One mother, clearly subscribing to the show don’t tell school of thought, simply posted this picture (by Javier Royo interviewed here: https://www.rebobinart.com/en/javirroyo/):
And I don’t know if I’ve ever been more discomfited by an image in my life; I felt attacked. How I wish I did not, how I wish I could have looked at that and been entirely nonplussed: ‘What’s all this about?’. Instead, there was a curdling sense of recognition.
So affected by this little cartoon have I been that I’ve taken, at drinks, dinners and meet-ups with friends, to producing it and observing carefully the responses it provokes. My own private Rorschach Test. I’ve seen Trumpian expressions of quizzicality, tight lipped smiles, heard gales of laughter and, in the case of one mother, it elicited a single word response: ‘Yes.’
You sometimes hear Tigger like first time parents enthusiastically announcing: ‘We are pregnant.’ And maybe the fathers to be that make these declarations go on to act as embodied ripostes to the suggestion that fatherhood infantilises. They are, no doubt, the sympathetic abstainers who eschew booze and decent cheese to affirm that they are doing pregnancy together. Rocking up to pregnancy yoga classes and cultivating expertise in hypnobirthing techniques.
But I hope I will be forgiven for expressing my personal opinion which is that pregnancy is personal. In fact, it’s hard to think of an experience that is less collective or shared than gestation. I think of it in prepositional terms. Pregnancy happens IN a woman but it happens BY or occasionally AT a man. In the latter case you need to watch out because a man that feels that way is highly likely to conclude that he does not like pregnancy being done at him and will be out the door faster than you can say ‘Child Support Agency’.
You sometimes hear talk of the 4th trimester, the idea that babies, even at term, are not fully cooked and need a few months to realise that they’re in the world and no longer in a personal flotation tank. You don’t so much hear talk that for most if not all fathers the 4th trimester is their 1st trimester. Sure, unless they’re particularly obtuse or myopic, they will have noticed that their partner or wife’s shape has changed somewhat over the preceding 9 months. But it’s not their body that has undergone a life defining and creating transformation.
Because pregnancy happens in a woman every day of it is, quite literally, a growing preparedness for the baby that is to come. When a woman lays her hands on her belly she is laying her hands on her baby. When a father lays his hands on her belly he is touching someone else, no matter how besotted, committed or evolved is his devotion to their relationship. Seeing is believing, as they say, and one thing I can say to any new father is when you see that baby you best believe that your life is about to change: big time.
If you’ve undergone the bourgeois rite of passage which is the NCT course or read any books on first time parenting you sometimes see or hear an observation to the effect that mum’s job is to look after the baby and dad’s job is to look after mum. I have always balked at this advice as it is trite and glib and patronising but also because what most new mothers want more than anything else in the world is sleep and the only way in which they get any sleep is if someone else is looking after the baby. And therein often lies the rub.
Returning, for a moment, to the despairing mum of Mumsnet, in the detail of her post she enumerated the ways in which her partner had demonstrated himself to be the Dummkopf of daddies and the feeblest of fathers. He was hopeless at feeding the baby, at changing it and at soothing it and, if you know anything about babies, you’ll know that’s all of it.
This provoked scores of responses effectively saying the same thing: he’s doing it on purpose; don’t stand for his shit; does he think this is your job; women have to learn this stuff too and, most jaundiced of all, the dreaded LTB (Mumsnet for ‘Lose The Bastard’). Being an anonymous online forum there was, unsurprisingly, no defence mounted to this denunciation and I certainly wasn’t foolhardy enough to venture one. Apart from anything else maybe this hapless father was the embodiment of the expression ‘If you want something done properly do it yourself’. But there is a riposte to that aphorism and it’s ‘Practice makes perfect’. Of course, in order to practise you have to want to but, just as importantly, you have to be able to.
I can only begin to imagine how spectacularly uncomfortable it must be to be 9 months pregnant, permanently impeded by having the equivalent of a small box of books strapped to your belly. But even harder it is to imagine what it must be to have one moment life within you and the next without. Newborns want their mothers and mothers want their newborns. That is inescapable biological reality. If you’re a new dad this can be quite confronting. If you’re a decent dad wanting to give it your all you will need to reckon with the possibility that even your all isn’t want the baby wants. More challengingly your all might also be found wanting by its mother.
This is where humility and patience are required. You are a latecomer to this party and you will need to prove that you’re bringing something to it. If I could rewind the clock to the arrival of my firstborn I would very much like to have understood this better. However understandable it is to feel that the introduction of a baby adds the metaphorical 3rd to the marriage if you don’t learn to relinquish that feeling you are doomed forever to be the lemon. The way to retain your partner’s affection, respect and ultimately love is to work for it and that means staying firmly on the side of team adult not diminishing and demoting yourself to the kids’ club.
But there is a lesson too for mothers. Fathers are only as useful as you permit them to be. There’s nothing like being in left in charge of a baby to learn what it is to be in charge of a baby. And not for an hour or two under close, anxious supervision. But a weekend or even a week of working it out for himself. And sometimes his working out won’t be yours but if it works, it works. Obviously, if the baby is endangered in any way there is a clear red line but giving birth confers no parenting expertise, it’s a question of trial and error and if you want your partner to be a father you have to let him try and, just as importantly, you have to let him err.
The great thing about having more than one child is you get more practice and I’m hoping with our 3rd I can, albeit belatedly, demonstrate that however many fathers that cartoon might fairly lampoon I am not among their number.
