The Day I Became A Dad

When Evangeline and I discovered we were pregnant for the first time, we did what countless other terrified young couples do—took Lamaze.  

There are only two things I remember about Lamaze.  First, the instructor said, “Make sure you talk to your baby.  Baby can hear what’s happening from inside the womb.”  So, I started talking to the baby.  

When I was in college, my friends and I had this silly voice that we used to talk to one another when we were hanging out.  We spoke with a soft growl that sounded somewhere between Strong Bad from the old Homestar Runner cartoons and a stereotypical eastern European lunch lady.

For some reason when I talked to our son from outside the womb, that was the default voice I used. For months, I would talk to him in that voice about all kinds of things:

• The weather: “I bet it’s warm and cozy in there! It’s snowing today—LAME!”
• Sports updates: “Lions lost again.  Boy they really suck!”  
• Practice my parental commands: “Clean Your Womb!”  

And every conversation with baby began the same way: “Hey buddy, this is your Daddy speaking!  How’s it going in there?”

The second thing I remember was when the Lamaze instructor did a show-and-tell of the “tools” a doctor might use to aid in baby’s delivery.  She showed various models of forceps, all of which looked like medieval torture devices. There was a thing called a “speculum”; my wife politely warned me, “You don’t want to know what that’s for.”  And there was a vacuum, which looked like a glorified Dixie cup stuck to the end of rubber tubing.  Apparently in an emergency, that is one critical Dixie cup. 

Lamaze ended and within a few weeks, it was time for baby to arrive.  We showed up at the hospital around 2 PM where the doctor informed us Evangeline would probably be in labor throughout the night—we should expect baby to arrive around 6 AM the next morning.  

Once we settled in, I noticed an interesting pattern develop in the hospital room.  Evangeline would have a contraction, which was followed by some manner of cursing me under her breath.  As she tried to find a comfortable position to breathe through the contractions, she would incidentally move some monitor on her stomach that would cause a beeping noise in our room and sound an alarm at the nurse’s station.  A nurse then entered the room and readjusted the monitor to stop the beeping.  That sequence repeated itself countless times throughout the evening.  Contractions followed by mild obscenities, beeping, then readjusting—hour after hour.

As the night wore on, the contractions increased in both frequency and intensity; so too did the recurring pattern.  Another contraction, another obscenity aimed at me, another beeping machine, another readjustment.

The 8 o’clock hour came and went with the pattern fully in place.  The 9 o’clock hour was just as predictable.  At 10PM, the pattern repeated again.  A contraction—more intense than the last—low-grade profanity, the predictable beeping of the monitor that had been slipping out of place all night.  Only when the nurse entered in, there was nothing to readjust.  The alarm was sounding, but the monitors were in the right place. Now it was the nurse who was alarmed. 

She made a call and within seconds an army of medical staff was at the bedside.  We were both terrified, and I was pushed to the side, away from Evangeline’s bed to make room what I was hoping wasn’t a “crash cart”; it was.  Unbeknownst to us at the time, the umbilical cord was wrapped around baby’s neck, slowly choking him to death.  The beeping alarmed us that his heart rate was critically low. I didn’t know that, but I did recognize the Dixie cup a Lamaze instructor had once showed me.  The doctor attached it to the baby’s head and pulled while Evangeline pushed.

Hours before he was expected, but within only minutes, our son was ingloriously wrenched from the womb, purple, not breathing, a cord wrapped around his neck, and with a portion of his head perfectly molded into the shape of a Dixie cup.  Critical seconds felt like hours as the doctor cut the cord, had to literally resuscitate him, got him breathing, put him on a warm bassinet, and started tending to Evangeline who just had a 7-pound human pulled out of her far too forcefully.  

I stood in the middle of the room, not knowing what to do.  My wife to my right was disoriented from the trauma, understandably in some bit of shock.  My new son to my left was alone, screaming in an incubator at the nightmare of this strange new world.  I couldn’t get to Evangeline because of the swarm of people tending to her.  But from beyond the mass of doctors and nurses, I heard her say, “Where is my son?”  

So I went to him.  There he lay, screaming under the warm glow of bright artificial light with a horrible Dixie-cup shaped bruise on his head.  In that moment I did what I had trained myself to do for the last nine months.  I went to his side, and in a voice my college buddies and I had once used to call each other “Lame,” I said, “Hey buddy, this is your daddy speaking!  How’s it going in there?”

He stopped crying immediately.  He opened his eyes and began searching for that familiar voice.  A visible calm overcame his body as I kept talking to him about sports, the weather, his beautiful mommy….

This was a traumatic event for him too: Until that point, the only life he knew was a warm, cozy 98 degree womb, and now he was in a cold world with lights and sounds and smells that were new and terrifying.  He had almost choked to death by the very thing that had been feeding him.  And now his poor head was bruised by a vacuum. Yet, when everything was traumatic and frightening and cold and strange, there was a still small voice that he recognized, and that in some unexplainable way let him know he was not alone, that he was safe.  

Everything in his little world was strange and frightening.  But one thing cut through the fear and brought comfort, peace, and security, even if he couldn’t explain it, even if he didn’t know why: It was the familiar, reassuring voice of his dad, a voice he knew, words he recognized.  

“Hey buddy, this is your daddy speaking.” 

For him, that phrase—what he had heard so many times from my voice—made the world right again.