I Told My Wife Watching Her Give Birth Was Horrifying and Now She Won't Talk to Me
We can read every book and watch every documentary, but when the time comes to go through labor and birth firsthand – or be the main support person to someone giving birth – the situation is never as tame as the books make it seem. We know it’s not going to be a walk in the park, but it’s hard to put into words the emotions that will be in the room and just how messy birth can be.
Not everyone is comfortable seeing blood and other realities of birth. And depending on how the labor and birth goes, it can get pretty real. That's exactly what happened when one dad-to-be watched his wife give birth.
He wasn’t ready for all it would entail – and he has found himself in the doghouse over how he acted and what he said.
Needing advice on if he was in the wrong, OP detailed what happened in a now-deleted Reddit post. Posting to Reddit’s AITA community, he explained that he and his wife had a daughter a month ago, but his wife “still refuses” to let go about how he acted during her labor.
“I’m a very squeamish person,” he admitted. “I don’t like blood or gore and even the appearance of raw meat kinda grosses me out. I knew I was going to be in the delivery room with my wife since I wanted to be there when my daughter was born, however I was terrified of what I could see.”
His fears turned out to be justified.
“When the big day came, my wife refused an epidural for a natural birth,” he wrote. “So when she began pushing the nurse brought me over to see it.”
It sounds like watching it all go down was really bad for him. “Let me just say it was one of the most horrifying things I have ever seen in my life,” he admitted.
“When the baby started [crowning] I let out an, ‘OH MY F------ GOD’” he continued. “I also said that I was going to be sick.”
He had to turn around and couldn’t watch.
“It wasn’t a picture perfect scene,” he shared. “I was also afraid and grossed out to hold my daughter due to all the fluids and such on her. When she passed her placenta I nearly threw up in a bucket one of the nurses had to bring me.”
While he was complaining about all that, his wife, who was giving birth, heard everything. “So my wife could hear and see all of this and she let me know she wasn’t happy,” OP wrote.
His wife's feelings were hurt.
“When we got time with just us and the baby, she told me that I was acting more of a baby than our daughter and that I embarrassed her,” he recalled. “She also said I had no right to complain while she was forcing my daughter out of her vagina with no anesthesia after I’m the one who put it in her.”
He tried to apologize for how he acted and what he said, but it didn’t go well.
“I apologized, but her view of things was a lot different than mine and I said I would never forget to see the things I saw,” he wrote. “She refuses to forgive me and asserts that I was acting like a massive d--- about this, despite her refusing to forget it.”
He asked Reddit if he was in the wrong for what he did or if his wife should just let it go.
And we can probably guess what everyone felt. He needed to apologize — profusely.
“It's time to put your big boy pants on,” one person replied.
“You should’ve gone to therapy to prepare,” suggested another commenter. “In this situation you definitely should’ve stayed at the head end of the bed and just support your wife.”
“You had months to prepare. You knew childbirth wasn’t going to be messy,” pointed out someone else. “You could have just stayed by your wife’s head. But no, you had to take a look knowing you would be grossed out and then had to make a production out of it.”
“I get being squeamish but you should’ve reeled it in dude,” wrote another Redditor. “You made what was already a stressful situation worse. You could’ve stayed near her head and avoided looking at what was going on down south.”
The guy needs to say he's sorry – like yesterday and again tomorrow. And probably next week too.
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