Breaking rocks with sledgehammers in the prison yard. Tarring a roof in the heat of a July afternoon. Anything involving a jackhammer. A job where you need to put on a hard hat to drive to work. If you ask a guy what he thinks about when he hears "hard labor," you are likely to hear a description similar to the ones above. There are sweat, tools and sweaty tools, all followed by cold drinks and bragging rights about the worst injuries incurred on the job.

For a woman, even though "hard labor" has a completely different context, there are likely to be more similarities than we thought at first. For example, her version will also involve blood, sweat and tears. ("Tears" as in crying, but also tears as in little rips. A manly man may be able to discuss having his arm nearly torn off by heavy farming equipment, but just ask him about any tearing that his wife may have experienced during her hard labor. Watch him turn white as a sheet and run from the room as if his nether-regions were on fire.) A woman's hard labor is also likely to involve some screaming or yelling, along with the creative use of enough colorful phrases to make her mother faint and a roughneck sailor beam with pride.

Her labor does not involve building skyscrapers or driving earthmovers – her work is about something much smaller – a tiny new life that cannot wait any longer to join the commotion. Find me a man who will trade in his hammer or table saw for the chance to give birth to that tiny new life. Find me a man who will push that loving little bowling ball through a biological garden hose. Yeah, find me that guy. Good luck. "Tiny" never felt so huge, and suddenly all of his hard labor seems to be fairly easy in comparison to hers.

We don't understand all of the myriad mysteries of pregnancy and the birthing process, and we never will, but it doesn't mean we should stop trying. One of the most important things we can do is to be open to the fact that the process can be difficult to manage and impossible to predict.

"There is much that we cannot control and being willing to be flexible takes the pressure off in a huge way," says Jennifer Walker, a registered nurse and co-author of The Moms On Call Guide to Basic Baby Care 0 – 6 Months (Revell, 2007). "It is fine to have a birth plan as long as you know that the adventure ahead may bring some unexpected changes. It's like a punt-fake in the last minutes of the game – not what you were thinking, but you still score a baby in the end."

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