There is nothing that compares to the pain of giving birth. And I'm a man

I've heard it said that a woman forgets about the pain of labour after it's over. And that's exactly what happened to my partner within minutes of giving birth to our son. "It was worth it," she beamed, as our baby began his first feed and a midwife dealt with "a bit more blood than usual" nearby. She assured me she would do it all again in a heartbeat.

We had obviously turned a corner. Four hours earlier she described the pain as “getting stabbed in the vagina from the inside". She asked me what was wrong with her mother, an Irish Catholic who had ten children. And while paddling around the bath between contractions under a gas-induced haze, came: "I really like the bath. I just wish I could drown in here." She may have forgotten about the labour, but I certainly hadn’t. And despite my best efforts I suspect I never will.

I am not saying it's all doom and gloom; what I witnessed in that hospital room was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. But, in the days and weeks after the birth those memories are stifled by other, more harrowing flashbacks: the sheer agony my partner endured, the gruff midwife who was eventually asked to leave the room, the use of an industrial mop and bucket to clean up the afterbirth.

Perhaps these visuals would have had less of an impact if I had visited YouTube to watch a live birth in the months leading up to the event. I thought SBS's One Born Every Minute, which mostly features women opting for an epidural and laying comfortably on their back for the majority of the show before pushing for 45 seconds, was preparation enough to enter that room. I thought the sanitized footage that doesn’t show anything below a facial close-up before cutting to goo-covered babies was a good indication of what to come. I thought I knew what to expect. I was wrong.

Like many men before me I watched the woman I love battle through a night of contractions before pushing a new human being out of her body. The concept really only hits home when you see it happening. What came to mind at the time were my childhood transformer toys. And a scene from Alien. I remember thinking, how the hell did that just happen? Like the anatomy of a toy car that somehow becomes a robot, a woman's body undergoes an amazing transformation.

As a man, the hardest part of labour is being effectively useless. Apart from the role of being her number one supporter and spokesperson your job is to simply be there, waiting and watching. And I what I saw puts getting hit between the legs with a cricket bat seem about as uncomfortable as a sore throat. But somehow women power through. Despite the pain, minutes before our baby crowned my partner asked a midwife to get me a chair because she knew I hadn't eaten since the whole saga began the night before. It was at that moment, as I stood there drinking my apple juice through a straw in an attempt to keep blood sugar up, that I decided to stop fighting her over the name of our baby. It would be her decision.

After watching my partner, who has an abnormally high pain threshold, battle through a relatively straightforward first labour and uncomplicated natural birth I am qualified to say that there is nothing that compares to the pain of delivering a baby. It is nature’s cruel little joke that women forget all about it and willingly go back for more. I’ll still need a few years to make sense of the whole thing.

Was your partner there when you gave birth? How did he cope?