So your *wife is having a baby (*obviously this denotes a personal relationship of all levels of formality and none but be very aware of calamitous financial consequences of unexpected parental death in an unmarried family).
This may be a longed for and thrilling prospect, it may be an unexpected and terrifying turn of events, it may conceivably be a matter of supreme indifference. Whatever your thoughts and feelings and however doltishly in denial you may be you are bound to be aware that this will change your life forever. You are right.
The following headers are offered in a collaborative spirit of brotherhood and amity and advanced with an intention to help you ready yourself for that change.
1. Preparation
Whether you and your wife prepare maniacally for birth or seek completely to ignore its arrival it will happen anyway and neither of you will have the slightest amount of control over its course. It is worth remembering that when the 10th book on hypno-birthing is thrust into your hands.
However before you adopt an approach of blissful ignorance it is very important to assess how your wife is preparing. If she is preparing carefully and undertaking courses for goodness sake join her. The ante-natal period is when your test really begins, drop out now and your card will be marked.
If your wife is undertaking no preparation then that is all the more reason to arm yourself with knowledge and advice. Remember when you did no revision for French GCSE and couldn't understand a word uttered by Jean-Luc your French exchange? Well babies are infinitely more incomprehensible and they don't go home after a week. Fail to prepare; prepare to fail.
2. Nesting
Do not underestimate how powerful this instinct is in your wife and do not scoff when it first evinces itself after 3 months of pregnancy. The sooner you give in to her instinct the sooner you will be ready. If like me you take the last possible train to the airport before ensuring you are the last possible person boarding the plane this premature readying may seem maddening and pointless. But remember babies never arrive on schedule. Your wife's due date may mean many things but it will almost certainly not be your child's birthday.
Under no circumstances move house or get the builders in beyond the first trimester. Having a baby but no boiler at home is not the start to life that any child needs or wants. This leads me seamlessly to stuff.
3. Stuff
Even if your wife is a model of Scandinavian asceticism (and, if she is, lucky you) prepare to be astonished by the sheer quantities of stuff that bringing a baby into the world entails. Everyone tells you that 90% of it is completely superfluous and it is but you will nonetheless trigger frantic calls from your bank as you set about purchasing it all. It is essential that you never forget the 3 Rs that underpin all successful fathering: Resignation; Retreat; and Reticence.
Resign yourself to all the stuff before you have to Retreat from battle and remember Reticence is the road to rapport. If you seize the stuff initiative you will be amazed by the amount you can get for free by scrounging from friends, colleagues and random people you meet on public transport. Because the last law of stuff is that it is utterly essential until the moment it is not at which point you will be paying people to take it away.
Put up a fight against stuff and there will be, as Francois Pienaar would put, it hard yards ahead.
4. Labour
Be there. Just be there. There is literally nothing more important than being there. Also don't merely be there. My mother once recounted my arrival and described my darling father sitting in the corner reading a book, she said she found this distracting as a moment came when she felt like making a 'small' noise and felt my father's presence to be inhibiting. Your job is to be chief cheerleader, aide de camp, bag carrier. You will be responsible for communicating and implementing the birth plan that will absurdly have been drawn up. Absurdly because, as Mike Tyson unforgettably said, everyone has a plan until they're punched in the mouth which, incidentally, would be a welcome relief from watching your beloved push a human being out of her business end. And don't call it the business end and don't balk at standing at it. You're about to find out that shit just got real is not just an expression and that any mother who makes a 'small' noise is not human. Life is messy, painful and confusing and nobody knows what they're doing so don't be surprised that its beginning is too.
5. Milk
No topic will prepare you more quickly for the double think, hypocrisy, and smugness of parenting than milk. Everybody knows that breast is best. And if your child takes to it like a duck to water then lucky you because you will be saving a fortune, be spared the ghastly farrago that is sterilising, your baby will be plump and pumped full of antibodies and wife and child will be happily lost in a cloud of Oxytocin. If on the other hand it is all a nightmare of not latching, cracked nipples, mastitis and a howling hungry child then just give it formula. For a supposedly natural process it all seems incredibly difficult to get babies going on mother's milk. Our forebears had wet nurses, aunts and cousins to step in if things went awry and nothing is more calculated to bring misery to your fledgling family than your wife beating herself up over getting baby on the breast. Support your wife and you support your child.
6. Nappies
In the unlikely event that my wife is reading this then this section will elicit the hollowest of laughs. Because for every smile that pierces your heart there will be multiple moments of absolute horror, exhaustion, tedium and frustration. Changing nappies is so far from being the most difficult part of parenting. There must be families where fathers bear the brunt of early days parenting where the mother is incapacitated or tragically has perished but the truth is they are few and far between. You can be the best supporting act in the world but you will never be the main event for your baby. But in truth you are not even the supporting act you are a combination of roadie and groupie. The sooner you get involved with the heavy lifting the sooner you will start to feel part of a family.
7. Family
I wrote in a previous post that motherhood is something that happens to mothers, a biological fact, for fathers parenting is about choice. Choosing to bond, choosing to be involved, choosing to be a father. There will be many moments in the first weeks and months that you will mourn the life you once had. Even if you were the least impulsive person before you will fantasise about an illusory time in your life when you could just stroll up to the counter at St. Pancras and be in Paris in time for supper, when a pint with a mate was an unobjectionable occurrence. However it is far better to mourn and move on from the life you once had than vainly to pretend that it endures. Transitioning from the role of child to parent within your concept of family is a fraught and uneven process but an endlessly enriching one. If you are lucky enough to still have your parents around the gratitude you will feel for the sacrifices they made will be immeasurable. Having a child is the great leap into the future that revives and renews family. Every day of your child's life is a day further away from the womb adding distance from its mother. You get to choose whether that day is a day closer to you, its father, whether your words and actions draw your child towards you our push it away.
8. The eyes
Lastly never ever forget that your child is always watching. Watching, absorbing, learning and imitating. When you are at your worst as a father this is a painful remembrance and it is easy to pretend to yourself that children don't notice. They notice everything, understanding takes a long time but they observe from the start.
Good luck.
