When Does It All Become Real?

Not to belabor the obvious, but as an expectant father your life is about to change. Depending on how soon your infant is expected, you've doubtless already experienced at least some disruptions in the normal routines of your life together. Perhaps your spouse has experienced mood swings, or morning sickness, or manic bouts of energy. She may have encountered nightmares, generalized anxiety, or nearly irrational feelings of excitement and happiness. It's equally likely that she has, or will become, unexpectedly emotional, bursting into tears at the proverbial drop of a newborn's nursery cap. If her labor is imminent she may well be more irritable than you've ever seen her. Or maybe she's simply dog-tired.

This is all assuming, of course, that your spouse is not one of those rare and blessed creatures for whom pregnancy is an enchanted breeze. It agrees with them and fits them like an elegant glove. They're happy, trouble free and radiant.

Lucky you. For the rest of us, the former is the more likely scenario.

As a loving husband and prospective father, you want to do the right thing. You try to be supportive and patient and understanding, even when you don't understand at all. You may pride yourself on your calm and rational approach to the entire affair, and the ease with which you have supported your wife in her moments of difficulty, or allayed her fears in her darker (but not uncommon) moments of irrational doubt and fear.

To be honest, you're probably not immune to at least some of these symptoms yourself. It's only natural that you too will harbor anxieties and fears, worries and hopes about your uncertain and imminent future. For you, however, it's likely to be more of an intellectual, rather than a visceral, set of concerns. Will I be a good father? Will I drop her on the head? Will he be a basketball star? Will she go to college, and how, in heaven's name, will I pay for it?

For your spouse, her pregnancy, with its mixed bag of excitement and turmoil, is obviously a far more organic experience. It's her body and she knows it well. Or she did. Strange and not always pleasant changes are taking place. Naturally she's anxious and almost irrationally concerned about the job she's doing of creating a healthy baby within her womb.

But for some of us men the whole bringing-a-new-life-into-the-world thing remains an abstraction until the very end. In my case, I knew intellectually that my child was quickening daily, growing and changing, as he prepared to enter the world. The evidence was there for me to see and feel. I marveled as I felt him kicking. He seemed to be playing scales on some internal piano lining the walls of my wife's burgeoning belly. Occasionally, he preferred to trade the tickling of the ivories for a few hearty kicks at an unseen soccer ball. I read and talked and learned, gathering as much information as possible about the unfolding mystery.

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