Your baby’s mother is 32 weeks pregnant or more in phase #4 of pregnancy. This means you move more rapidly from ‘becoming’ a father to ‘being’ one. How soon that will be is unknown. Sure everyone would like a pregnancy to go to ‘term’. Eighty percent of women give birth two weeks either side of their estimated ‘due date’. This means your baby could be born well before the ‘due date’. During phase #4 of pregnancy marks the shift from being pregnant to giving birth. Once the Birth is over then you’ll be a father for the rest of your life.
Hopefully, you are working with Birthing Better Childbirth Preparation Online Course or some other skills-based method. Hopefully, you’ve already spent phase #3 (24-32 weeks) to begin to prepare the pregnant body to give birth and at 32 weeks started doing the internal work.
As you’re learning and doing the birth preparation skills you need to use a kind and gentle touch. Men are very good at doing this and women love to be touched in a gentle and kind way. Women feel respected by this type of touch. You also can a wonderful Birthing Better eBook Right Touch or Deep Touch Relaxation.
Kindness, however, has both a physical and emotional component
The tone in your voice reflects the emotion of ‘kindness’ or not. The way you think can reflect ‘kindness’ or not. The actions you take show whether you are using ‘kindness’ or not. And this is not only to others etc but also to yourself.
We are all children even if we are in our adult form just as each child is an adult while in childhood form. We don’t raise ‘children’ we raise children to be adults.
Your kindness matters. Men have such big hearts and men intuitively want to act in kindness even if they are macho, macho, macho. Yes, we have an image of Man as Warrior but struggle, death, injury, oppression are only one very, very small component of Man. The larger and most dominate characteristics of men are about gentle strength that’s why we admire the ‘gentle giant’.
Bottom line
We are living at a crucial time in human history. There are so many dysfunctional things happening … financial crisis, jobless recovery, lowered wages and fewer benefits, a global climate crisis (whether man-made or not is very, very real) and crumbling infrastructure. You are bringing a baby into a dynamic period of history. How you and your family meet these challenges will center around your ability to grow kindness.
‘Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see’.
– Mark Twain
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.