There is exactly one rule in the delivery room that supersedes all others. It is not about the lighting or the playlist or the epidural. The rule is that if you are the partner who is not currently pushing a watermelon-sized human out of your body, you keep your mouth shut unless you are offering encouragement or ice chips. You absolutely, under no circumstances, tell the birthing parent that they are being too loud. One husband on Reddit apparently missed that memo, and the karmic debt he accrued came back to bite him in the most painful way possible.
Our narrator is a 26-year-old mom who gave birth to her son about a year ago. It was her first pregnancy, and she opted for a natural delivery. For those who haven’t experienced it, natural childbirth is a level of pain that rewrites your understanding of what the human body can endure. She was in the thick of it, screaming and crying because that is what happens when you are being ripped open from the inside out.
Her husband, however, was having a rough night too. Not because his body was breaking, but because he was “tired.” He hadn’t slept the whole night, poor guy. So, in a moment of agitation that should have legally disqualified him from ever speaking again, he looked at his agonizing wife and told her to “just try to suck it up a bit instead of screaming like this.”
I need you to sit with the audacity of that statement. A man witnessing the miracle of life decided that the soundtrack was a bit too loud for his liking. The wife, understandably, cried even harder because on top of the physical torture, she now had to deal with emotional invalidation from her partner. The baby was born, joy ensued, and they “sort of forgot” the incident. Or so he thought.
Fast forward to a recent day. The husband starts feeling a sudden, sharp pain in his stomach. It gets severe enough that they rush to the hospital. The diagnosis? Kidney stones. Now, let’s be fair here. Kidney stones are notoriously painful. They are often described as the closest thing a man can get to the pain of childbirth. He was suffering. He needed painkiller shots. And just like his wife a year prior, he was screaming at the top of his lungs.
This was the moment. The universe aligned. The stars shone down. The wife, who was already exhausted and fussy from taking care of their toddler, looked at her screaming husband and saw an opportunity she simply could not pass up.
She leaned in and delivered the line he had gifted her a year ago. She asked him, “Can’t you just suck it up for a while? Why are you shouting so much?”
The reaction was immediate. He was shocked. He went quiet. The sheer mirror-image perfection of the comment clearly short-circuited his brain for a moment. When they got home, he finally found his voice again, but instead of apologizing for his past behavior, he played the victim card hard. He called her insensitive. He said he felt bad.
When she reminded him that he had said the exact same thing to her during labor, he claimed he “didn’t mean anything” back then, but that her comment had “malicious reasons.” The hypocrisy is truly breathtaking. When he said it, he was just a tired dad. When she said it, she was a petty monster.
So, is she the ahole? Absolutely not. N-T-A. This is the definition of “f*ck around and find out.” He set the standard for how much empathy is required during a medical emergency in their relationship. She just matched his energy. If he didn’t like hearing those words while he was in agony, maybe he should have thought about that before he said them to a woman in active labor.
He called her petty, and she probably is. But sometimes, pettiness is the only language some people understand. He learned a valuable lesson about empathy that day, even if he had to pass a kidney stone to get it.