Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood

by Michael Lewis

You might think that people who work in hospital maternity wards have some special feeling for new mothers. You’d be wrong. Some of them enter the spirit of the occasion, and a few do it with obvious pleasure. But an astonishing number seem to resent any woman who has had the nerve to reproduce. To ensure that she thinks twice before she does it again, they bang bedpans against her door every twenty minutes, holler down the halls all hours of the night, ignore all her gentle requests, and, in general, exude the warmth and charm of an old Soviet border guard. “Oh, great, another fucking baby,” I half expected a few of them to say as they breathed their heavy sighs over my wife’s pale, spent body. For all I know, this is sound hospital strategy. Certainly, the atmosphere in the recovery ward discourages anyone from staying longer than necessary. The patient remains on the premises just long enough for the hospital to collect the data it needs to prove to the courts that it didn’t kill her.