-conscious so that the Somme-like bloodbath could be sown-up.
The baby is called Martha, though almost wasn’t. But more of the aftermath of the birth-giving next week .
Comments (1)
1. 23-01-2009 13:42
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