Victoria and I had been married for almost 13 years and known each other for nearly twenty. Although we were both flirting with middle age, this baby girl would be our first child. I could count on one hand the number of babies I’d held (but in no way was responsible for keeping alive!) in my life, and Victoria’s credentials listed a stint as a teenage babysitter as her primary experience. We were entering parenthood as true freshmen. Still, it’s not like we were completely inept—we were functioning adults, with actual jobs. Plus, we had the advantage of knowing one another pretty well.

Victoria was the diligent one, the one who enjoyed hard work, the maddeningly detailed person who oscillated comfortably between her fiery Italian roots, and her mom’s warm Alaska Native stoicism—equal parts white hot temper and zen patience, with a dash of street smarts from her early years in Brooklyn, NY. I was the idea guy, the big picture person, meta if you will, prone to jumping from thing to thing with blind optimism and a we’ll-figure-out-the-details-later! action plan. It worked, our version of yin and yang, for the two of us. How this model translated into parenthood was yet to be determined.

Shortly after my sage advice that Victoria simply relax, the nurse pointedly assured her that we did the right thing coming in to the hospital, that she was smart to listen to her body, especially at this late stage of pregnancy when you never can be too careful. There were smirks radiating from underneath those masks, I just knew it.

The nurse monitored Victoria’s blood pressure, which was slowly coming down, and shuttled vials of blood to the lab. Earlier in her pregnancy Victoria had been diagnosed with borderline gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, the latter a complication marked by persistently high blood pressure. Both of these issues posed risks for our unborn baby girl and required careful management. For weeks we’d been pricking Victoria’s finger daily to measure blood sugar levels, and discussing safe birthing options with our doctor, including scheduling an early-induction date a little more than a week later.

I knew the gravity of all of this, of course, yet somehow managed to resent the fact that we’d extracted ourselves from the safety of our bedroom and driven into the Wild West of the coronavirus, armed only with homemade cloth masks, copious amounts of hand sanitizer, and a trunk full of weekend-wear. This resentment bubbled up inside me, literally, in the form of painful and overwhelming intestinal bloating at the precise moment Victoria’s nurse reassured her that we’d made the right choice to join her in this particular version of hell. As she spoke her tender words, I clenched my rectum, and quietly prayed for her to leave.

As soon as the nurse complied, I darted to the bathroom that adjoined our room, just on the other side of a paper-thin hospital wall. Once inside I found a second door that led to another hospital room (A shared bathroom?!? Another paper-thin wall!), and no discernible locks on the doors. This did not promote the type of comfort and security that one often needs when resolving a hot air balloon of flatulence. As soon as I came to rest on the toilet, I was convinced I’d heard the nurse return to our room. I imagined the entire nursing staff looking for me, their ears pinned to the door, awaiting the faintest of sounds to confirm my location. I paused mid-blow, buttoned up, flushed, and emerged from the bathroom as if I’d just casually returned from washing my hands—it’s the responsible thing to do in this day and age after all!

The nurse was nowhere to be seen.

What’s wrong with you? Victoria asked.

My stomach, I said pivoting180 back to the bathroom.

You’re having Couvade, she scoffed.

Couvade? Is that French for COVID or something?

No! Cou-VADE.

She’d mentioned this before, but here she offered an unprompted reminder that Couvade syndrome was the term for the sympathetic response a husband sometimes has when his wife is pregnant, such as weight gain, insomnia, moodiness, or digestive issues. I balked at this.

Nope. That’s not happening.

The nurse interrupted us for another blood pressure check, and I once again assumed the posture of a normal person, while the psi inside my colon ratcheted up like a roller coaster making its initial ascent. Victoria’s blood pressure continued moderating and her anxiety seemed to be evening out. Her focus had turned to me. As soon as the nurse left again, she ordered me back to the bathroom.

It’s fine! Just go, no one cares! She said.

You seem to be doing fine! I shot back. Why is no one telling us when we can go home?

This dance continued. Each time the nurse exited, I retreated to the bathroom in search of relief. Inevitably I would hear a door slide open and the murmur of voices, to which I would respond with a prompt flush and return to my post in the room as if I’d never left. It occurred to me at some point that maybe this Couvade syndrome wasn’t so far fetched—in fact maybe Victoria and I had been volleying our collective anxiety back and forth for some time.