Only one in 20 fathers now avoid being in the delivery room when his baby is being born, according to a new survey by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. The rest, I guarantee, are desperately telling themselves to be brave, wondering where to look and wishing they could check the score in the World Cup.
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One of the best things about becoming an old chap is that nobody will ever again twist my arm with mute moral blackmail to take up that pointless, useless, redundant place of the father in the delivery room. Next time a baby is born in my family, I look forward to occupying the safe seat in the hospital corridor, waiting to be invited in after that shocking business with the blood and guts has finished to meet and greet my grandchild.
I have been four times to the delivery room. Every time, it was an unspoken, unquestionable assumption between me and the mother that, from the breaking of the waters to the cutting of the cord, I ought to be there. It was never stated in so many words, but I was implicitly given to understand that I would be counted among the scum of the earth if I didn't rise to this occasion, see it as a spiritual transport of delight, and describe it ever after as one of the best moments of my life.
But then there's a lot about labour that nobody puts in so many words. Nobody ever told me that after the birth, I would feel as shaken as if I'd been in a car crash. That was how I felt for about two days after my oldest son was born, 32 years ago.
I now see it as my fatherly, comradely duty to pass on that kind of information, sparing no gory detail, to young men about to see service in that war zone for the first time. Nobody else – certainly not those fluffy prenatal classes – will fill them in.
"You do know about the afterbirth?" I murmur solicitously, feeling a certain satisfaction as they turn a shade of green. I tell them because nobody told me. When the afterbirth appeared – about five minutes after the main event – I was already cooing over my firstborn son. "Dear God!" I exclaimed. "There's another one arriving!"
New fathers also need to be told that, when they enter that room, they might not see daylight again for a long time. Also that, in the endless night to come, they are likely to witness sights no civilised man should ever see except in gruesome hand-to-hand combat with axe and pike.
My eldest daughter was born after 30 hours of labour in hospital, culminating in an emergency caesarean with 18 medical staff in the operating theatre (plus my own irrelevant self). The next day, I asked the registrar, "How is it that we can calculate the weight and circumference of a planet 10 billion light years away, but we can't know the weight of a baby before it's born?" (He answered: "That’s an interesting question and I wish I could give you an answer, but what I can tell you is that, if this mother had been trying to give birth to this baby even 50 years ago, neither of them would be here today for us to be enjoying this interesting conversation.")
No man, I suspect, has ever attended the delivery room without realising at some point that, of the three individuals at issue, he is the only one certain to be alive to walk out again. That thought is so burdened with pointless guilt that any man may be excused who would prefer to give the whole thing a miss. Really, a new father might genuinely be more use to his family at home in bed and clocking up some hours of undisturbed sleep in preparation for the long periods of wakefulness ahead.
In fact, soon after the birth of my second daughter, I went to sleep in the dentist's chair while the dentist was working with tools in my open mouth. They don't really talk about that part, either.