I was 26 years old when my wife became pregnant and then I had the feeling that, more or less, I knew what this birth was about and that, more or less, I would know how to act both in childbirth and later as a father.
However, now I confess with sorrow and regret that I had no idea of ​​dilations, of oxytocin, provocations, episiotomies, breaths, lactations, diapers (that they tell Jon and Picasso that we did between the two with the meconium), pacifiers, quarantines, expulsives, caesarean sections ...
Come on, that I was accompanying my wife in the deepest ignorance (and that I had studied motherhood in the career six years before) without too many expectations about what childbirth would be like and without too much ability to make responsible choices. "Pringaillo", which is usually said, that is, little prepared to be a father.
Jon was born and began to take an interest in the world of babies, pregnancy, childbirth and everything related to childhood and motherhood and all this helped us to go, for our second birth, with the clearest ideas, with more security and with some more experience in general.
Why after and not before?
You could have started to "recycle" before it was born, you will think some. And yes, it's true, but men are that simple. Women know their baby at the moment they see the positive pregnancy test and begin to experience physical and emotional changes from that moment.
The men, on the other hand, only see a line in a test that tells us that we will be parents, a belly that grows week after week and our mind can only imagine us with a 3 or 4 year old boy, playing football, to the console and you would lose mom, as if the baby stage was not much with us.
The pregnancy is evolving and you have to start buying clothes and pots for your future child, but then you feel that you are not able to choose and, in fact, you do not even want to do it.
- The one with the kite or the bear with the balloon?
-That?
-Sweetie! Do you want to listen to me? Don't you care about your son at all? Do you spend everything? I'm asking you if we take the pajamas with the bear with the kite or the bear with the balloon!
-Oh honey, it didn't happen. I like the one in the balloon.
- The one with the balloon? Do not you like the kite more?
-Oh, yes, take the kite. If I don't care.
- How do you not care? Look, I need you to help me choose, which is for your son!
-Well, take the balloon.
- But you have not told me that the one of the kite in the end? Look, we take the balloon that the other seems to have a higher neck and the same rubs.
Until I see his face ...
And what do we know the parents of pajamas necks, batiste shirts, one piece pajamas, two pieces, bears with kites, shawls or blankets, wool caps or moisturizers for the lobe contour of baby's ear?
Well, nothing. Nothing, because when we were little they only gave us balls and G.I. Joe's and playing moms and babies were girl stuff.
So I fear that, as I say, until a man does not see his son and takes him in his arms, he does not begin to feel the need to learn to be a father (and sometimes not even then).
I may be wrong, so the witness passed to you moms (and to you, dads): Are men prepared to be fathers?
