Some helpful pointers for dads-to-be
I'd like to give a little love today to all the older fathers out there who became first time dads during the turbulent 60s. I think we did a pretty good job for having to wing it.
My oldest daughter was born in 1967. I was all of 21. There were no childbirth classes for new dads to help get us up to speed. No Cliffs Notes or “Being a Great Dad for Dummies” books to give us at least a hint at what the job entailed. We were flying blind.
I could teach her how to play tennis or ride a bike later on, but, right then, as she was being born, I didn't have a clue on how to change a diaper or heat up a baby bottle. Swaddling? Forget about it. I had no idea what that was.
Today's dads are involved in every step of the birthing process with their wives. I think that's great. My generation just drove the car to the hospital, walked our wives in, and handed them over. That was our job. Support staff.
We weren't allowed in the delivery room. We were banished to the father's waiting room down the hall where we read the paper, watched TV and had a smoke to calm our nerves waiting for the nurse to come and get us.
It was the 1960s, the height of the Marlboro Man era. There were ashtrays everywhere, even in the father's waiting room.
The popular thinking at the time was that the delivery room was not a man's place, according to
“Hiding in the Pub to Cutting the Cord,” a University of Leeds study that gathered parents' experiences of childbirth from the 1950s onward.
“There were quite a lot of men in the '50s and '60s who couldn't cope with the idea. Equally a lot of women didn't like the idea of their husbands seeing them in that way,” the study found. “They wanted to preserve their husband's idea of the wife as a beautiful, feminine Madonna.”
OK, I get it, but it still would have been nice for husbands to be given a choice. My last child, a boy, was born in 1984, and I had that choice. By then I was armed with three children's worth of parental knowledge I didn't have in 1967.
I could swaddle and change messy diapers with the best of them. I knew never to stand in front of your baby son while giving him a warm bath or hoist him over your face too soon after a feeding.
Most important, I had found the perfect, soothing voice to make them finally go to sleep in the middle of the night.
Vin Scully calling a Dodger game on tape. It worked every time.
So, yeah, I was ready in '84, let me in that delivery room. I can handle it. No, I couldn't. It was controlled chaos with orders being shouted every second, bloody surgical instruments clanging off trays, and my wife, who seldom swears, sounding like a barroom brawler every time I asked her to push harder.
I'm going to leave it there because, like Vegas, what happens in the delivery room should stay in the delivery room.
I'm a grandfather now, and all my kids are doing great. If there's one piece of advice I can offer new fathers today, it would be don't worry, the thing you need in order to be a great dad isn't found in a birthing class or the delivery room.
It's found in your heart. Unconditional love.