MayDay MayDay – Belated Happy Labour Day

01 May

Extending a very warm greeting to all women who have experienced labour or are in labour and to those that may experience labour at some point in their lives. Ladies, we adore you and are so beyond words, in awe of you. All through my formative years I have grown up thinking having children must be an easy thing to do in life – in my neighborhood alone, every house save ours boasted of a mean of 5 little monsters per household. Going into labour is a phenomenon unlike no other which a man truly cannot begin to understand even if he has laboured over it for 9 months. I do not intend for this post to become some kind of a frivolous chatter by the nutter in yours truly…rather I will like to think of it as an ode; never mind if it is entirely in prose ( you didn’t notice that) to the Woman in labour - to the resident resilience in women from my neighborhood who have been through hell and back, each time they had a visitation of the stork . Who are we kidding here? Why romanticize the stork story when it is plain the husband/partner is the prime suspect responsible for this their most precarious station in life ? Women cannot be the weaker of the sexes, for surely, SHE has chosen the sturdier of the sexes whose threshold for pain and suffering is far greater than that of a man’s to carry forth a pregnancy and to deliver an offspring. Come to think of it, we men would be nervous wrecks waiting for labour to first start and to then take its course over a couple of hours and maybe even an odd day or two?
Do you find the idea of men getting pregnant even a teeny weeny bit enamoring? And how would men you reckon fare during labour? Equally, just how important is going into labour for today’s woman and do women who decide on an elective C-section love their babies any less than your garden variety push and shove types no pun intended. Since it takes two to tango and in the present context to very well, make a baby is it not somehow remiss to not legally require fathers in the labour suite alongside their better halves and to make a pseudo-liberated society, such as ours yours and theirs, see the light.
These are just a couple of questions that crop into our mind as both of us ultra-Gay fathers-to-be wait it out in the delivery suite, sitting anything but poker faced before this made- to- order surrogate mother of our child whose waters have only right this minute broken, and with it so has our male chauvinism.