What fathers-to-be need to know
One thing you need to understand is that learning how-to be a father is sort of different for men than learning how-to a mother for women. Sounds obvious?
- Women are physically pregnant and can never take one nano-second vacation from that state. This is the biological mandate. Your baby is required to grow and this pulls and pushes the woman into growing. Women are biologically forced through the transition from ‘being’ a woman to ‘becoming’ a mother to ‘being’ a mother after ‘The Birth’.
- Men have to ‘choose’ to move from ‘being’ a man to ‘becoming’ a father to ‘being’ a father.
In traditional cultures the role of fatherhood is be diverse.
- There are cultures that believe all men within the family, clan, moiety or village are the fathers.
- Some cultures accept children born outside formal marriage.
- Other cultures easily accept multiple fathers for multiple children from the same woman … and vise versa.
- Other cultures are more constrained and only recognize children from a formal marriage although there may be children born outside that union.
When you think about it, how bizarre is it that we are all One Humanity yet with our Mind we create so many cultures. But this is sort of the good news and sort of the bad news.
The bad news
Most women and men living in modern societies are taught few skills. Is texting a skill? Sure. It doesn’t grow corn, build a house, make pants or play a musical instrument. There are also fewer cultural norms. The movement of people into modern lifestyles and away from traditional ones means that every single person and family now does whatever they want and often they lack broad skills.
Think about this lack of skills and the modern gift of living as you chose. Our human Mind is so complex. One would think that when we have a physical, physiological need such as hunger that we would automatically know what foods are poisonous but we don’t. We don’t automatically know how to make fire, a house, clothes, baskets or grow the simplest foods. We learn.
Who knows why … perhaps this is actually a good thing. Humans live around the world where the foods available vary greatly. Perhaps if we were hard-wired to only know certain foods then we could never have settled in so many places. If we were hard wired to build a certain house or use specific material for clothing then we’d lack skills when in a different environment. Humans are generalists and we thrive by being skilled.
Women are locked into a dance with their baby once they are pregnant but even this intimacy does not produce automatic good mothering skills. Our cultures are what teach us the how-to father and mother. If we don’t have lots of people around us doing the same thing then we don’t know what is expected or how to do things. We have too many possibilities.
This makes sense when you think about your child. Because your child could be brought up in any culture, he or she would learn what is expected and accepted in that culture. Children do not automatically get what you expect of them or what is acceptable. They have to be taught
Because modern people have so little guidance and each family develops it’s own ways of doing things then when you come together with a woman who was brought up differently then you conflicts of how-to parent can lead to lots of other conflicts.
The good news
You get to be who you want to be as a father. It’s your choice. How to be a father is not instinctive or intuitive by nature. We know this because every culture has different ways of being a father yet any man can impregnate any woman and any child can be brought up in any culture. Good fathering skills are learned as are bad. Either you learned them from your father and the older male role models or you watched other fathers and decided to pick up some of those skills.
Can we totally remove the wonderful qualities of intuition and instinct? Of course not. For example, the most basic level of instinct would be the way a baseball pitcher catches a driving fly ball. That happens so quickly that there is only instinct.
Instinct and intuition are sometimes believed to be below thought but not always. The deeper level of instinct and intuition are experienced by anyone who is very skilled yet continues to evolve their skills through a refinement process. Perfecting skills brings skills, intuition and instinct together in a very sophisticated way. Experienced fathers can tell you that this level of sophistication in fathering comes from living, using, honoring, respecting, accepting and knowing that you are bringing your best skills to your own life, your partner’s and your children’s.
What most fathers-to-be do not know is that there are specific skills to learn and perfect during pregnancy so that you can grow alongside your partner and your baby. But you have to choose to grow these skills because biological does not mandate that of you. Once you learn the skills below don’t practice them. You use them.
Secret:
Women do not automatically know how to ‘mother’. Just because women get pregnant and give birth they don’t automatically know how to be a good mother. In fact women don’t automatically know how to give birth. One hundred percent will give birth but that doesn’t mean women know how. Just because we’re hungry we do not know what foods are safe/poisonous. We are not as primal as some people submit.
Women have to learn to be a mother just as you have to learn to be a father. That’s why growing skills in pregnancy (for both of you) is so vital. If you can become skilled while you’re ‘becoming’ a father then you’ll move through the Gateway experience of the birth and out the other side ‘being’ a father. That’s exciting.
Here are the skills. You can talk and discuss these and create the family you want. These are human skills but so very suited for male energy. Men don’t need to get in touch with their feminine side, they just need to learn these valuable skills and use them throughout pregnancy and have them well integrated into your self on behalf of your relationship and kids.
Once you realize that the way you do things are merely taught behaviors. You can choose to change them or refine them. Skilled people love their ability to refine their skills.
So these fatherhood qualities can lead to the behaviors you can use throughout your life:
- Kindness
- Patience
- Awareness
- Attention to detail
- Being able to see what needs to be done
- Growing a second set of arms (I’ll explain later)
- Growing two more sets of eyes (I’ll explain later)
- Humor
- Delight
- Clarity
These are qualities that you need to grow. Your child in it’s earliest years is much more non-verbal than verbal. Children (and you were one once) are totally into ‘actions’. Remember actions speak louder than words.