There comes a day in most couple’s lives when the news arrives: there is going to be a newcomer in your comfortable lives. This news is greeted with both trepidation and happy anticipation by most couples. No matter how much you’ve planned for the day, you rarely feel quite ready for a baby’s impending arrival.
The pregnant mother has one advantage over the father: she is constantly reminded of the fact that something is growing inside of her. The father just sort of takes her and the doctor’s word for it. If he was not the sole provider before the pregnancy, he is likely to be, at least for awhile, after the baby comes.
If you’re like most parents, your parental instincts will, at least at times, be overridden by a sense of panic. How are you possibly going to cope with the demands of motherhood? How are you ever going to be fulfill your role as a father?
Nevertheless, we get a grip on ourselves and get on with our lives. We take a trip downtown to look at baby cribs and talk about the other things we’ll need for the new arrival. If we’ve been happy just to cruise in our jobs, we realize we’re going to have to get serious about our careers.
Right from the beginning, we start to give up some things we want in favor of the baby’s needs. The mother who has had her eye on a new bedding collection for her bedroom agrees that the money would be better spent on a crib. The baby becomes the first priority.
Sure, the father-to-be resents the fact that he can no longer buy that husqvarna chainsaw he’s been wanting for a long time. He accepts it, though, and usually accepts it graciously. It wasn’t all that much of a necessity and his neighbor has always been happy to lend him his when he needed it.
Babies are not real to fathers until they are born. Before that, they just have happy fantasies about kicking a ball around the backyard with their son or walking hand in hand with their pig-tailed daughter. The fact that babies are helpless little creatures who don’t think twice about waking you up at night or peeing on your good pants when they’re sitting on your lap is only a distant concept until it actually happens. Fathers aren’t the ones who feel the baby growing inside, so thinking of it as an infant doesn’t really come naturally to them.
Just as a mother doesn’t have to think about feeding the baby who is growing inside her, since that happens automatically, neither does the father really have to think about how he is going to fulfill his role. It just happens. You do what you have to do and as the billions of babies who have managed to survive until adulthood can testify, we parents usually do alright.
If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...
