On Saturday our homebirth education class gathered for a reunion in  Prospect Park.  In place of a bunch of pregnant couples sitting in a circle, you now had a bunch of new parents, with infants on their laps.  It was quite a scene.

Almost everyone showed up to sit beneath a large tree by the baseball field, including our instructor Natashia Fuksman, to visit and share our experiences.

We exchanged our birth stories over chips and bagels.  It was totally informal.

Listening to each couple’s story, it was amazing just how different each one was.  I thought our birth had a lot of drama but actually our birth was kinda text-book in the sense that it progressed in a particularly typical way.  Other couples had many more challenging and more unexpected births — some had very different journeys in fact.  Two couples ended up transferring to the hospital.   And while we have had a lot of difficulty and pain with breastfeeding, other couples have had a much easier time.

Each one of us had an epic of our own fashion. Whatever the story, we all now had these amazing babies on our laps.  Quiet, content, alert babies.  We were all parents.

It was comforting to see everyone and their babies, and here such diverse paths.  Clearly, there is no straight path to birth, or to being a parent for that matter.  Yet somehow, each baby grows up.

Theory has been making lots of grunting noises of late.  They can be disturbing because it is not proper babbling, and often it is difficult to discern if she is upset.  I will watch her on her play mat while I am typing and see that she is just playing but still the grunts are hard to take.  But on Saturday, many of the babies were making exactly the same noise.  So there was a little bit of relief, making the groans and grunts more tolerable.

It was also nice to hang with the other dads who are all very involved in care giving.  At times when I am out with Theory, particularly in the morning when I have her in the Moby and I am taking Jasmine out for her morning business, I feel a bit observed.  We live smack in front of the NY Stock Exchange so at 8 am I am out there picking up dog shit while bankers and stock brokers scuffle off to work.  I get the sense that I am a bit foreign to them.  And there is the persistent watchful eyes of the security guys, for whom this must seem very “unmanly.”  So being in a group of men who were all totally engaged with their babies was refreshing.

I am hoping we continue to get to together as a cohort.  Everyone brings such a different perspective.