My wife recently gave birth to our first child. It was a grueling home-birth which lasted about 28 hours. Grueling is an understatement: it was the most arduous, intense, primal and excessive experience I’ve ever seen anyone go through. It’s as if she was being tortured or punished. Merely watching someone go through such an experience was agonizing. Her physical responses to the most excruciating moments will be seared into my memory forever, enough for a man to wince for a lifetime.
The labour was a success without the need for any medical intervention despite several moments of doubt throughout that it would escalate. We are incredibly fortunate and have been blessed with a new baby boy.
What’s a new father to make of this experience?
I think of the balance between the sexes: My woman has put her body on the line to forward our family lineage and I now feel obliged to do the same. Through motherhood, women have their hero’s journey encoded into their lives. It appears that men, on the other hand, must rise up through sheer determination to find and conquer their respective hero’s journeys.
Many traditionalist men of the modern age want traditional wives who will birth them plenty of children in arduous labour, go through 9 months of physical discomfort for each of said children; not to mention have her do 24/7 monitoring and feeding of the babies and toddlers which they require so they don’t simply die.
To the men who want such wives: what are you bringing to the table to make yourself worthy of such a woman? What struggle are you conquering that is equivalent to the difficulty of childbearing and labour? If you can’t uphold an equivalent end of the bargain then you don’t deserve such a wife as described.
The main rebuke that men have against women with regards to their respective gender’s difficulty of struggle is: well, men get drafted to war. To that I say: if you’re sitting around waiting for a hypothetical draft to uphold your end of the bargain, that’s not good enough. We already are at war.