Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Birth ain't beautiful.

As I'm gearing up to birth a baby at the end of this summer, I'm giving extra attention to the many pictures on the Facebook announcing my friends' new babies!  It's exciting, except some ladies post a lot of naked gooey newborns and exhausted sweaty mom pictures with comments like "So beautiful!  The miracle of life!  Look at the beautiful momma!"  I even watched a live birth last week and the chatters exclaimed how beautiful the process was and how she looked like a Lotus Queen Earth Mother, or some hippie shit, I dunno.

No.

As a concept, making life is a positive, awe-inspiring, yes.  But I believe "beautiful" is far from the correct adjective.  Let me remind you of this process, ladies and gentlemen.

First, two humans engage in the most awkward, sweaty, animalistic and hilarious act (seriously, think about sex objectively and try not to laugh at the image), which results in the man shooting some viscous love liquid into a moist tunnel of skin folds, bacteria, and mucus.  Delightful.

The result shortly thereafter is Zygote Cheese.  Remember that?  The beginning of life that looks eerily like a mold spore?  Breath-taking.

Zygote Cheese.

Then the fetus goes through several stages of ugly before looking even remotely cuddly and baby-like.  The 8 week "ET jelly bean".  The 11 week "Big-headed Shrimp".  The 14 week "Lou Ferrigno Head on Nicole Richie Body".  Charming.

Hug me Mommy!  Love, Platopotamus Alien Baby.

Meanwhile, Mom's body is going through ungodly disgusting changes.  Any mucus-making orifice she owns has become a slip-and-slide - but not in a fun way, in a I think something foreign just slipped out of me way. Parts of the body become wider - the hips, the rib cage, the nose.  Nothing says "beautiful" like a 4 foot wide nose on a pizza face.  The boobs grow also.  Awesome, right?  Except so do the nipples.  The big sexy dark teacup nipples.  Stretchmarks everywhere.  Cellulite everywhere.  Veins everywhere.  Hair everywhere.  Yes, personal hygiene does become a challenge at some point (but to be fair, we put up with with you stinky men for our entire lives).  Heavenly.

Finally comes the big day.  Somehow a microscopic single sperm and an egg have developed into an 8 pound being floating in water inside of a woman's torso, peeing in it and drinking it too!  When the fetus has finished development, it shoots out hormones through the placenta into mom's body through some creepy mom-fetus language, and it says "Hey!  I'm ready to come out of your vagina now!"

Here I will admit, some women manage to not look atrocious during labor.  Hypnobabies helps some apparently.  An epidural helps a lot.  Most laborous ladies though, are struggling with the pain of their insides simultaneously imploding and exploding, and so they make some very not beautiful faces, gestures, and body movements.  Not to mention the grunts and groans suggesting they're pooping out a St. Bernard.

At some point, if it didn't happen days earlier, the mucus plug will make an appearance.  It's like a poorly mixed raspberry Jello shot.  This suggests the cervix is dilating.  What's a cervix?  It's a zip tie at the meeting place of the vagina and the uterus to keep all the baby mess in and all the Daddy mess out (zing!).

Even a heart-shaped mucus plug still had to fall from a vagina.

At the completion of dilation, the zip tie has expanded enough to fit a bagel through it, if you're into that sort of thing (or just a baby I guess).  The baby then begins its descent down through the very love tunnel that it and its siblings and its fallen comrades originally entered, lubricated by pee-water fluid, blood, and a white Cheez Whiz coating called vernix.

Somehow, the vagina pulls off the greatest magic trick known to mankind, and expels a baby.  Sometimes, due to the magician's miscalculations, it rips.  Yup, just tears right open.  Then some lady with some gloves and a mask and a spotlight gets all up in it with some needle and thread and says, "Do you want to keep the old model or should I give you the upgrade?"

So then you have this Cheez Whiz baby there looking like a wet old man in his birthday suit, still connected to you by a curly fry flesh hose and the lovely raw-beef-and-butthole organ known as the placenta.  That eventually makes its way out, and then all Mom is left with is her tiger-striped mud flap belly, and her exploding boobs.  HELLO picture opportunity!  Ravishing.

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I admit I don't mind at all seeing those intimate pictures, but I'll be damned if this is not gross!


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