More Firsts

We had a couple of firsts on Sunday. The more children you have, the more ‘first times’ you get.  That much is obvious.  What surprised me is that they’re all just as special.

First Impressions

G’day Everyone. Before I start I’d like to thank the mums from Fusion Parenting for honouring me with the invitation to join them on the soapbox.

I thought for my first post, I’d start at the beginning and talk about an impression that I got when I became a dad. It was over nine years ago now, so I have to cast my mind back a bit, but it’s the kind of thing that leaves a lasting impression. It’s not about fathers though, it’s about mothers.

In our mid 20’s my wife and I decided to have a baby. It was a mutual decision that we came to from different directions. I was thinking and reading and came to the conclusion that it would be better to have kids first, then go do stuff when the kids grew up and left home. Meanwhile, my wife’s biological clock was apparently an alarm clock and it was going off. Not having ovaries, I’m not sure what it feels like to have them ‘twanging’, but it doesn’t sound comfortable. Heading through a local market one day, we heard a newborn baby cry and my wife says her uterus twitched.

It was Time To Have a Baby. We were pretty lucky, in that we could have a baby when the time was right for us. I can only imagine how hard it must be want to have a baby, but be unable to have one. For us though, it was a great time, we were young, financial, and fertile (like the Nile valley is fertile). Hello Baby!

It was challenging looking after my wife through the appalling morning, noon and night sickness. It was fascinating watching her belly grow and really cool feeling the baby kick. I did the supportive partner thing because, well, I’m a supportive partner. I even attended a Breastfeeding Education Class run by the local Australian Breastfeeding Association group.

It was a long, hard labour. I supported my wife through it, physically, emotionally and sometimes literally. I can understand now why sometimes the midwives don’t want the fathers around – it’s a terribly hard thing to watch the woman you love going through labour. A man who wasn’t paying attention at the birth class might try to be helpful in unhelpful ways. After 36 hours the most amazing thing happened. I saw the bulge of a head, and then a tiny patch of dark hair through an impossibly small hole.

Sometimes there’s a difference between knowing something and really getting it. As my wife’s belly grew through the pregnancy, I knew that we were having a baby, but only when I saw my not-yet-born son with my own eyes did I get it. It hit me like a bolt of lightning (that and the thought that there was no way that baby was going to fit through. I was wrong about that). My wife had had 40 weeks feeling our baby grow, getting to know him. It seems I needed to see him myself to understand that we had made a baby. I was a father.

I was proud of my wife, proud of my son and happy that we got the birth experience we wanted. I was profoundly in awe of what my wife had done. I had never seen anything like it. The phrase “the weaker sex” could only have been used by men who had never seen what I saw. There is a terrible, primal beauty in a birthing woman. The task itself it torturous and nearly impossible, and yet she does it.

Having seen my wife give birth ‘naturally’ four times, I can see why some women want to birth that way. It must surely be one of the most powerfully feminine things a woman can do. However, I can also see why birth classes spend a lot of time telling you about the painkilling options, and I can see the potential it has for going wrong.

Not long after we got home, still birth-shocked like first-time parents are, I had to leave the house and do some shopping. I still remember going into the local shopping mall, tired and dazed, and everywhere I looked were mothers with their children. Mothers … everyone one of whom, I could probably assume, had done that amazing thing I just saw, or something like it. Every one of those mothers had birthed a baby, more than one in many cases. My mother had done that thing. I’m sorry I took you for granted all those years Mum, I had no idea.

So that’s what I learnt when I became a father – fatherhood is awesome, and motherhood is awe-inspiring … and that was just the start.