Nate's Guide For New Dads

Guide For New Dads - Pregnancy: Chapter 1

So you've just found out that your wife is pregnant, have you? Well, then congratulations - and good luck. This is an exciting and nerve-racking time for a man. If you're like me, you initial reactions were much like the 7 stages of grief. Within a matter of minutes after seeing that blue line, my emotions ran so wild that the guys who monitor the seismographs were starting to get nervous.

Shock, Denial, Bargaining, Fear, Joy, Hope, and Acceptance.

Stage 1: Shock I was completely dumbfounded. I was saying things like "Are you sure?" and "How can you be pregnant?" For some strange reason, I was having a lot of difficulty figuring out exactly how and when this happened. Very simple things like biology and subtraction eluded me for some time.

Stage 2: Denial After that, I began to wrestle with the fact that I would be a father. Once I regained control of my computational abilities and determined that I was not, in fact, out of town at the time of conception I began to mull over the word "father". I said it in front of the mirror a few times just to get it through my head that I was now inseperable from that word.

Stage 3: Bargaining Even the most devout athiests have a tendancy to find God at this point in their lives. This is the point in the process where you begin to think about all of your parent's shortcomings, and pray that you will not end up just like them. The ugly truth is that you probably will. Even if you don't turn out to be exactly like your own parents, your child will most likely find something else to hate about you. My advice is to save the bargaining for when your child is old enough to do chores.

Stage 4: Fear When I found out that my wife was pregnant, we were living in the basement of her parent's house. It struck me that we needed a place to raise a child, and that I was going to have to support this baby for the next 18 years or so. If you don't get scared for some reason or another, my advice is to check your blood pressure. The initial shock may have killed you.

Stage 5: Joy Unlike the stages of grief, there is no anger involved. At this point, it will probably start to dawn on you that you are going to be a dad to a brand new baby and will find yourself doing stupid and decidedly unmasculine things. I'm not proud to admit it, but I believe I did a little Snoopy dance. You'll do sillier things in the next 18 months, I promise.

Stage 6: Hope Again, quite the opposite of the stages of grief, this stage is when you start to have hopes and dreams for your little zygote. It's perfectly OK to imagine them fulfilling your childhood dreams by proxy. I imagine myself driving a Jaguar to work, but that probably won't happen any more than my daughter will become star quarterback of her high school football tem. You can hope and dream all you want - just don't expect your child to cooporate.

Stage 7: Acceptance This is a special, mythical phase that never actually occurs in real life. One way to determine that you're nearing this phase is when you begin shopping for a minivan. Even if you think you've come to terms with the idea, you will probably cycle back through a couple of phases intermittently for the rest of your life. Personally, I go through Hope and Fear a lot.

In addition to this, you will probably go through some sort of "nesting" ritual. My wife and I bought a house and began renovating it in the months that followed our discovery. I sold my sporty little Nissan autocross racer and bought a well used minivan. We now live in the suburbs, in a tiny house in the best neighborhood we could afford.

Now, the most important thing I want to tell you at this point is to try to relax. You're going to go through a lot in the coming months, and it's best to conserve your energy. I consider myself much like a boxing coach at this point. I can't tell you exactly where the punches will be coming from, so the best I can do is to teach you how to roll with them.

Gentlemen, the fun part is now officially over. We must now proceed to chapeter two:
Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Pregnant (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the mom).