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Transcripts

Seems at any time a couple gets pregnant some well meaning people come over and say oh boy your life is going to change, it will never be the same.  Well that’s exactly right and I got an email from someone that was asking specifically how it was going to change. 

Dear Mr. Dad, My wife is seven month’s pregnant and even though I’m getting pretty excited about becoming a dad, the whole thing doesn’t seem quite real yet.  I know things are going to change but what am I in for and what can I do to prepare myself?

Well at some point not long after your baby is born, just about every new dad gets hit with a sharp jolt of reality.  He’s a father with new responsibilities, new pressures, and new expectations to live up to.  For some of us that seemingly basic epiphany comes pretty early before we leave the hospital but for others reality may not even hit for a few days.  Sooner or later we come to realize our lives have indeed changed forever.  Sometimes the changes are pretty subtle, sometimes they are not so subtle but they are almost always surprising.  So here is my top 10 list of how things are going to change.  It’s going to be pretty long so I’ll have to continue it on tomorrow’s show. 

1. You may be confused.  If there is one thing that sets the first few months of fatherhood from the next few years, it’s the confusing and often conflicting emotions you may feel.  On the one hand there is the virility, the power, and the pride of creating a new life.  On the other hand there are the feelings of helplessness when you can’t satisfy or even understand your baby’s needs.
    

2. You will discover a new and different kind of love. There is no comparing the all consuming love you will have for your child but the love you have for any other person you have at all. Maurice Sendak, one of my favorite authors, may of captured the feeling better than any other writer in a scene from Where The Wild Things Are, which if you haven’t read you’ve got to start reading it now. The monsters are pleading with Max to not leave him and they say please don’t go we’ll eat you up we love you so. Great – just captures that feeling so well.
   

3. You’ll feel ambivalence. One day completely out of the blue you will look at your baby and realize that the intense passion that you felt just a day before has been replaced by a kind of hollow nothing feeling. You know this child, you care, and you’ll feel like bagging the whole thing and starting a new life someplace else. Chances are the next thing you will feel is this incredible guilt at having these feelings in the first place after all if you were head over heels in love with your child 100% of the time you can’t be a good father right? Wrong. Ambivalence is a perfectly normal part of being a dad and you are going to have the same feelings dozens of times over the next 50 years so get used to it now.
   

4. You may get depressed. Yep absolutely true even though most people think that post partum blues are a gal thing, a mom thing, plenty of guys get depressed after their baby’s are born. Our blues aren’t usually hormonally based like their partner but they may have more to do with returning to reality. When you were expecting and a brand new dad people paid a lot of attention to you, maybe cut you a little bit of slack but after a few weeks it’s back to the grind at work plus you have to deal with all the bills, the sleep interruptions and the extra laundry at home. That’s enough to depress everybody.

I’m going to have the rest of this top 10 list starting with number five on a later show on Baby Talk Radio.  If you’ve got a comment or question you would like to get a dads perspective about you can drop me a line through there Baby Talk Radio website or you can visit my website http://www.mrdad.com of course you can send me email from there and you can find out about the various books I’ve written starting with The Expectant Father Going Onto the First Year and Toddler Years.  I’ve got a podcast for dads, a daily podcast called The Daddy Cast and a brand new DVD that’s called Toolbox for new Dads.  You can also subscribe to my monthly newsletter, The Mister Dad.com newsletter.  You can do all of that at http://www.mrdad.com.