Last week’s post, which can be found here, got me thinking about my own experiences as a father. I did try to include most of my thoughts in that post, but it is hard to compress sixteen-years into a thousand words – which is my self-imposed limit.
This week, I am going to go talk about my experiences of parenthood as a man. Afterall, there’s a mountain of stuff to read on how it affects women but not a whole for us dudes.
I’ll break my rambles into three parts: pregnancy, birth and the early years, so it is easier to digest!
Pregnancy.
After a couple of minutes of fun, and the consequent little blue line on the piss -strip, comes the man’s eight-month slog to the birth. I’m not saying it is easy for the pregnant mum to be, as it is not, but they do have hormones, midwives and baby showers to help them in the journey. We men have nothing; we are mere observers, watching from a distance. Yeah, most of us do get involved these days; we build cots, see scans and all that stuff, but all the important event is happening to someone else. Mum has hormones such as oxytocin and progesterone to prepare her body and brain, we witness morning sickness and the irrationality born from the crazy hormones-nothing changes in our body.
“A great adventure is about to begin”
Winne The Pooh.
Personally, I felt detached. Like I was living outside my body and watching a slowly blooming family grow from above. I don’t know whether this was due to a combination of my illness and the pregabalin my crazy pharmacist was supplying in quantities that made the drug dealer across the road jealous, but I did not feel party to proceedings. I did everything I needed to do morally as I love my wife, and I wanted to support her. But I wasn’t doing it out of affection for the growing child. In my pre-parenthood naivety, I think I was in love with the idea more than the baby.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying men have it hard during pregnancy, we don’t. Our role is just one of support and assistance. Afterall, it’s not our bodies that have this multicellular parasite selfishly hogging nutrients like a cancerous growth. For us, nothing changes. And that, as I will discuss in my next blog, is the issue.
Pregnancy is a risky time for female and baby; lots can go wrong. Our first born was the survivor of multiple miscarriages; some early, some later. Thankfully, none past the 28-week mark where you must go through the whole death process in the U.K. I’ve known women lose wombs and fallopian tubes through ectopic pregnancies and worked with a widower who lost his wife shortly after childbirth – I am glad I have a penis and not a vagina!
What I found, even when sitting in a maternity hospital watching my partner having one of our children induced as its heart had stopped, is that the father is largely invisible. I sat, distraught, as the nurses and doctors fussed over my wife, ignoring me completely. I was bewildered as to what was happening. Too afraid to ask the experts as I knew I was not their priority. Trying to keep it together for my wife, while just wanting to scream at the unjustness of it all – why my child? Grieving at the lost future. Not the child itself, but of what could have been.
” Men tend to be forgotten during pregnancy”
Anon
I had been through a still birth with a previous partner, and the ambivalence of staff was the same – dad wasn’t there, he wasn’t carrying the child, he wasn’t important.
It annoyed my wife so much that she had a moan at one of the midwifes – they’d moved us to another room and left me in the corridor. The midwife apologised and admitted she never thinks about the dad as he’s often absent, or not caring- which was a poor sign of the world we live in!
I’m not saying that medics should fuss over the man at the expense of the women, they certainly shouldn’t. They just need to remember that some blokes do care. To be honest, it was the same with some nonurgent stuff – I had a sonographer ignore me, and a midwife refer to me as the ‘sperm donor’ and ignoring my questions once we had our daughter.
The Journey
As the lump of cells gradually differentiated into what was to become my daughter, my wife and I got busy building our nest. We’d moved into a derelict house and were busy doing it up. I have a mental image of my wife, six or seven months pregnant, sitting, cross legged on the floor, laying tiles! She could barely see what she was doing for the giant lump on her front! There were anti-natal appointments to attend, lots because of mum-to-be’ s age and history. Plan for maternity leave and a thousand other things to prepare.
I watched and helped with a sense of detachment. Making late night runs to Tesco when she irrationally demanded a certain type of cake, only for her to have changed her mind before I got back. The pre-bed paranoia and nerves about irrelevancies, and arguments so trivial that I cannot even remember what they were about – probably as silly as what colour white is!
My point is that I was so busy working, planning, taking strong medications and being as supportive as possible that I never thought about me – was I prepared to be a dad? I, naively, thought I had been.
For me, the last few months of pregnancy were spent on increasing higher doses of anti-psychotic medications. In the last month I was so doped up that I fell asleep while out walking our dog! Luckily, about two weeks before the birth my doctor made me go cold-turkey and fired my drug dealer pharmacist who had massively overreached his authority.
I kept my detachment to myself, not telling anyone. I foolishly had a picture of the stoic father. Strong, caring and all knowing. Selflessly supporting his partner through one of the greatest events of her life, while preparing for fatherhood from the invisible book of dad facts you get when you take possession of your testicles. Unaware of the tsunami that was approaching as I thought I was prepared.
“I was so clueless it is laughable”
Me
Now, many years later, I know that I was so clueless it is laughable, as I will cover next week when I discuss experiences of birth and beyond.
To conclude this section, I give this advice to other dads to be.
Accept that you are not important in the process; you are there as support cast. The only person that needs to appreciate you is your partner.
Medics generally don’t give a crap about you, even during loss, as you are not their priority. Accept that fact and see the above.
If you are handling depression or anxiety, accept it will be a hard process. You are now involved in something bigger and more important than you and realise that you will not be perfect, you will mess up, cry, panic, think you are not up to being a dad. All perfectly normal feelings. Just support your partner – ask her what she needs and take it one day at a time.
Until next week
Steve