Of course, time-lines matter. A father who doesn’t get involved during the first nine months of his child’s existence, an existence albeit in utero, is likely going to experience a strong sense of lagging behind in his relationship with his child later in life, i.e., after birth and for the rest of their lives/relationship. On the other hand, given that already and still we continue to deal with a strong prevalence of paternal secondariness, it should be stated clearly, rather than fretting about the fact that many fathers are coming late to their children: let’s welcome them when they do come.
Moving from Helper to Primary Caregiver
When my wife was pregnant with our first son, Noah, I was still very much approaching the entire issue of pregnancy, babies and being a father from the perspective of being a helper to her. This meant that, in my mind, my job was to make her comfortable, to make sure she had enough and the right things to eat. It meant that I would trail along as she was going through things like buying baby-clothes, thinking of things the baby would need (such as diapers, some toys, bottles, etc.). With awe and a great amount of incomprehension, but also smart enough not to voice too much of that incomprehension to her, I followed her, watched her change and . . . felt somehow prepared, albeit not ready, for the arrival of our first child.
Like many other couples we also took part in a child-birthing class. We decided to go not with Lamaze, but a natural child-birth class also known as “husband-coached childbirth.” Here I learned how to “coach” my wife, how to count her contractions, distinguish between different kinds of breathing and to guide her into and through different kinds of birthing positions. On a certain level this class was satisfying to me. It gave me lots of information and put me in charge. After all, for most of this experience I had not been in charge and didn’t imagine myself to be in charge again soon.
New research seems to suggest that it is this kind of experience, i.e., exposure to baby things, to the things people do during pregnancy to prepare for birth and infancy, that readies men to be fathers. It seems that even hormonal changes take place during this time, enhancing the father’s emotional ability to care for the baby and the mother. Perhaps this is indeed the case. The thought that a kind of immersion experience in baby stuff might turn men on to fathering is not that strange. However, I can say with some certainty that it wasn’t this immersion that began my journey towards fatherhood and being a primary caregiver. In fact, I felt and still feel I could very well do without 80% of the stuff we were told we had to get in order to prepare for the birth. This includes the birthing class. For while it prepared me for my wife’s birthing experience and how to support her through it, it didn’t really prepare me for my experience, of how I would be affected by the pregnancy and by this baby as it entered the world. It didn’t do anything for my sense of how to connect with this baby that was on the way. The pre-and postnatal connection with this child seemed to be the manifest domain of the mother. Nobody even thought that fathers would have anything of their own, their very own, to add to how a baby is received into this world.
I didn’t question this. I was there to support her. And so I would simply learn how to empathize, understand her feelings, eat apples dipped in caramel syrup, and blueberry and raspberry fruit-bars. I did not have a good experience with this. Sure, I was doing what was expected of me and supposedly this brought me closer to my wife. But certainly it didn’t bring me any closer to my baby. Rather, it made me feel like I would never have a good connection with him, if it meant eating apples dipped in caramel syrup. But again, I didn’t think about it or question it. To me this was what it was. Apparently becoming a father went along with doing things that seemed strange and inauthentic. It seemed unfathomable that fathering could be something that might come from the very bottom of my soul, something that I was meant to do, something that could be as essential to me as is mothering to a woman.
THE ESSENTIAL FATHER
Modern fathering is often seen as a consequence of socio-cultural changes in the Northern hemisphere, the industrialized part of the world. In this view fathering is not so much a consequence of a man’s psychic or psychological propensity for fathering, but rather the direct outcome of things like upbringing, exposure to information about and models of fathering. Men are made into fathers, in other words, they are not simply developing into being fathers.
This view, of course, means that we believe that men have a choice about being fathers. This choice would not only be a biological choice (it is indeed true, men don’t get pregnant and have babies) but it would also be a psychological choice (viz. that men get to make a rational decision: do I want to be the father of this child or not?) Culturally speaking a man’s biological inability to have children combined with his ability to take it or leave it, have led to the concept of fathers as secondary caregivers. Primary care-givers are those who have no choice and who have the biological means to have children, mothers in other words. In this conceptual framework fathering is seen as an act of will not an act of essential determination.
To me this seems like a bad deal. In order to claim some kind of primariness with my children it will be necessary for me to find something regarding my children over which I have no control. Primariness is the reward, in other words, for not having a choice in the matter of having babies. This kind of thinking, of course, prevails throughout the literature, classes and workshops on parenting education. It results in an odd and annoying contradiction: fathers are really quite unimportant as far as the health and well-being of their babies is concerned, but they should welcome and accept their unimportance and move into secondariness. So we’re saying you don’t matter, but don’t you dare leave.
We should also not forget that most of what is asked of fathers in this secondary position has little to do with the baby herself and more with the mother’s need to have a convenient way to access a sitter when she needs a break. In other words, fathers are most important, secondarily, when they succumb to the position of helper to the mother, not as fathers in their own right.
If we want to understand the psychic/psychological potential in men to be and act as fathers we need to understand fathering as something that is inherent in their essence. This means that men don’t need to be trained to be fathers, they don’t need a manual to help them understand how a baby is handled. Rather, fathering is a combined phenomenon of a father’s love and attachment to his baby, his creativity and curiosity, when it comes to finding solutions (what is wrong with using duct-tape to secure a diaper?) and his willingness to persist in the care of his baby (i.e., to not allow tiredness, etc. to affect his wish to care for his baby). In what follows I will attempt to give an account of what might account for the development of such attachment between a man and his newborn.
Observations of fathers during pregnancy: From Outside to Inside
Becoming a father is normally treated as something that happens post birth, for it is only then that fathers are deemed capable of having access to their babies. I question this approach because I am convinced that it puts fathers and fathering at a disadvantage, which, once it has taken place, will engage the father in a continual catch-up game with his children. Can fathers have access to their children before they’re born? What would such access look like? Since such access cannot be established directly, we need to think about what indirect connections a father could focus on with his unborn child.
Successful fathering is dependent on a combination of the father’s ability to be in touch with his baby and being in touch with himself during the pregnancy. This means that fathers need to be “in touch” with their unborn children (sight, sound, touch). It also means that fathers have to feel and understand the simultaneous emptiness they might feel inside themselves as their partners are becoming fuller. Fathers can learn to think of this emptiness as their pregnancy. Or better, since the term pregnancy really should be reserved for the woman, fathers can think of this emptiness as their expectancy.
What follows is a narrative of twelve stages of the becoming awareness of a man’s move into fatherhood. It is really a combination of several men’s comments on how they perceived themselves and their babies during this process. Every stage is divided into two parts: what we say about fathers and what they say about themselves.
Not understanding, disbelief
Often, fathers at this stage are said to have trouble believing that what they’re seeing or hearing about the pregnancy of their partner is real. Pregnancy tests, the doctor’s announcement, even the partner herself informing him, seem not to have the power to change the man’s sense that something new and earth shaking has happened. Men who have just been told that they will be fathers, we are told, act nonchalantly and seemingly unimpressed by this information.
What fathers are experiencing:
I am on the outside. I don’t see, I don’t feel, I don’t hear. What, then, do I know? I am disconnected from what she alleges to be the fruit of our love-making. I am disconnected from the woman herself. It feels awfully scary to be disconnected in that double way? Emptiness is growing in my inside. But something of mine is there. When did it begin? What was that moment of conception like? Was there something different about that moment? Where we different with each other? Did I feel differently? These questions are growing on my inside. And as I feel those questions emerge from within me, I begin to feel attached to something that still seems to be a nothing.
Fear and Loss
We are told that, often, men then move into a phase of disconnection out of which they may or may not emerge before the baby is born. They are acting as if the pregnancy is not really happening. They go out as they used to, work as they used to, want attention from their partners as they used to. And they are seen as quite unwilling to “accept” the pregnancy as fact. In one word, men act as if all they are concerned about is the loss of their freedom.
I am, still, on the outside. Hollowness grows inside me while, I suspect, fullness grows inside her, your mother. This is scary. I am not in control. I am losing control of a question that seems to take me backwards, towards infinity.
Again, my fear of being abandoned on the outside takes me inside. It takes me inside to “it” (for I hesitate to call you “you”). It takes me, once again, inside to my own hollow womb. Who are you? Who are you whose absence and presence I feel so simultaneously and so conflictually? Also, I’m feeling nauseated a lot. I am panicking. The worst is I can’t talk about this to anyone.
Ignoring
While in the previous stage men were seen as acting in ego-centric ways concerned only with their freedom, this stage is characterized by a strange sense of settling into the fact. However, in a silent way men seem to continue to pretend that nothing has happened. They are often unwilling to plan, to think about names, or even tell other people about the pregnancy.
I am on the outside. What else is new, right? Naming? How can I name something that is nothing? How can I talk to others about “it”?
And yet, something else is beginning to rise from within me. I know. I know I can’t deny or ignore “it”. Not just because she says it’s real, but also because I know it is. I know you are. I know this, not only because I know something about your beginning. No, I also know something because of how real my hollowness feels. It, this hollowness, is preparation as well.
Anger
If it hasn’t already been observed and happened, it is happening now. During the early stages of pregnancy men often seem consumed by anger, distrust and aggressiveness towards their partners. They complain that their spouses are becoming less and less available and focused on them. She is often distracted, will keep coming back to the baby topic, perhaps (but not in all cases), be less interested in sex.
I am still on the outside. I feel lonely often now. I get angry, because she doesn’t seem to think of anything but you. Of course, I, too, think about you. But my way of thinking about you is so different from hers, it seems. Doesn’t she understand how difficult it is to talk about something that is both so completely unknown, yet so damn real at the same time? Going to the doctor does not help at all. She never asks me anything about this pregnancy and that makes me feel worse, because I wonder, if what I feel really is “normal.” I wish I could be more connected with your mother, so I would know more about you. Yes, I want to have sex with her more than we currently do. It’s because I know, but can’t tell, that being inside of her, has changed its meaning. It now means that I am closer to you too.
Protecting and Envy
As soon as palpable signs of the pregnancy are present (i.e., heart-beats, the woman reports feeling the baby kick, her belly begins to swell, etc.) there is a palpable change in men’s attitudes toward their partner, the pregnancy and their baby. The empirical realness of these changes finally makes it possible to engage the man in the pregnancy with his senses. They now can see, feel and touch the baby, if only indirectly. Fathers often feel a simultaneous urge to protect the baby and mother and to have the baby in their belly. Some fathers feel impatient about their partner’s apparent struggles with being pregnant and fantasize about how easily they would handle the stress of it.
I am on the outside. No changes there. But I have felt you now. Oh boy! What a feeling that was. I have even seen you move, through her belly. The other day I was even singing to you. Some of those songs from long ago come floating back through my mind. It’s amazing! Something strange is happening, though. While in the beginning I thought that I wanted more signs of your true existence, I am no longer sure I care so much about that. And you know what else? I feel suddenly as if I want you to be in my hollow womb. I almost feel as if I could do a better job with you than your mother.
Working hard
Fathers begin to feel more strongly about needing to provide. They will work longer hours than usual, perhaps even take on new project in order to get that bonus at work. They might start to think about building a room, a bed or a toy for the baby. Often this phase falls together with more pronounced activity between the parents to get ready for the child (nursery, clothes, crib, etc.). Men at this stage often feel quite enthusiastic about their relationship and the impending change in their status as men.
I am still on the outside. But that’s okay. Something is growing. Many things are growing. There is something growing between your mother and me, there is something growing in me, believe it or not!. You’re growing, of course. This is a wonderful time.
Parallel Symptoms of Pregnancy
As men are more comfortable with the factualness of the pregnancy they themselves may begin to show symptoms of being pregnant. This still little understood, but widely misunderstood, phenomenon in men is referred to as “couvade”. Couvade or male child-bed, means that a man can exhibit symptoms like weight-gain, swelling of feet, nausea, cravings, depression, anxiety, variety of baby dreams. Men often report a quite strong sense of understanding and sharing their partner’s nesting impulses.
I am still on the outside. Here’s what’s going on. I am anxious for you to be here. But I feel so tired too. Can’t exercise the way I used to anymore. I feel exhausted all the time. I am sure I’m gaining weight. Coming to think of it, that nausea I spoke of earlier, that’s still there too. I feel like her. That’s right, I feel just like your mother. And yet, I don’t.
Something in me feels older (really not in a bad way) but older and perhaps more settled.
Connections with Own Father
Often, it is at this stage when the pregnancy becomes a perceptible thing, that becoming fathers begin to look to their own fathers. How did they father? How did they feel during the pregnancy? Interestingly, fathers don’t seem to look for that connection during earlier stages (not with their fathers and mostly not with friends either).
Still on the outside. Yep. I wonder what my father was thinking about at this time during my mother’s pregnancy with me. Somehow he seems to act as if that never happened. Or is that just my perception? Did he feel any of the things I am thinking about and feeling these days?
Frustration about not being pregnant
Up to this point, many fathers can make up for the emptiness they feel inside of themselves through work, care, sharing, etc. But as the woman’s body is more
and more conspicuously pregnant fathers often struggle with conflicting feelings of envy, rejection, impatience, protection and providing. This can lead to aggravated depression and anger.
Still on the outside. This thing is taking longer than I thought. Your mother is having trouble sleeping and doing other things. Her belly is always in the way. I secretly wish (but really have trouble saying it) I could experience this too. I admit it’s not just about a nice and politically correct way of saying I know what you’re going through, honey. It’s also a competitive thing: I can do this too. There was a time when we loved to make love, but now that’s mainly a thing of the past. It’s too energy-consuming for her. And, frankly, I’m not sure, if it might not hurt you. I feel a little lonely and resentful at times.
Becoming involved/Leaving it
The third trimester is a true juncture for many fathers as it is at this point that many set the stage for how involved they will be for the rest of the pregnancy, the delivery, and the life of their children. Curiously, some men leave at this stage. After some seven to eight months of getting ready and pheriods when it seemed they had gotten used and warmed up to the fact of their impending fatherhood, some men choose to leave their partners and babies at this stage. Men who do so, often complain of the thorough lack of male support. They would like to speak to their father, or at least a father or older man. They miss their friends or would like to have friends who can understand the emotional roller-coaster they’re on.
I am still on the outside and scared a lot, feeling a lot, feeling soft a lot. This is not normal. The other day I was listening to an old song I used to like and I found myself starting to tear up about something I couldn’t really understand. The other part is, though, I’m gearing up. Your mother and I have talked about your birth so many times, we could probably go through it sleeping, if it weren’t for the pain and the general excitement we will encounter in the delivery room. I have to admit, sometimes I feel like running away, though. Everything seems like such a momentous and scary decision these days. I wish there were some other guys to talk to about this. It almost feels as if the other guys are avoiding me now.
Delivery
This is the stage that, nowadays, most men do not want to miss. Whereas just a generation before us, fathers did often simply opt out of this opportunity, fathers now are gearing up for this moment. Interestingly, new research is questioning whether fathers really should be invited into the birthing room. Behind this research is the hypothesized idea that fathers who are present at their children’s birth might not really be able to focus on their own process as becoming fathers, but be preoccupied, if not scared, by what is happening to their partner.
My days in my outside prison are numbered. It’ll be only hours, I think, before you will be here. I can’t wait to hold you in my arms, to see what you look like, feel like, smell like, whether you’re a boy or a girl. Then what? We’ll take you home, I guess. It’ll be strange to suddenly share our place with you. No, I am welcoming you, don’t worry about it. I love you already more than I can say. It’s just . . . how can we take something as precious as you to our home? It’s dirty there, sometimes loud. Shouldn’t we have some kind of care facility at our house, to make sure that nothing will happen to you. I guess we will be this care facility. I guess that’s what I have been getting ready for all this time. But I’m not sure I can do it.
Birth
For many fathers this is a moment of extreme conflict. They are overwhelmed by joy, tenderness, and awe. Overwhelmed also means that they feel fragile, exhausted and weak. But who can they tell about that? It is at this stage, at the latest, that it becomes clear that men should not be thought of as “coaches” for their partner’s birthing experience. If anything, they themselves need some kind of coach or doula to help through the experience.
There you are! I can see your head. I can’t believe you’re really coming out that way. It seemed unbelievable to me right until now. And, you know what, I think I’ll forget it again very soon, too. I am so excited, but I feel bad too. She has done all the work and I feel weak and exhausted right now. It’s not just my tears. I’m used to those by now. It’s my wobbly knees and this urge to just lie down with you and your mother and sleep that scare me.
What then is the essence of fathering? The men who have contributed to this narrative of male feelings and thinking during their partners’ pregnancies have one thing in common, they all fretted about, sang to, got afraid of or even angry at something they couldn’t comprehend with their senses. Focusing on “nothing” that will soon be “something” is a task of the highest spiritual order. It is a quasi-religious experience, one might say, through which men might have access to their own essential skills and feelings about fatherhood. My sense is that much of this essence can be understood through the awareness of emptiness as it grows in a man’s life throughout his partner’s pregnancy. It is almost as if it is this space, this hollowness, into which the baby is born and in which it will live and which it will eventually fill. This means that the more becoming fathers are able to process their own emptiness, talk about it with others and feel understood in their impatience, fear, anticipation, anger and sadness about their impending fatherhood the more prepared they are to be connected with their babies once they’re born.
Conclusion
The idea, I think, cannot be to leave fathers out of the birth experience. Rather, what this narrative shows is that men have their very own story to tell as they’re going through the nine months of their partner’s pregnancy. If we allow this experience to unfold, if we are able to see it as part of the couple’s overall process of getting ready for the baby, then the man’s experience of this process is just as important to the baby’s care post-birth as is the experience of the woman giving birth. Moreover, men who have had the space and “permission” (their own and that of their partners) to explore their own sense of the pregnancy tend to provide for the baby later in ways that are more solidly grounded in their own judgment (rather than being just a copy of what the mother would do). Such fathers exhibit more independence in child-care.
I want to finish with a story told by a grandfather:
Paul and I had been talking about the arrival of this—his first grandchild—many times. Paul was all excited. He and his wife Lucy were poised to go see their son and daughter-in-law as soon as they knew that the child was born. Actually, their daughter-in-law needed to be induced and Paul and Lucy were able to go the day of the planned procedure.
I talked to Paul again two days after the birth. Everything had gone well. He was happy and truly elated about his granddaughter. Apparently, both sets of grandparents were there and could stay in the room right up to the time when the pregnant mother began to push. Then, right after the birth, the women (i.e., grandmothers, sisters, etc.) were allowed in, but the men were not. They got to hold the new baby right after it was born, the men, however, including the father, didn’t get to hold the baby until the following day. Paul told me that the doctors were of the opinion that the baby had to be protected from “viruses and diseases” and shouldn’t see anyone else.
Oh, yeah, I said, we men carry all these bacteria and other bad things around with us, we shouldn’t be let anyone near the baby. Paul laughed, he understood the sarcasm in my voice. I could tell he was both saddened by and resigned to accepting how this particular part of the birth experience had gone. This is how much power we men have he seemed to be thinking. We simply don’t get more. Why should we complain?
I, on the other hand, still can’t get my mind off the palpable sense of disappointment in Paul’s voice and face, despite his deep happiness about his granddaughter (Nobody should say he wasn’t happy. Nobody should say that this had any effect on his overall feelings about this new human life.) But, his face seemed to ask, why? Why would they keep me (and other men of the family) out?
Paul’s experience is, of course, another anecdote showing us how men are still kept away from participating fully in the lives of their children and grandchildren. We know about this, we have begun to see that this is, indeed, happening. What is, perhaps, more complicated to understand about this experience is that it reminds us that men, too, are only now beginning to understand their own feelings about this experience. Paul has a sense that something is wrong here. That there is a dissonance in his experience is undeniable to him, but can’t be easily verified culturally. Did I just feel left out? Did I just feel pushed to the side? Did I just feel unimportant? The quite conspicuous absence of a strong cultural verification of those feelings is troubling to me. Where are the enraged fathers, grandfathers, uncles and brothers who want to be involved but aren’t? Why are there no protests, no demonstrations, to show hospitals and doctors that men’s involvement with birth is sought for by men themselves? In my experience, the strongest factor working against these kinds of changes is shame. Men are ashamed and embarrassed to admit that they have these feelings. At the time a child is born this shame and embarrassment is in its third phase. The three phases, as I see them in men I have talked to, approximately run like this:
a) hesitation about having children (often out of fear of being displaced); this is laughed about by many because men are seen as still being infantile and immature, unable to “grow up and face the demands and expectations of adulthood.”
b) Pregnancy itself during which men are seen as largely irrelevant because they “are not pregnant.” Men feel left out and unable to communicate their feelings about being an expectant male.
c) Post-birth when men are seen as direly in need of “learning” how to deal with a new-born, while women “know” everything there is to know. There is still a sense that men are bumbling idiots when it comes to dealing with infants and toddlers. Paul’s case showed us that in the 21st century even, men are thought to carry disease into the birthing room.
One last note:
If we’re serious about men relating to babies well, if we will focus on this not first when they become fathers, but rather already when they’re still boys.
For a boy to learn about his capacity for emotional expressiveness is to counter what Heinowitz (2001) calls “the pool of common fears” we men have acquired in terms of fathering.
Only boys who have learned how to express their feelings will be able to express them again when they become fathers.
This is particularly true when it comes to understanding male sexuality. Teaching boys that their sexuality is as much about fathering as a girls sexuality is about mothering is an important part in opening up the ways in which men relate to babies. This means that
a) male sexuality is always also about fathering: “always” means there is never a time when it is not about fathering; “also” means that it is about fathering next to other things that are also true about male sexuality.
b) When we see male sexuality as always also about fathering, we are making a direct connection between his sexuality and his creativity: almost every time a man has an orgasm he also ejaculates. The production of sperm is at least potentially about fathering.
c) This does not mean that every sexual act must be carried out with the intent of fathering a child. It merely means that when we make love to our female and male partners we are participating in the flux of life, whether or not a child results from that act.
If men want to be understood as primary caregivers to their babies, then men are greatly responsible for talking to each other about this nexus, to our children (especially our sons) and to our partners.
