FATHERS IN PREGNANCY
Circumstances:
- There are many mothers-to-be who are not living with or even connected to the father of their baby. This doesn’t mean you should skip this read. The man who got you pregnant is still impacted by your pregnancy and the birth of his child.
- There are many mothers-to-be who are in a relationship with another woman. This doesn’t mean you should skip this read. Even though you did not impregnate your partner you are still very impacted by this pregnancy and the birth of this child.
- There are many mothers-to-be who are in a relationship to a husband/partner or boy friend who are pregnant because of a sperm donor who will not know that. The man living with you is the one impacted by your pregnancy and should read this.
There’s this funny fact of Life, once a woman conceives the world changes. Throughout Time women have had very mixed emotions about getting pregnant. Throughout Time and in absolutely every culture women have tried with varied degrees of success to prevent pregnancy. Yes, some modern religions are against that but there will always be women who do not want an unwanted baby. Throughout Time and in absolutely every culture women have tried with varied degrees of success to terminate unwanted pregnancies often at the risk of their own life. Throughout Time and in some cultures, women, those attending them, the family have taken the life of a newborn … those with abnormalities, girls, sometimes twins or those born unwanted. It has only been very recently that ‘pro-live-birth’ politics that stem from modern religious beliefs have been so culturally vocal. Getting pregnant and having a baby changes the world.
What has the role of men been in all of this? It’s varied tremendously. There are some cultures that do not connect the sexual experience to pregnancy … why should people? Remember women can find out they are pregnant within just a few days now but that hasn’t been true through most of Time. Missing a period didn’t always mean a woman was pregnant so most women didn’t know for several months. Sex and conception were not always linked.
While some modern religions are adamant that only one woman and one man in a married situation should have sex, sexuality has been incredibly varied throughout Time and culture. What people do publicly and privately can be very, very different. Therefore the role of man/husband/father was sometimes not as clearly defined as we are led to believe in the present.
Once a woman became pregnant the role of the acknowledged father varied as well. There are cultures where the husband and wife stop living together until after the baby is born. In other cultures, the woman may have moved to the father’s family and once pregnant moves back with her family. In other cultures, every man in the community is the ‘father’. In others the father in his role as ‘father’ will turn toward his sister’s children and his wife’s role as mother will turn her children toward their uncles who take on the role of ‘father’ … because of lineage relationships. Lineage relationships plays a big role in who the ‘fathering’ job belongs to and where the woman belongs as well as the children.
While some cultures believed in love and forming a partnership, the concept of ‘marriage’ as we know it today is pretty recent. Even today there are cultures and religions that arrange marriage.
So the role of father-to-be is not the same as what is expected of modern men today, where love is supposed to be the foundation of the marriage, where both partners often have jobs, in which there is an expectation that fathers become deeply involved in pregnancy, birth and fathering … and cleaning the house and cooking. With new societal expectations needs to come some guidelines. Knowing how-to is not innate in any of us. All of us must learn the how-to’s of our culture and present trends. Even within any one culture, trends change over Time. What is expected of fathers today is very different from what was expected of their fathers and their fathers’ fathers.
So here we are today and that’s good news. The issue now is to get men/fathers-to-be the simple skills that will enrich their person lives, the life of their partner and of their children.
At the basis of our Humanity, we are all one. Yes, there are some differences between women and men but basically we share more in common than differences. This micro-reality is no difference from our unique individuality and our commonality in our humanity of giving birth. Too often we use our differences to proclaim an inability to solve problems.
So where should modern men/fathers-to-be start with integrating themselves to pregnancy?
We wrote a blog specifically for fathers-to-be laying out the simple skills they can learn as soon as pregnancy is known and acknowledged whether they are in a living relationship to the mother.
This blog starts from the very beginning of knowing that conception has occurred because the world changes at that moment. The baby is biologically mandated to grow from the moment of conception. This drags the woman along even though she might not know she is pregnant for months. This means the man is now ‘becoming a father’ just as the woman is ‘becoming a mother’. It is during this period of ‘becoming’ that simple yet life transforming skills can be grown … for both the man and woman.
Curiously, there is little skill sharing among women. Just as there’s a false reality that ‘because women get pregnant and carry babies they know how to birth’, there is a false reality that women know how to mature themselves during pregnancy … they just are pulled along.
Leave it to say, fathers-to-be today must absolutely be taught simple skills so they mature as human beings, men, partners and fathers. Everyone benefits whether the woman and man are or continue to be a couple.