So much I don't know

I hope my wife disagrees, but I'm not about to ask her, even though thirty-plus years have run by. The truth of the matter is that the moment that I felt myself among the Absolute Worst Husbands was when I should have felt the greatest glory--at the birth of my children. Well, let me edit that line a bit: at the moment my wife gave birth to our children. 

Some husbands stand by with cameras to record every savory moment. At times in my life I have been regaled by tales of heartwarming spousal piety--how meaningful it was for Jake or Ed or Kyle to experience those birthing moments with their wives. 

Okay. I wish it warn't so, but it warn't that way for me. I'm a Calvinist, for pity sake; I know the bite of guilt. What I'm saying is that I probably never, ever felt so useless as when I stood there, holding my wife's hand.

We'd lugged pillows to countless classes where earth mothers reviewed all the glorious anatomical details of the birth process, details I tried to tell myself I really wanted to know. I do know what I supposed to feel; but truthfully, I didn't.  While my wife was in the throes of pain I'll never feel, the doctor who sat at the receiving end at my son's birth talked about having read something I'd written in a church paper, expressed at least a bit of his disapproval, in fact. Seriously, that happened.

But the moment those pink bundles arrived and arrived in tact, we both experienced miraculous recovery. A novelist friend of mine once said he thought the finest way to finish a novel had to be birth because absolutely nothing else we'll ever experience is so affirming as birth, as bringing forth new life. Sometime pick up a copy of Touches the Sky, and you'll see I, once upon a time, took his advice to heart.

Even though I felt as useless as I did, it's fair to say that watching my wife take those babies in her arms just a few moments after those births has to rank among the most beautiful portraits I have in a treasured album that exists only in my memory. (That we have no video doesn't mean we own no unforgettable images.)

That kind of joy was something I was surprised not to find on this young mother's face. She'd just borne her first child--we arrived a short time after her delivery. The baby looked healthy and was, or so said the midwife, a tiny bundle of life wrapped up in a blanket, almost Christ-like for some reason. But, this mom's face, her whole countenance (to use an old word), seemed joyless.

I wouldn't call her sad really, and there's no real fear or any anger whatsoever. What's on her face seemed, right then, roughly akin to boredom, as if what she'd been through meant no more to her, perhaps, than spreading clean clothing out to dry on the matted roof of her hut.

Not that life was drudgery--that's not what I saw on her face and still do when I see this picture. What I saw was a kind of passive acceptance of what had just happened, at a moment when one might expect at least a sparkle of, well, ecstacy. She'd just had a baby, a son, and that sweetheart was healthy and strong, and it was her first.

Instead, she looked as if what she'd just gone through--how can I say this best?--really didn't amount to much at all.

And maybe by her estimation it didn't. Maybe in her world, having children is less a joy than obligation, Who knows?--perhaps she had no reason not to expect another dozen such episodes in her life, some of them less successful. When she'd go back to her village, there'd likely be no balloons, no streamers hanging from the ceiling of the hut, no cake, no cards, no hugs. The father hadn't even come with her to the clinic. Perhaps whatever gratification she could take from having just given birth to her baby was the simple fact that she'd done her duty. It's entirely possible she could have been one of his several wives.

Some who know far more than I do claim that animism, the old religion of many in rural west Africa, creates iron-clad passivity by teaching adherents that one's life is blessed or cursed, willy-nilly, by strong spirits so vastly beyond our control that believing in human choice is nothing less than silly. 

Then again, maybe this young, young mom is just plain worn out. She's just a kid, and she just had a baby.

My wife witnessed a birth at another rural clinic in another African country, and was immensely thankful for the experience. But she said she was surprised that the mother didn't seem more excited at what had just happened, more pleased, more thrilled.

Some things one witnesses in other worlds, in other cultures, are almost immediately translatable on the basis of our mutual humanness--women laughing together around the village well some mornings. There is no common village well in Alton, Iowa, but their laughing and spoofing?--I think one could see that happen anywhere in countless coffee shops.  A half-dozen guys sit around a tiny fire heating tea; I don't have to have an ear for their language to translate their joshing around.

But there are other images whose mystery is beguiling, and this is one I have in my camera roll--the taciturn face of a very young and beautiful mom holding her very first baby; and the passivity, the seeming joylessness that seems so clearly written all over her. What is on her face and isn't is so far from white, Western, middle-class birth experience that this grandpa simply can't read what it is and why it's there.

I don't know how to understand it, how to translate it.  I wish I did. I'd like to know.