We all suffer from impatience. Some more than others. During this first phase of becoming a father, impatience can abound. Your life is being dismantled as you know it and rearranging itself for the future. This period repeats itself within a few days of the birth of your baby. The first 3 months after birth is as complex as this early pregnancy period. You can use this period now to learn how to deal with that unsettled period later. Patience is a good quality to grow in yourself. Your newborn will require a great deal of that because the early newborn period requires a lot of non-verbal understanding.
Patience and yourself
What does patience look like? For one thing, if you are impatient inside and trying to be patient externally this ultimately won’t work. You need to learn to cultivate patience.
What you’ll notice with your newborn is that patience/impatience are not part of logic and reason. As you read your baby’s body language and signs you’ll notice that your baby can be quite patient. They will only become impatient when you cannot read their language and provide what they want.
Feeling impatient is a quality that goes hand-in-hand with childhood and early adulthood. However, patience is a quality that grows throughout your life if you choose to grow it. Some people feel they are always entitled to let their impatience come forward and be known to all.
There’s a good way to practice patience. Drive a car and notice how you feel about getting to your destination as well as whatever is happening around you. You’ll notice that sometimes you feel relaxed and patient; other times you feel tense and impatient.
Whenever you feel impatient, ask yourself why. If it’s due to something you cannot control, impatience will not solve anything.
Once you realize you can only control your reaction to what happens to you or around you then you can choose to slow down inside, take a deep breath and calm down immediately. Every moment you exercise the choice to grow your patience, you will be able to do it more quickly.
When your baby is impatient and you can hold it in a calm manner and let it discharge its negative emotions through you (not into you) then you will teach your child how to find their own patience. You are your baby’s teacher by your actions and feelings.
Patience toward the pregnant woman
During this first phase of pregnancy, you will find many opportunities to be patient with the changes in your partner. It’s difficult for men to really appreciate how rapid the changes are in your baby which impacts the mother. There’s nothing else like it to help you understand this.
Women can be all over the place sometimes. It depends on how bad the morning sickness is or whether other health issues present themselves. Women get very tired during this early period so it’s important that you take on many of the daily activities and let her rest.
Every human needs to learn the skills for taking care of themselves whether they are in a relationship or not. Women fought hard to be able to work. Men didn’t fight to stay at home with the children. This often means that women are going out to work AND coming home to take care of the children AND clean and cook, etc.
Your partner can get very impatient if she thinks that you are not doing enough. Women can be as overwhelmed by life and children like you. This feeling is not gender-specific but rather a human quality. All people feel overwhelmed. It’s important to help each other with patience.
When you are physically feeling fine and she is physically tired and perhaps sick, now is the time to patiently just get up and do what needs to be done. This will help her store the energy that your baby needs.
If your partner is unhappy, irritable, sick and tired then your baby feels all those things. The more you can help her feel safe, comfortable, and nurtured the calmer she will be and this will have a positive impact on your baby.
Take many opportunities in this early stage to exercise patience. You’ll admire yourself for growing this quality.
Your bottom line
Remember the old adage: Patience is a vulture that eats you up inside. When a person is impatient they often aren’t thinking clearly. Developing patience means you can think through what needs to be done.
Head to Udemy for all the Fathers-to-be Pregnancy Academy courses. Then at 24 weeks of pregnancy, come back here for the online birth class and start with the birth preparation and birth-coaching skills … all developed by hundreds of dads and moms.
Birthing Better skills are housed in Common Knowledge Trust.