Secret Baby

You have not kept a secret until you keep the secret.  I'm hopeless at keeping secrets; an incorrigible gossip who has to divert all my will power to keeping my professional confidences without which I wouldn't have a job.  I'm so used to my private life being an open book that when my wife told me she was pregnant I knew that though she'd have the burden of carrying our baby I'd have the burden of carrying the secret until a sonographer neither of us had ever met permitted what was private to become public.

Because my wife's pregnancy was mercifully unafflicted with morning (afternoon and evening) sickness and because her cravings never got more exotic than pickles, which for a German hardly counts, by the time of the first scan her pregnancy still seemed very much more conceptual than actual to me.  The first scan is, with wholly unintended humour, called the dating scan.  Because if you're having that scan and you're still dating perhaps parenting is not for you.

As we made our way into the North London hospital entrusted with being the first piece of architecture our child ever sees

I had my first insight into how medical pregnancy is, at least in this country.  It's no wonder women live longer than men given the familiarity with doctors and nurses having a baby engenders.

Going into the room with the sonographer I quickly realised what an extraordinary job theirs is.  Fathers/birth partners/retinue are given a seat the other side of the bared barely bump.  This presages either a moment of true wonder or, if something's wrong, what must be almost unbearable anxiety or devastation.  For good reason does the sonographer get the first look.  Mercifully all was well and it wasn't twins.  In my job I am used to bearing witness to elation and despondency but sonographers are the improbable heralds of life and death with their jelly and their wands.

Two months later we were back for the much less promising sounding anomaly scan. This time hearing the heartbeat was strangely a much more vivid experience than the spectral images which manage both to leave one marvelling at the wonders of technology but also frustrated by its limitations.  Again we were given the guarded all clear and it is with some sheepishness that I admit to only discussing what my reaction might otherwise have been after the event.

Before the scans I don't know whether the three month convention existed.  If it did not I'm not entirely persuaded that its development has been a positive thing.  Fortunately for the future of mankind many pregnancies result in the birth of a healthy baby.  That some do not is a sad fact of life.  For those confronted with that unwished for outcome it would perhaps be a source of solace to know that there are others out there dealing with the aftermath of that situation.  If miscarriage is kept secret whose feelings are we sparing?

My Wife is Having a Baby

I am having a baby.  My wife is having a baby.  We are having a baby.  You know the team players because it’s always We.  With now just a few weeks to go it’s an expression I am finally on board with.  My reluctance to adopt it had nothing to do with denial about what was happening but instead a real reticence to pretend a role in a process so awesomely and uniquely female.

But there is something else too.  Whatever the biological facts are fatherhood is a choice.  Mothers cannot opt out of the extraordinary transformation pregnancy wreaks on their bodies and whether pushed or cut out of them their babies’ visceral journeys to the outside world are fraught with peril and jeopardy.

Every second that passes from conception that ball of cells gets one day closer to being a bundle of joy and that is so whether the father is feet away or thousands of miles.  And of course physical proximity is often meaningless or worse when emotional distance puts fathers beyond the reach of their offspring.

Therefore fathers get to choose.  I say get to choose because in many bleak cases some men choose never to be fathers to their children for the whole of their lives.  And because nature abhors a vacuum another man or men or an idea has to fill that father shaped hole in those children’s lives.  Perhaps it’s a conscious choice but I am sure for many there is a sudden or dawning realisation that the fact of fatherhood is finally concomitant with the feeling of fatherhood.

Many deplore that  the marriage proposal is still accompanied by the moribund expectation that its occurrence will be at a time and place of the man’s choosing.  Few however comment on its mirror: the announcement.  Every mother that ever told her child’s father had to choose when and where.  The important distinction being that men ask permission and permission can be withheld whereas ‘I am pregnant’ is a declaration.  It is a mighty powerful announcement to make and an augury for the power of pregnancy, a power that man cannot wield.

I am dimly aware that whatever my feelings are for a child in utero they will be as nothing compared to what is coming and unlike revising for a test it is very hard to know how to prepare my feelings for the lifelong exam that is fatherhood.  Part of me wants to trust all to instinct but then common sense prevails and I bury myself again in the baby books.  And now NCT, which has been everything I had hoped, but more of that next time.