Are you sure about that?

Have you noticed that there are some things about life in Tv and real life that just don’t quite match up? I recently saw an episode of the show Parenthood where a baby was born. It was a fast process, in fact it was so fast that prior to her water breaking the woman in labor didn’t even know she was in labor. Her water broke and I would say within the hour, at least within the time it took for her husband to drive what I can only assume was not a great distance, she made it from her house to the hospital and delivered the baby… right. So here’s the thing, if in fact your water does break and you didn’t know you were in labor prior to that, there is a possibility (a pretty good one) that labor is going to take more than an hour- in my case it took about 24 and a lot of Pitocin once that happened. But why in the movies does it always seem like the dad is about to miss the birth, he doesn’t seem to be that far away but the process just goes so dang fast. Has this happened for any of you? That from the time you realize a baby might be born that day to the time the baby is actually born is shorter than the amount of time it would take for your husband to arrive? It seems that most people are in labor longer than 20 minutes, longer than 1 hour I would even venture to say. So I thought about it, and if I had gone into the hospital at 3pm on a Thursday and Brian had been in San Diego and planned to drive to Dallas(without stopping to eat, get gas, or sleep) he would have missed Mikey’s birth at 1pm on Friday by a few hours. If he had gotten on an airplane he would have made it, he might have even gotten to enjoy a few hours of waiting with me. If he had been at work when I went into the hospital he would have made it with about… 21 hours to spare. Was this just a really really long labor, or do dads generally almost miss the birth of their children? And why is there always so much yelling? Maybe there was a lot of yelling when Mikey was born and I just don’t remember, but I thought once I had an epidural that things were well… peachy, calm, and not that bad (minus the no water). Wow, I am really hoping the next one is just as fast and dare I say dramatic as TV.