Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark
by Ryan Knighton
EXCERPT
“HOW THICK ARE YOU?”the prenatal instructor asked me. I stood in a row of skittish men who, along with our seated audience of wives and girlfriends, waited for an answer. I couldn’t just eyeball a guess, so I measured my thickness with a pinch of my finger and thumb.
“Well, oh, I’d say I’m a good half-inch.”
“That’s right!” the instructor chirped. She seemed pleased with my hands-on ingenuity. “And how dilated are you?”
I poked a finger into my hole. “About an inch, I’d guess.”
Well before Tracy and I arrived at our first prenatal class, I knew that the day would involve some participation from all the soon-to-be fathers and labor buddies. Gone are the wallflower days of direct, bone-dry information and, thankfully, gone are the days when expectant husbands brought cigars to the hospital and paced its floor into a nice, high polish. Nevertheless, the role I was asked to play in our birthing class called for more than method acting. No emotional memory could help: I was a cervix.
Not that I was alone, as cervixes really are. The five other men in my prenatal class played the same role, too, standing shoulder to shoulder, each of us representing another stage in labor. A cervix gallery. With my measurements out of the way, our prenatal instructor turned her attention to the rest of the class, explaining that I was at the early stages of effacement. I had a long way to go until I would be supple enough for the baby to pass. The dinky plastic donut in my hand — intended to further illustrate my dilation — felt heavy and perfect, like a knucklebone our pug would enjoy chewing.
Unfortunately, our stage play wasn’t dramatizing the plot fast enough. The cervix next to me had a question. He’d asked it twice already.
“Do we drive to the hospital now? I mean, I just want to know exactly when we need to go, that’s all.”
I don’t know his name, but Tracy had described him to me earlier. He was the man whose t-shirt shouted, “Canada: it’s f-ing cold here!”
“Please, just relax. Labor partners always want to know when to go,” the instructor said. “Trust me, your wife will know. Still too early, though. Just look how small Ryan’s opening is.”
I held up my hole, remembering that I was a visual aid and should act as such, and showed it around the way elementary school teachers display picture books. My gal and I were now seven months pregnant. In the name of education and our unborn daughter, I was going to be the best damned cervix I could be.
Not that it came easy. Neither Tracy nor I are into interactive fun. We’re the ones who pop Atavan when actors bust through the fourth wall. But, faced with childbirth, rising to meet one’s anxieties is what nature demands. For any partner standing beside a pregnant beloved, the prenatal class marks our own passage into a funhouse of identity. We are helpless and afraid and, most importantly, motivated by such feelings into action, to do whatever is asked of us, and to invent a few irrational expectations of our own.