Approaching parenthood

For a while now, my goals in life had been as follows – to be married by the time I was 25, to work in London, to have a black and white cat, and to have become a father by the time I turned 30. Three out four of these ambitions have been fulfilled, and as I write this, according to the estimated due dates, my wife and I are less than three weeks away from becoming parents, and I am just under six months away from turning 30. Not bad going, methinks.

The eight and a half months since we found out we were expecting have had their ups and downs, but above all else we are just excited about this new phase in our lives. We know it’s not always going to be fun and games, that the highs will be higher than anything else we’ve experienced together and the lows lower. I’ve never even held a baby before, let alone dress one or change one’s nappy, and I know that as a father I’m going to make countless mistakes along the way. But I'm also determined to be the very best father I can possibly be. My own father taught me that I could never disappoint if I just tried my best, and that’s all I can hope to do.

All of this said, however, I don’t feel anywhere near prepared enough for what’s about to happen to us. My wife approaches everything in life with an organised and focussed attitude – within the first few weeks of knowing we were expecting, she’d been out and bought several books on pregnancy and birth; the decoration of the nursery was completed at the start of the year to allow the paint fumes time to evaporate before the baby was born; she signed us up for the National Childbirth Trust (NCT), joined a yoga class, took up reflexology, and worked out everything we needed to buy. The pain of labour has concerned her, but on the whole she’s tackled this major life event with a breezy and calm sense of purpose. She’s thoroughly researched everything, is very clear on the kind of birth that she wants, knows all the conditions and all the risks, and could probably write her own book after all this.

Me, on the other hand, that’s a different story. I tried to read a book very early on called The Bloke’s Guide To Pregnancy, which – as its name suggests – is written for expectant fathers. It’s written in a very casual, simple way which says a great deal about how men approach pregnancy. I actually had to put the book down after the first few chapters as I got very emotional – I read on a little too far too quickly and got myself in a state about my wife having to endure labour. Not a bad book by any means, but one that should be read slowly as things are happening, not in one sitting. It is also, I have to say, written for the kind of bloke that probably wants to spend a lot of time in the pub with his mates watching the football. I know I'm probably in the minority, but those things have never really appealed to me and so some of the author’s forewarnings of having to give up such pastimes were lost on me.

At the other end of the spectrum, as a present, my wife bought me the Haynes Manual for expectant fathers, which has frustrated the hell out of me because it is written in such a concise way that I don’t feel like it’s taught me anything. However, the sections on caring for your baby look quite good and so I haven’t given up on it just yet.

We started NCT classes earlier this year with four other local couples, and at the very beginning I really enjoyed the fact that I was finally learning about pregnancy properly. Many of the myths were rapidly dispelled and I felt at last like I was going to be a supportive birth partner and good father. After a while, though, during the course of the eight weekly classes, I began to reach the point where the information just wasn’t sticking anymore. I wasn’t learning anything meaningful, and the only things I seemed to be able to absorb were unnecessary things like physiological factors, the effects of hormones and all manner of scientific facts that I really felt like I didn’t need to know. (This used to happen to me at school as well – I’d always seem able to recall tiny, irrelevant pieces of information during an exam whilst forgetting the major point of the topic. Either that or I’d find myself suddenly adept at being able to remember all of the lyrics to the first Kylie Minogue album, but forgetting how to solve basic algebra.) So at the end of the course of lessons, I look back and believe that I learned very little overall, and I guess I became a little bitter and twisted by the end of the course. Deep down I know I’m using this resentment as a means of avoiding considering the fact that I simply am not prepared enough for what’s going to happen today, in three weeks or five weeks depending on when our baby decides she’s going to make an appearance.

For me the best part of NCT was the bit I was expecting not to enjoy – the social aspect of it. Neither my wife or I are particularly gregarious people, and the NCT literature puts great store in the fact that you will make lasting friendships with people in a similar position to yourselves. I remember driving to the first class in silence because we didn’t want to feel pressurised into forming relationships. Stupid, really. Typically it’s the things you don’t look forward to that end up being the most positive things, and for us both it was great to meet people like ourselves, make some new acquaintances and understand how other people were feeling about it. And, you know, I learned some very important things about myself and the way I approach things – in particular work / life balance – from the guys in that class, which I feel indebted to them for. Not having anyone close to me who’s about to become a father was a godsend. Although I’ve discussed pregnancy and parenthood with people in the office who’ve already got kids, it was really good to talk to people who are facing this right now, rather than looking back on it.

Aside from feeding me information that I felt in some cases irrelevant, my other problem with NCT was how it has seemed to make time speed up in this last trimester of our pregnancy. The classes were held each week on a Monday, and Monday seemed to just come around so damn quick after starting the classes. I'm sure that before the classes started time was progressing fairly slowly, but now everything has accelerated, and I think that also might have something to do with why I don’t feel sufficiently ready.

On the face of it, nine months feels like a long time, but now it doesn’t quite feel long enough. I feel like I could do with perhaps another couple of weeks to get my house in order, but I sense my wife - who by now is sick and tired of carrying around an extra person - would disagree. That said, I strongly believe that in those nine months not only do your wife’s physical appearance and eating habits suddenly metamorphose in front of your very eyes, but so too does your entire outlook on life. I have always considered myself to be a mature, sensible and above all grown-up chap, but I look back on life before we became pregnant and think that we were just playing at being adults. The nine months of a pregnancy for me have been the perfect length of time for this great epiphany of adulthood to unfold, leaving me feeling one thousand times more mature and confident about myself and my abilities than I ever considered myself to be before. I've now got things into perspective, stopped focussing my efforts on things that really have no material significance in the grand scheme of things. The nine months have been filled with so many new and joyous experiences that make the supposedly important things of the past seem so trivial in comparison, and that’s only going to continue.

At work people ask how things are going, and thankfully throughout the pregnancy everything has gone very well. Right now my response is that we’re ready for the birth, in as far as the nursery is decorated, the hospital bags – should they become necessary if there are complications with our home birth – are packed and everything that our baby could possibly want and need have been purchased. Okay, mentally, I’m slightly off the pace, but I'm confident that will come in time (and lets face if, it doesn’t then I'm in for a big shock). The hardest part to deal with is that this isn’t just about the goodness-knows how many hours that constitute labour; that’s just the beginning, and there’s going to be even more hard work to come once she’s born. My wife, typically, is quite sanguine about this – she just knows she’s going to cope, and I truly believe her because she has incredible resources and an ability to just get on with things (even though she denies it).

So here we are, waiting impatiently for something we’re so excited – and slightly nervous – about, but not knowing precisely when our baby is going to decide she’s had enough and wants to tackle the big wide world outside of the safety and comfort of her mother’s womb. I glance at my phone every five seconds, wondering when it is that I'm going to get the call from my wife that says ‘Stop what you’re doing and get home now!’ And while it might be stressful, and while I can’t honestly say that I have a clue about what I need to do, I really can’t wait for that call and what lies beyond it.