Sweet Nothings

The story so far: Wednesday morning, April 19th. No sooner had our heroine Charlotte been born than she was separated from her parents and whisked off to the Special Care Baby Unit (SCBU) to be monitored, due to suspected poo-swallowing. Eww.      The hospital As prospective parents, nobody tells you about the SCBU. Although we were cheerfully informed of the myriad potential horrors of labour, we blithely assumed that we would be able to cuddle our newborn child and indulge in the promised skin-to-skin bonding as soon as it popped out. The odds of a baby ending up there are admittedly low, but the sombre ward was still close to fully-occupied when we warily trudged in. Bassinets and incubators bore tiny boys and girls of varying fragility, with some parents maintaining pensive beside vigils. From the whiteboard in reception we could see that one child had been born at 28 weeks and must have been living there for months. Although from this perspective Charlotte was one

The Birthing Centre does exist. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Our local hospital offers a free tour for parents-to-be on a Thursday evening. What seemed like fifty other couples turned up alongside us, in an Attack of the Pregnant Women-style scenario. The Centre’s rooms are spacious and replete with birthing pools, sofas, birth balls and many other lovely facilities to enable your baby to arrive in five-star comfort. Tellingly, only one was occupied at that time. But, they say that as long as there are no complications with your labour, you too will be able to give birth here; and they say that plenty of lucky women do. They say a lot of things. My wife’s labour started at 4am on Tuesday April 18th, four days after our due date. The contractions were light and infrequent, and after I’d worked from home all day we went for a leisurely walk around the park and had dinner. At around 9pm, the pain set in and we retreated to our bedroom with stopwatch app in hand. As the