Birthday: It’s Worse for the Man… what if men had babies?

Tick, tick. tick…

If someone doesn’t tell me WHAT IS GOING ON soon I’m going to chuck that irritating, mockingly rhythmic clock out of the window…

Waiting to give birth…waiting, and waiting, in all three of my sitting-around-in-a-hospital experiences. You wait to see if the lines appear on the pregnancy test. You wait in impatient anticipation for that precious first scan. You wait for nine whole months for that day that everything has been building up to…and then you wait around for just about everything as you lie strapped up to an uncomfortable monitor and watch the seconds pass by in slow motion, going on and on and on…

It’s a curious time – full of emotional upheaval, full of expectations and also kind of all consuming…it’s like a tiny island in your life. To the point that, when there’s actually a baby there lying on the bed covered in goo and yuck and all manner of stuff it’s actually kind of a shock.

But only to the woman going through it all, and her partner. Women give birth every day, after all. There’s nothing new, and nothing particularly interesting about that.

Except – well, it is kind of interesting really. But it’s not until you look at it from an entirely different perspective that you realise that. And that’s the perspective that ‘Birthday‘, the new drama from Sky Arts, encapsulates perfectly. Written by Joe Penhall, who experienced a bit of an ‘I must write about this!’ epiphany whilst experiencing his wife undergo an epidural as part of a fairly traumatic birth process, Birthday was originally performed at the Royal Court Theatre. Then Sky Arts got their hands on it, grabbed Stephen Mangan (Episodes, and my absolute favourite Green Wing), Anna Maxwell Martin (The Bletchley Circle) and Roger Mitchell (Notting Hill), and turned it into an awesomely directed, disturbingly funny bit of television ready to be viewed by the masses on Tuesday 9th June at 9pm.

So what makes this birth story a little bit different from all the rest? Well, it’s because it’s all about a man having a baby. A heavily pregnant, hormonal and hairy, just-induced-awaiting-caesarean and really not sure about this whole ‘thing’ anymore kind of man.

And that man is Ed.

 

Ed is sitting in a hospital room, awaiting the birth of his daughter as a cheery, matter-of-fact midwife bustles in and out, offering little in the way of real reassurance and instead regularly throwing forth the ubquitous ‘don’t worry!’ when faced with questions, complaints, and demands for pain relief. In fact, the whole drama takes place inside this one small room – and because of that, Penhall has cleverly managed to convey one of the biggest things that never really comes across about medicalised modern birth: a real sense of being trapped – in an institutional and an emotional sense.

 

And it’s not just that either. Alongside the conflict and the power struggles (between Ed and his wife Lisa, and between the midwife and the doctor too) there’s also a very revealing glimpse into the procedures and indignity that having a hospital birth often forces mothers to go through. The tedium, the terror, the mess and the gunk (‘it’s like a shark attack!’) and the things that often you sort of suspect aren’t really necessary but feel like you have to submit to anyway, because after all it’s all for THE GOOD OF THE BABY and of course, you can’t put the baby at risk. The only way to really deal with it all is a kind of world-weary acceptance, and that’s quite a hard thing for men to do. Which means of course, that Birthday is full of ups and downs, of laughter and crying and screaming and tension. And of course (well, it is Stephen Mangan after all) a reasonable dose of comedy too.

 

In fact, all very well summed up as he says himself: ‘comedy softens people up, then you can slip in the emotional stiletto’.

It wasn’t at all what I expected it to be, but what it IS is an incredibly visceral, semi-surreal in a very real kind of way, curiously thought provoking 70 minutes of television. Undoubtedly, having given birth myself in hospital, I felt a kind of stirring of my subconscious as mostly forgotten memories were dragged screaming to the forefront of my mind. But not in a completely traumatic way, more in a ‘thank goodness I won’t be doing that again’ kind of sense. I think it’s fair to say that the impact watching Birthday will have is likely to vary greatly, dependent on how, if at all, you as a viewer have experienced birth before.

Perhaps, like birth itself, watching it might change the way you see the world. Or at the very least, inspire some conversations about birth and all it’s curious complexities that might not otherwise ever have happened.

 
A big thumbs up to Mumsnet Bloggers and Sky Arts who arranged an amazing preview of Birthday in order to give me something to write in this post 🙂 Thank you!