I’m a guy and I’m actually shocked at what this guy did. This happened a week or two ago with my one of my friend’s coworkers. Names have been changed to prote…eh, I don’t actually know any of the names. I’ll make some up.
OK, so Edwardo works in the research area of a hospital. His wife is pregnant with, I believe, their first child. Before this time, coworkers ask him if he’s going to take any time off work to be with the baby. He sort of shrugs his shoulders and says “eh…I’ll probably take that afternoon off.”
Turns out even that didn’t happen.
So his wife, Felicity, is in labor and Edwardo is still working at the lab. Coworkers know about his wife and suggest that he take her into the hospital. He says he can’t stop his experiment or his results will be ruined. Another coworker, let’s call him Raul, offers to take over the experiment. Just get your wife down to that maternity ward!
So Edwardo reluctantly goes and gets his wife. Half an hour later Raul gets a call.
“I’m downstairs in the hospital with Felicity. She hasn’t checked in yet. I’m thinking about coming back upstairs to finish the experiment.”
At this point Raul is ready to have a heart attack. “Get Felicity checked in!” he screams.
So apparently he does. Later that afternoon, my friend, whose name is the only one I know but she kinda looks like a Samantha, goes up to Raul.
“Did you know that Edwardo is back here again?”
“What? What’s he doing?”
“He’s in the break area eating his lunch and reading the newspaper,” she says.
So they finally get him out of there and back downstairs. Now here are the two kickers: 1) by coming back upstairs, he missed his child’s birth. 2) by not checking her in sooner, she missed the time period where she could have gotten pain killers for the birth.
Soooooooooo, anyone wanna lay odds on this being Edwardo and Felicity’s last kid?
I bet he’ll be just as attentave as a father as he is a husband. :rolleyes:
I, for one, couldn’t imagine not being there when my son was born. Woe be unto anyone who tried to keep me from there.
Opposite story.
A good friend of mine was about 18 months pregnant when she did her oral defense for her dissertation. (I mean she was Waaaaay out to here ::holding hands clasped together out in front of stomach: Anyway, we both are in the computer lab after her defense and she’s making changes to her dissertation and blowing off contractions. Five minutes later, she’s still typing and puffing again. Five more minutes, still puffing. Everyone is trying to get her to go to the hospital but she keeps saying that she’s fine and that she just has a few more edits to do. Somebody told her advisor who came into the computer lab and basically dragged her out of her seat and took her to the hospital. She checked into the hospital and had the baby (her first) about half an hour later.
Heck, after all, it was her dissertation we’re talkin’ 'bout.
A) When his wife wises up and either 1) drags him in for marriage counciling or 2) divorces him and he remarries
or
B) When he starts having an extra-marital affair.
Let me tell you, I raged into holy hell at (former)Roommate for him going out and sitting in the car (“because I was bored in the waiting room”) when I needed him there during a non-routine mammogram. Granted, he could not be in the room with me, but it’s the fact of knowing he was there that helped. When I found out he left, and I spent ten minutes waiting for him (thinking he was in the bathroom), I explained to him the necessity of trust in a relationship and the closeness of the bond between two people. In other words, if he left me in a lurch like that again, having to get the bad news from the doctor ALONE, BY MYSELF, WITH NO EMOTIONAL SUPPORT AND COMFORT FROM HIM, he was not getting “any” for quite a long time. He honestly did not understand the need to be there, but put in those terms, he did.
He had not missed one exam afterwards.
There are certain times you need the emotional support of your your spouse/SO - the birth of your child is certainly one of those times. Yes, he may be sitting in the waiting room unable to do anything to help.
Call it an emotional response, but I’d say this guy is quite insensitive.
Bunny Girl, it is possible she may not have known that he was like this. I’ve known of people who were the nicest one the outside, but could not handle the stress of a situation like this.
Oh god, I’ll bet they go on to have three more kids.
I know women who put up with inattention and self-centeredness worse than this, and husbands who put up with the worst harping you’ve ever seen. Still, they add to their family.
Case in point: a friend of mine knows a woman on her pregnancy list who brags (brags!) that when her husband forgot to bring the baby seat to the hospital after their first child was born, she refused to use the ones the hospital loans for just such occasions. She made her husband drive back home (over a 2 hour round trip) solely to “teach him a lesson and teach his something about responsibility.”
I know a woman whose husband gets queasy easily so he wasn’t there for the birth (understandable). But he has also never changed a single diaper. Not even the wet ones. He has cheated on her, left her, called her ugly & stupid, etc. He’s so uninvolved and unreliable that she can’t even leave the kid with him for 15 minutes without one or both of them losing it. But they keep getting back together and she’s eagerly looking forward to their next little one. I think she thinks it will bring them closer.
I know a couple that didn’t consider child birth to be particularly magical. The wife didn’t consider it to be particularly more interesting than going in to get a mole removed.
She just wanted him to help her to the hospital as necessary and to be on call should something go wrong.
Yes, its weird, but they were both honestly fine with it. She didn’t particularly want him there, he didn’t particularly want to be there. He took her to the hospital and then went and saw a movie, and another. He went and checked on her and then went and saw another. Halfway through he got the call that the baby had been born and he cut out of the movie and saw the baby.
Weird? I think so. But it’s their life and their relationship. And their happy with it.
It may take her a while, but if she’s a healthy human woman, she’ll surely divorce him some day.
It’ll be at least 6 weeks until he gets any, and only if she gets “needy”. Affection and closeness doesn’t sound like they have a prime spot in this marriage.
Funny. I said the exact same thing when they told me this story.
“You bastard! You could have waited another hour to meet [Chitlin A]. You don’t take phone calls in a movie theater!”
He assured me that he was sitting near the exit, had the phone on vibrate, and answered it in the lobby. That’s his story but I view him with suspicion, just in case.
Anyway, we both are in the computer lab after her defense and she’s making changes to her dissertation and blowing off contractions. Five minutes later, she’s still typing and puffing again. Five more minutes, still puffing. Everyone is trying to get her to go to the hospital but she keeps saying that she’s fine and that she just has a few more edits to do. Somebody told her advisor who came into the computer lab and basically dragged her out of her seat and took her to the hospital. She checked into the hospital and had the baby (her first) about half an hour later.