Having babies at The Home

My wife spent 40 hours in labor with our first child. I say this as an enlightened father since I was at the delivery of both our children. Altho I was merely an object which my wife cursed and berated, like the Priest in “The Exorcist”. The excruciating pain of a creature trying to escape her womb caused her to attempt to cast the evil onto me with a profanity laden exorcism.

My wife endured horrors that would’ve made the Marquis de Sade say “Damn man, cut her some slack”. She was breathing, grunting, sweating and pushing while the nurse was buffing up her biceps using the bed rails and my wife’s abdomen to practice her curls. As the doctor was feverishly probing her insides with Satan’s salad tongs searching for a baby or an end to this ordeal. Finally it looked like the blessed moment was upon us. And not a minute too soon.

I was giddy with excitement, my breathing was short and quick and my pulse was racing. I was waiting for the moment when I could know for sure that our daughter was healthy and safe. But it was not to be. What popped out of her womb could only be described as a featureless, cone shaped lump of flesh with 2 blow holes on top like a beluga with dual exhausts.

I looked with horror at the doctor who was as cool as a poker player. I looked at the nurse, pleading with her to make this abomination unto God go away. I looked for a hammer to end this hellish nightmare. I looked back at the nurse with an expression of “I don’t know what you see, but I am looking at the freakish spawn of my wife’s procreations with a submarine”. An inhuman torpedo baby.

The doctor was smiling, holding the creature and told us that we have a beautiful baby girl. I thought I was trapped in an episode of the Twilight Zone. I expected to hear Rod Serling’s voice explaining to the audience why our child was a flesh torpedo. My first concern was how do we feed it? My second was back to that hammer. Because whatever this is it must not be allowed to live. What if it breeds?

I glanced at my wife with a look of “Dear God, what have you done”? My fear filled the room and she could smell it. She asked if everything was alright. I wanted to scream “Hell no evacuate the building, we can only hope to escape with our lives”.

But as the nurse handed our child to my wife I noticed that the blow holes had transformed into a nose and she had ears. Her eyes were now open and she obviously had a mouth since she was screaming incessantly (I had thought that the screams were my own). I had been unprepared for what 40 hours stuck in a birth canal can do to a pliable infant. She was still shaped like a cone but the sock cap covered that nicely.

In the end we had a perfectly healthy daughter. But I still have nightmares. Late night visions of my wife as a submarine patrolling the oceans depths to keep our country safe. Shooting babies at Russian submarines.