Panicking. That's what the last thing was really about. I don't think there is a lot of stuff that doesn't merit some degree of panic in this process.

But I think for the most part I swing back and forth between abject panic and plaintive bouts of total, bizarre calm. I think we're totally ready, with a handsome nest prepared to receive our newest addition. I see the beautiful room we’ve prepared with help, and I look at the massive pile of material goods people have bestowed upon our baby, and I think we're totally set for this next thing. Bring us the baby to set into the bassinet, lay the infant on the tiny sheets in the tiny furniture. Hand me a diaper and let me perform the first great motor challenge of parenting with aplomb.

Whatever. I'm screwed. Tonight at baby class, we saw movies about three eighties couples and their birth experiments. One couple, based in Boulder, Co, were unbelievable. There must have been some massive boom in baby-related movies in 1984, because these mustache-wearing bastards are everywhere, standing next to their big bangs and feathered sides wives, flanked by nurses in thick eyeglasses and white shoes, talking about the birth experience ad nauseum.

But the first couple went with no medicine, no nothing, just raw, unadulterated baby-having. They made funny noises, and the woman was in the most incredible and exquisite pain I have ever witnessed. I simply cannot believe the pain she was experiencing. She looked like a torture victim, like she wanted to die. The nurse who runs the class came back after we saw the film and said, 'she was in so much pain.' WHY WOULD THEY SHOW THIS TO PEOPLE?

The second couple was a professional athlete and her firefighter husband. These people had an epidural, which caused a warm grin to creep across the faces of everyone in the room, men and women. Sweet dark elixir, flowing right into the spinal column, numbing all the pain. Yes. This taut and toned athlete shot out a baby and looked like she could ride her professional cycle all the way back to Rochester, or wherever they were from.

Finally, the c-section movie was distressing, because it looked fake. They cut right into lady and got out a baby. The doctors were rough and brusque, because they were seventies doctors operating on another eighties lady (poofy hair, loose turtleneck sweater, husband who looked like my uncle Ken and didn't say 4 words). They made three incisions, whipped out a baby, poked it in the face a half-dozen times with a tiny turkey baster and then tossed it over to a nurse to bat cleanup. Took forty-five minutes, they said, and the lady only had to recover for three days while taking care of her new baby and her toddler. Where’s that quiet-uncle looking bastard? Probably out getting discount smokes at the Stop-n-Go.

I believe we'll probably have a lot of pain, and I know nobody looks like a million bucks having a baby. I don't mean at all to diminish the value of the experiences relayed in these movies. I think the intent of the movie is to prepare you for something for which there is no preparation. Nobody can tell you how this will feel until you feel it. It won't look like this, because these three ladies had three different births, and you will have yet a forth, and ours will be a fifth, unlike those others. Maybe K will yell, maybe I will eat a sandwich. (The nurses keep insisting the coaches bring a sandwich, so we don't pass out, hit our heads, get sent to the ER and miss everything. Can’t I get an IV?) Maybe the baby will be born in two hours, maybe in 20. The only thing we'll know for sure is that a lady and I will enter the hospital with a big belly and an unused carseat, and when we leave, we won't have either.