MY WIFE is due to give birth any day now to our first child (thank you, and yes, we are registered) and I would like to take this occasion to make a request of all fathers: Please don’t give me any more advice about the first year of the baby’s life.
I’m already so terrified by the counsel I’ve gotten that I have asked the obstetrician to give me an epidural so I won’t have to think about all the daunting things I’ve been told about what comes after. Though, come to think of it, an epidural won’t help, since it doesn’t deaden the feeling in the brain, which is where the warnings have lodged themselves.
I’ve been told–again and again and again–that I won’t get any sleep for months. I’ve been told that the baby won’t stop crying and I won’t know what to do about it. I’ve been told I will find every moment the baby draws breath will expand the well of my existential worries (Is she breathing? Is she unhappy?) near the breaking point.
I’ve been told that I will feel helpless because I won’t be the primary caregiver or feeder, that hormones might transform my beloved wife into anything from a hateful harridan to a raging psychotic, and that there’s nothing I can do about any of it except live through it.
I’ve been told to go to restaurants and movies and the theater and every other entertainment venue now before it’s too late, because once there’s a baby, we will never again go anywhere except to a playground, a playgroup, or a playdate.
“I won’t lie to you,” one friend told me a few weeks ago. “The first three months just suck.” I should point out that I hadn’t actually asked him to proffer his wisdom as the father of a 15-month-old, but I have learned that being in the presence of an impending new father causes even the most reticent of men to soliloquize about paternity.
It was this fellow’s view that God had blown it, that the true gestation period of a baby is really 12 months, and that basically, infants come into this world only half-cooked. They don’t want to be here, they’re not ready to be here, and they punish their parents for forcing them to come out too soon.
Interesting theory. Thanks a lot.
After a while, of course, these men will say something like, “It’s the best thing in the world, of course, being a father.” But that almost seems pro forma, like something they have learned to say. The horror stories emerge unbidden and voluminously, like Old Faithful.
There was a time when I thought I was well prepared for fatherhood. I was an expert babysitter as a teenager and have been very much present in the lives of my 10 nieces and nephews. Of course, there was also a time when I expected to pace in the waiting room with a box of cigars, waiting anxiously for a doctor in operating-room scrubs to emerge from a swinging door to tell me the baby’s sex, that the missus was sleeping peacefully, and I could go look at the child through the nursery window.
Then I would go home and try to do some laundry, whereupon I would put too much detergent in the washing machine and cause the house to be flooded by bubbly foam.
Well, we don’t live in a house, and we don’t have a washing machine, and no sitcom father–for that is where I got my idea of what it’s like to have a baby, from situation comedies–ever was given the option of cutting the umbilical cord. (I will have that option. Lucky me.)
Some of this unvarnished truth-telling reflects the new spirit of motherhood advice. In an effort to keep mothers from choking on guilt, advice-givers try to make clear that women do have mixed emotions when they have babies, that it’s not all sweetness and light and roses and candy.
Lately, however, it seems advice-givers do more than acknowledge the mixed emotions. They seem almost to revel in the negative, to dwell lovingly on every feeling that might be dark and unpleasant–and thereby potentially make such feeling seem more normal than joy and fulfillment.
So perhaps all this trash-talk is yet another example of the feminization of male discourse. But I don’t think so. The more I have reflected on it, the more it seems to me that the horror-story fathers sound less like survivors of postpartum depression than exhilarated outdoorsmen, happily comparing the scars and wounds they suffered during grueling physical challenges.
In other words, fatherhood is the newest extreme sport. And the most ancient.
–John Podhoretz
