09. As D-Day Approaches

They say ‘mard ko dard nahi hota’ (men does not feel pain) with pride. But they forget, aurat ko dard hota hai tab hi jaa ke maard payda hota hai! It’s through the pain of a woman that men are born. Pain is not something to be ashamed of.

Some people says that women forget the pain of labor, had they remembered they would have never wanted to be pregnant again. The researchers have underestimated mothers. If that was true, they would have fainted during labor itself. In fact, I have heard many men fainting just watching their wives. Truth is, men not only feel the pain, but are afraid as well, especially so, in the last few months. It is normal for both of you to worry about the final delivery. This too shall pass!

Human childbirth is so weird that it almost defies evolution. Pain is an evolutionary warning to avoid life-threatening things. Why than is give giving childbirth painful in humans? In fact the saying that women forget the pain of labor is not entirely true. It may be true for mothers who has mild pain during childbirth, but definitely not for those who went through the trauma of painful birth. Human childbirth is not only painful, but also very risky for both mother and baby. It is a compromise evolution made to help us stand on our feet.

Becoming upright made us weak, slow, and poor tree climbers. The pain you may have in your back from the long office hours, you can thank bipedalism for it. In this new arrangement, the pelvis had to bear our full weight when we stand. So, it needed a small alteration that gave the pelvis of bipedallers a unique shape. The load on the pelvis reshaped the legs in a way that females now have a narrower birth canal, not convenient for delivering babies. Evolution had to trade-off between the advantages of bipedalism versus the risks of giving birth.

The narrow birth canal meant that the baby had to come out before its head was fully-grown. Homo sapiens babies are born with a brain size of less than 30% of adults. That makes our kids more immature at birth than the newborns of any other species. Adolf Portmann dubbed this as “secondary altriciality”, and Ashley Montagu calls it “exterogestate fetuses”. It takes at least a full year for a newborn Homo sapien baby to reach the mental level of a newborn great ape. That’s a lot of time being vulnerable in a wild world.

But, at the end, it all works out. Thankfully, we don’t live in the wild anymore.

One thing that made us really worried was baby’s movement. 22weeks passed and we could not feel her move. Then on the 23th week she told me that she felt something in her stomach. Is it gas, or is she moving? She was sure it was our baby. I still could not feel her, but she did.

Few weeks later I felt her for the first time. Those jerks and kicks grew stronger as weeks passed, and then we could actually see her move! She was probably dancing to the beat ‘I like to move it move it!’ We talked to her, sang her songs. Isn’t it amazing that she could actually hear us?

The last few months can be tiring. The baby grows rapidly creating stretch marks in mommy’s tummy. Don’t be afraid when you look at your wife’s tummy, be happy for the fact that your baby is growing well. Some of her pregnancy symptoms return in the last trimester. She might be having back aches as well. This is your excuse to touch your wife, give her a gently message. Easy way to add some points to your kitty. Remember, happy wife means happy life!

MRI scans have shown that mothers brain shrinks by 5% in the third trimester. While we focus on the changes in mother’s body, it is the brain that changes the most. The loss of grey matter is not a cause of concern, barring memory loss, occasional mood swings, sleep issues during pregnancy. But they are temporary. Things gets better after pregnancy and the grey matter is regained. This is an extra phase of brain development that males miss. Mother’s brain gets totally rewired post pregnancy and grows in areas related to childcare. This helps mothers understand kids expressions and needs better.

Technology has advanced a lot. We went for the third trimester Doppler USG. That’s when we saw her face for the first time. That face finally looks like a human being. She is no alien. Now it was the long wait for the day we were actually going to hold her.