The only remaining issue to understanding ritual couvade is to apply the test of modernity to it. Does it work? Or is it just some hocus-pocus, backwoods weirdness that anthropologists dote on but doesn’t have much to do with anything? How can any reasonable person believe that dressing up and pretending to have a baby serves to anchor a man during pregnancy? The answer to this question is a complicated one. But understanding the appeal of maternity for men has little to do with our concept of modernity. Week by week my back hurt more and more. Pain killers couldn’t touch it. Eventually I had to quit running because exercise aggravated the pain. It was like my rib and tenth thoracic vertebra had collided and were now sparking like downed power lines. I squirmed in my chair at work, and twisted from side to side as I drove on the freeway. I was coming apart at the seams and couldn’t understand why. Rachel was terrific. By four months she was clearly showing, and morning sickness and drowsiness were taking a heavy toll on her energies. We would sit at nights and gaze forlornly into one another’s eyes, each knowing the other was uncomfortable, each wishing he or she could swap lives with the other for just one day. Days would go by and I would numbly know that a baby was on the way. Ten months seemed like eternity. Gradually I came to think of pregnancy as a permanent condition, an ordeal that had no reasonable end. Rachel gained weight. I did too. Without exercise, with my back hurting more and more, and without a strong sense of my own center, I lay about a lot, drinking several beers or wines every evening, snacking on popcorn out of a bowl with the capacity of the Astrodome. By mid-term we were obviously going to have a baby. My back was killing me, plus someone was clearly living inside Rachel, and was pounding on the walls of her tummy, looking for secret panels, I think. Rachel was down to three or four outfits for the duration of her pregnancy, and I was down to two pairs of pants that would still fit my expansive self. We are moving more and more toward the view that modern couvade solves, in its frustrating, willy-nilly way, the same problems as ritual couvade. First, it re-inserts the man in a process from which he has been removed. His complaints serve notice to all that the change that is upon him has not gone unnoticed. In a subtler sense, a man’s psychosomatic lashing out at his own body may be as magical as anything anyone ever did in the jungles of Borneo—his bellyaching may well be an expression of his profound caring for the partner and unborn child. Despite his outward ambivalence, the expectant father may well be acting as decoy for the evil spirits of the modern world, the bogeys of stress and anxiety which prey on all our weaknesses. This is modern man’s one shot,'and in its recoil we get a glimpse of something rare today—a look at man’s unresolved need to nurture and to be nurtured. Upon visiting the genetic counselor, I got my first true taste of the horrors of parenthood. A cultivated Spaniard, he gave us computer printouts listing such possibilities as Down’s syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities, the risk of spontaneous miscarriage, neural tube defects such as anencephaly, spina bifida, congenital malformations, ethnic genetic diseases, etc. I felt my heart sink. How could I have been ignoring these terrible realities? It struck me how irresponsible I had been behaving, crossing my fingers and hoping for a lucky draw. Face it, I told myself, no one’s normal. Somehow I knew my child would be a monster of unspeakable deformity. Watching the monitor on the ultrasound machine, I saw my child for the first time—skeleton first. It was breathtaking, terrifying and gorgeous. For the first time, my knees went a bit weak. There it was, turning slowly in the monitor screen—my replacement unit, stewing away in its mother’s broth. And outside its chest (at least it looked like that) its little heart was beating away. It looked like some sort of frantic, kiss-blowing tulip. It seemed so brave to me, all of a sudden. Coming into existence, unarmed by anything at all except the will to life. There it was, the most helpless thing in the universe—and it was a juggernaut. Our worry deepened, and so did my guilt. How could I be the kind of caring, watchful parent my child deserved, I asked myself, if I continued my indulgent, crackpot ways? I felt a solemn seriousness set in. Rachel was doing all the work, while I fretted and sipped beer. I finally started reading the baby books—though I could not finish any, as I kept looking up from the books, daydreaming. My son. I kept thinking. My daughter. After all the travail of the couvade experience, there appears to be but one sure-fire cure, the birth of a child. Aspirin may help with headaches. Maalox may help settle the queasy stomach. A regimen of regular exercise may help reduce stress Suddenly, it is the man who feels omitted from the excitement of an important project. levels overall. But only a flesh-and- blood baby, squinting up at the new father through his or her swaddle of receiving blankets, can ultimately and effectively end the transformative process. Thus one great mystery comes to an end, and another, perhaps even greater mystery, makes itself known, with a fanfare of squalls and frowns. In the end, of course, it is foolish to speak of couvade as having any sort of cure. Diseases are cured, life struggles only “happen.” It would be truer to think of couvade as a cure itself, for it is nature’s instinctual school for fatherly preparation. Whatever it is that a man brings with him into couvade, he exits as a new father. Modern man is compelled to admit what the so-called savage engaged in ritual couvade knew for centuries—that it works. MA Soon it was summer. I polished off the last of the baby books and went and dug up an old shower curtain and spread it on the bed. This, I told myself, would keep all that blood from destroying the mattress and box springs. The baby still needed a name. I issued the decree that if it were a boy his name would be Isaac, for “he laughs.” My son would have a tough time in the future without a sense of humor, I decided. His would be built- in. If it was a girl? I didn’t know that yet. No name seemed right. Rachel wanted to name the child after her father, Daniel, who had passed away when she was sixteen. But Danielle seemed too francaise or something. We would be condemning our child to be coquette for life. I assured Rachel I’d come up with the right name. We attended a party at the medi- cal/dental clinic where Rachel had been working, and I watched on as she danced the tango, the jitterbug, and other steps with a dashing doctor friend. She was rotund, yet so graceful on the dance floor. She had never looked so beautiful to me. Ritual couvade achieved a variety of ends. It functioned to protect the infant and mother by serving as a “decoy” to evil spirits in the vicinity. It served as a symbolic expression of the close physical and moral bond between father and child. It signaled acceptance of a new role and status in society, lest anyone doubted. And it was a somewhat public and therefore legal admission of paternity. Ritual couvade was also a valuable outlet for potentially violent emotions. In social systems that tended to shut the father out from the rest of the family, couvade was a way for the father to reinsert himself. The beauty of ritual couvade was that it was purposeful behavior. And it was learned. It did not simply “occur” to a man to take to his bed and commence pre-enactment of a birth—it was expected, it was the law. Couvade today is, due to ignorance and lack of community support, improvisatory on the part of the father. He does what he can to achieve the same objectives sketched above, in his blind effort to assure the safety of mother, child and yes, self. He has no idea he is “doing” anything. And yet, at some subconscious or unconscious level, some kind of business is getting “done,” and in its own bumbling way it is empirical and it does indeed work. Four days after the due date, then five. Then one night we kissed one another and went off to sleep. Later Rachel told me that the phone had rung, and some fool asked her what she was wearing. Disgusted, she slammed the receiver down, and grumbling remaneuvered herself under the covers. We woke up around midnight, the bedding swamped with water. Rachel’s bag had ruptured in her sleep. We turned on the lights, glanced at one another. Without a word I rose and called Felicia, the midwife. I moved in a kind of unthinking but purposeful fog. Rachel began to worry about various things. I patted her hand and stroked her face. She had the look of a condemned prisoner. She asked me to listen through the fetuscope for a heartbeat. I listened and could detect no heartbeat. Rachel panicked. I looked at her, sucked in my breath, and told her I was picking up a beat. Counting- 140 beats per minute! It was a lie, a very dangerous one, but it relaxed Rachel, who I now saw was ready to trade her life for this new one inside her. If she was willing to take a risk, I thought, so was I. Felicia arrived, Doppler in hand, and took the baby’s pulse. My heart was tripping so quickly I half expected her stethoscope to pick it up. Beat! Beat! I urged that little tulip inside the baby, and sagged with relief when the reading showed a strong heartbeat at —get this— precisely 140 beats per minute. Believe it or There is no cure for couvade. Couvade is itself a kind of cure for fathers of their non-fatherliness, and the process is finally capped by the birth of his son, his daughter, or some fearsome multiple birth combination of the two. And the most painful couvade is the one which is most ardently avoided. Just as the mother discovers (generally around mid-afternoon of the baby’s first day) that pregnancy and birth are less significant than the greater issues of parenting that have only begun, so does the father understand that couvade is very much of a stop-gap action against a short-term problem. From birth on, the cloud of unknowing is lifted. The problems of parenthood get, if anything, more and more difficult. But the father—expectant no longer—has done his homework. He is prepared for the challenge. He may not know what exactly to expect, but at least henceforward, he will know who it is he is dealing with. In nature’s wisdom, the travail of couvade gives way to the even more heroic struggle of day-to-day fatherhood. Thus the day of birth marks the completion of the first long cycle in a man’s life. Without this process, that man’s growth, at least in one direction, can never continue. In retrospect we see that couvade is a man’s way of giving birth not only to his offspring, but in a deeper, more abiding, and more private sense, to himself. It is, or ought to be, a time of joy. For the next 20 hours, the little heart beat out time for us. Rachel and I walked, we rocked, we laughed and cried. We walked in trembling circles in the courtyard of the building. Kids on bicycles rang past us, laughing. I loved us both so much at that moment. During transition we put Rachel in our neighbor friend’s bathtub and kept the hot water coming. We sang. Took pictures. Ate popsicles. Worked. Friends drove all the way from Minneapolis to Milwaukee to help us through. Another made beet and carrot soup. I was never so proud of Rachel — you could read the will to life in the furrows of her brow. And I was proud of myself, too. No squeamishness, no fear. Except at the very end, a final shudder inside me. It was time for Rachel to push, for the baby to finally be born. All the panic rose up in me, an^ I walked outside the birthing room and stood by a window, watched the traffic pass by outside. Soon this great ordeal would be over. Soon the great unknown would reveal itself. My legs quaked far below. I nearly fainted. But I didn’t. I was done indulging. I had been through so much the past ten months. All the worry, all the evasion, ail the screwy ways I had devised to get ready for this one telling moment. I was ready. Except for one thing, our accompaniment. I flipped through my cassettes looking for a moment too long for just the right fanfare for the new person. Finally I settled on Gustav Hoist’s The Planets and returned to the bedroom. Within a half-hour (the tape was on “Saturn”) I caught the baby as it slipped from its mother’s womb. It was a little girl. She looked around, blinked once, and sighed with relief. Ahh, she said. And I held her up to look at her, to gaze into her dark, solemn eyes. I felt tears racing up my face. She felt like butter to me, impossible to be so soft and so prudent. How insipid all my worries suddenly seemed, how self-referential when all along this marvelous person was boring into existence out of next to nothing, a gob of germ, calling to itself such completeness. I thought about how hard it was for a person to come into being. Hard on the mother and hard on the father, too. Judgment that you had planned on isn’t there any more. The you that was is someone new now, everyone is new. I saw how all my convolutions and worries were maybe my way of drawing fire from the real action, which was now in my arms, blinking at the silent bedroom full of people, this hungry life, my heart. There is honor in a newborn’s eyes. It seemed to me there was honor everywhere, nobility and valor filling every seam and every interstice of the world. I forgave everyone everything, total amnesty, and after, champagne. I snipped the cord and laid the girl on her mother’s heaving breast. “This is Daniele,” I heard myself say, patting the still-wet skin. In 1985 Michael Finley was awarded a Wisconsin Aris Fellowship for fiction. More recently he became the father of a second child, Jonathan. Zola Anne Belanger is a French-Canadian artist living in the Twin Cities. This painting is part of a pregnant woman in art series. Free-Lance Graphic designer Carol Evans- Smith is a Twin Cities native. Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988 15
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