Expectant Dads Must Adjust, Too

Published April 3, 1980.

QUESTION: My wife and I recently found out she is pregnant, and she hasn’t been the same since. I can’t explain it. Our marriage is somehow different, and we are only into the third month of pregnancy. Do other couples go through this when they have their first child?

ANSWER: Not knowing exactly what you mean, I think I know what you are asking. There are many events in marriage that necessitate change and adaptation. Pregnancy happens to be one of them.

When thinking about pregnancy, we often focus on the mother-to-be. It has not been until recently that we have begun to understand some of the problems that expectant fathers experience.

Here are some common adjustments of expectant fathers according to one writer. Hopefully they will be of interest to you.

In the book, “Marriage means Encounter,” Tom Congdon, senior editor at Doubleday and Company has written an article titled. “What Goes on in His Head When You’re Pregnant.” Even though childbearing is physically a female enterprise, Congdon observes that psychologically it is fully 50 percent male.

There are a few things, Congdon notes with tongue-in-cheek, as exasperating as living with a pregnant woman. In in the beginning, she may be sick and most husbands are no good at coping with a normally sturdy wife who suddenly gives out. A husband tries to be sympathetic during sickness, but after a few days he has to fake it.

Once a pregnant woman stops being sick, she then embarks on being hyper healthy. Editor Congdon notes that nature programs her hormones to give her that famous pregnant-woman glow . . . For Prospective Mothers Only. “But why,” asks Congdon, “doesn’t nature do anything for the prospective father? Why isn’t anything done with his hormones to insulate him from reality?” Congdon relates, “While his wife becomes daily more serene he becomes daily more frantic. He’s all alone with the dark thoughts any sane person has when approaching one of life’s great confrontations.”

Another confusing aspect of pregnancy for future fathers is living with a mother-to-be as she goes through the preliminaries of nesting rituals. “As natural ritualists,” Congdon writes “women love preliminaries, and having a baby is for the expectant mother, a half year or more of sweet preliminaries.”

For an expectant father the preliminary rituals maybe fun at first. But a husband may grind his teeth when a wife wonders aloud for the nineteenth time whether to gamble on either pink or blue for the color of baby’s blanket. In desperation, he may suggest they compromise and settle on yellow.

Other seemingly endless preliminaries for a father-to-be include buying or borrowing maternity clothes, the preparation of the nursery, the gathering of the layette, and choosing a bassinet, all part of the nesting routines he is experiencing first hand. There are also late-night discussions over the virtues of breast-feeding or 2:00 a.m. thoughts on which kind of baby bottle is better.

Then there is the matter of choosing a name for the new baby. Numerous possibilities are reviewed as prompted by TV programs, commercials, or celebrities on late-night talk shows. Even the names of old boyfriends and girlfriends are considered. Ancestral names back to the Revolutionary War are discussed, but indecision abounds. A compromise is inevitable.

Other worries an expectant father may experience include “How am I supposed to act happy if I want a boy, and it is a girl?” or vice versa. And what if the initial glimpse of his newborn does not engender love at first sight?

And after the birth, a newborn can also be threatening. Why must new babies look as if they are angry with their dads? Is this instantaneous gift universal for new fathers?

Congdon concludes, “By and large, a wife becomes her old self again. The hormones ease off, and she is no longer playing Earth Mother, no longer maddeningly remote, and no longer ethereal.”