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| Pregnancy Preparation For Women |
And then in the actual labour, N got stuck, so she was a Caesarean, and that was pretty scary. You think you've just about plucked up enough courage to stomach watching a natural birth, and then a doctor says, 'Oh, we're going to whip her out by Caesarean, do you want to come and watch?' And you think, mm, I'm not sure I'm really up to seeing my wife being sliced in half, but I suppose I'll have to. So I did.
I didn't watch that much, because they erect a sort of sheet, because Gina was conscious during this. She had opted, in typical Gina style, not to have a general anaesthetic, so that she would be awake when the baby came out. So they put a sheet up so she couldn't see herself being cut open. I was with her at the head end, but occasionally looking around the sheet to see what was going on.
Basically, push the stomach to one side, push the small intestine to the other side, reach in and ... well, it was a bit like scraping vanilla out of a bucket in an ice cream van. They scraped this child out. The whole thing was pretty ... scary.
So that first one was reasonably traumatic and memorable, and Gina contrasts it with P's [their third]. I was quite attentive for the first one, mopping Gina's brow, bringing her water and things, being very protective of her, and making sure all the various things on our birth plan were done. When P was born, which was an early evening birth. I went in, and there was a football match I wanted to watch, so I watched football on television for the first hour and a half while she was in labour. I then stole her pillow and blanket and went to sleep in an armchair and had to be woken up by the nurse about five minutes before Gina was due to give birth, because I had slept through five hours of labour, even though Gina was screaming a few feet away.
And O, as the middle child - of course neither of us have any memories whatsoever of how O was born, so she might have been delivered by DHL one day, we really don't remember. She was also the child that we didn't bother to name for three weeks. Because middle children just lose out, I think. Not that we knew at the time she was going to be a middle child.
FERGUS: The first birth reminded me of waiting for a delayed flight. Same sort of plasticky chairs, same feeling of tiredness and lots of magazines to read, and vaguely feeling that you should be doing something to speed things up, but not really knowing what to do. You feel very supernumerary. You feel very much that you are not the focus.
And the second one I was fine with that because me had a doula, who was a very good friend of both of ours. She basically just took total control and told us both what to do. And the odd thing was that Flora is the only person I know who specified that she didn't want to have a water birth who ended up having one.
The midwife came in and said, "We have a water birthing facility free," and the doula said, "Right, we're going to have it," and dragged her off and made her sit in it. Because usually it's the other way round, isn't it? People who want water births always end up having epidurals and the rest.
Both births were at St Thomas's, and both rooms had views of the House of Commons, which was very nice, I remember going for a walk in the middle of the night, doing a loop over Westminster Bridge and Trafalgar Square and then back down and round, and looking up at the clouds, which were orange with reflected light, and thinking, I will look at this scene and I will look at clouds like this again, but everything will have changed. To find out more, you can check out Pregnancy Preparation For Women.