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.