Shareware Grab Bag/Shareware Grab Bag.iso/008/pregman.arc/COUVADE

Text File | 1987-07-09 | 7.1 KB | 149 lines

Exclusive
for WORKING MOTHER Magazine
TRAVAIL
OF
THE
PREGNANT MAN

By
Michael Finley

It took a while, back when my wife was pregnant, to admit I was
jealous.                        Not of the hard work and discomfort Rachel was going
through, but of the way that society knew just what to do with pregnant
women.            And of the way women, carrying that bundle just below the
belt, had a feeling of connectedness through pregnancy.

Men aren't so lucky.            Bookstores bulge with titles for expectant
mothers, but there are none for expectant fathers, save a primer
or two with cro-magnon titles like How
to Have a Baby.                    Women
throw one another baby showers -- all husbands get is the occasional
slap on the back from other men, who are just glad it isn't happening
to them.                    People on the street, complete strangers, stop to pat
the mother's tummy.                Husbands' tummies go unpatted.

I completely denied we were pregnant the first couple of months
-- all the evidence was locked away inside Rachel.                            Before the
baby was born I would learn that men go through their own travail,
some in stalwart silence, some in continuous fretting, others in
mindless behavior that, though self-

destructive, somehow gets men ready for fatherhood.

Anthropologists call this readying process couvade,
or brooding,
and it gets its name from the customs of pre-industrial cultures
in which men go through ritual preenactments of the process of labor
and delivery, with beads and feathers and screams in the night.                        Modern
men have to concoct, all alone, their individual responses to pregnancy.
The
stages in accepting new life, it turns out, are disturbingly like
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's steps toward accepting the end of life, running
the gamut from denial to depression to acceptance, sometimes including
great anger.    And they happen when a man is asked to be more supportive
of his partner than ever before -- when there's no time to attend
to his own needs.

I couldn't face the sense of responsibility, of adulthood, looming
over the project.            The loss of free time, of discretionary income.                The
awareness that soon someone would be utterly dependent on me.            The
annoyance of children, period -- why should I, who never felt drawn
to them before, start suddenly liking them now?

The first trimester, Rachel carried the ball of our pregnancy, so
to speak.                        She kept her usual hours as a community clinic nurse
practitioner, read all the childbrith books, contacted a lay midwife
(Rachel was determined ours would be a home birth), line dup health
insurance, new clothes for herself and baby, researched the pros
and cons of amniocentesis, and drew up a rash of first names for
boys and girls.

She had to, because I awoke in a fog, drove to work in it, punched
out and drove back through it -- not at all in love with the stranger
taking up residence in my wife, unwilling even to admit it (not he,
not she) was there.                        People -- other men -- kept nudging me with
their elbows, as in "attaboy, Mike."                            I gave them my perplexed
frown, as in "what are you talking about?"

My meek personality grew bristles.                        I conducted kitchen debates
with passing acquaintances over the wisdom of home births.    I, who
was petrified of them, took the pro
position.                I railed against delivery rooms, saddle blocks, episiotomies,
and the like.                    Doctors, I said -- bah!        I preached the virtues
of jungle childbirth to all who would listen and for as long as they
would listen.

I was acting out my anger, with my mouth and with my stomach.            Rachel
was eating for two, of course, but couldn't drink.                            I began
to drink for two.                Soon the new pounds came, and my suit pants
began to tighten their deathgrip around my middle.

The middle months saw me grieving over the life I saw dragging to
a tragic end.                        Every time we did something fun was the last time,
I kept intoning.                    Fortunately, Rachel and I were able to talk
-- lacking the beads and feathers of ritual couvade, I used their
modern equivalent, words.                            Ours were spoken at night, staring
into the endless bedroom ceiling.                    I needed, and got, assurance
that my worries and fears about fatherhood were natural.

To cheer ourselves up we took a last-ditch romantic trip together,
flying for a week to Puerta Vallarta and points south, all on borrowed
money.                    We wobbled, two giant norteamericanos,
up and down the sands of the Mexican Pacific, my sweating hand in
her edematous hand.            We were fat, we were nauseous, we were in love.

Back
home, I began taking out my anxieties on my thoracic vertebrae, and
daily the irritation in that area grew, until I couldn't even sit
in an easy chair without squirming.                I took to popping Advil like
Good'n'Plenty for back pain.

In the last few weeks of pregnancy, I started to come around.                I
had progressed from denial (how can I be sure there's a baby in there?)
to shock (me? a father?) to grieving (there goes my life!) to gradual
adaptation (gotta set some money aside, gotta buy life insurance,
gotta build a baby elephant mobile for over the crib).

Suddenly our midwife, in whom we hadplaced all our trust, announced
she was going to California over our due date.                        Something cracked
in me, and in that moment of betrayal I climbed out of my useless
let-others-do-the-work skin and began taking responsibility myself.                        I
faced up to the realities of home birth by taking down the bathroom
shower curtain and spreading it over the bed.                        No sense destroying
the mattress with all the blood, I said.            I was a soldier now.                        Let
them come.

One night, after about three years of being pregnant, we went into
labor.                        It was a long night and a long day, and then nighttime
again before we held our little Daniele blinking in our arms.                    I
was ready, after my eight-plus months of misgivings and after the
extraordinary effort of labor, to catch her as she spilled out into
the world.                    My squeamishness was gone.                She was soft to my touch,
like butter.

In earlier societies, couvade was a ritual, with the father enacting
the pangs of pregnancy and childbirth, as if to draw away the evil
spirits who might otherwise attack the mother and child.                            Modern
man has no such program, no ceremony to fall back on.                He, like
me, can only fret, start arguments, gain weight and hurt.

Modern couvade, like couvade as it was practiced for centuries in
rituals, is a crisis of development for men, like puberty or marriage
or getting a first job.    We get scared.            Somehow we have to get from
nonfatherhood to fatherhood, and there is no set of instructions
to help us get there.

I made the change, somehow.                    In nine months I went from being
one kind of man to being another, from being intent upon an individual
goal to a collective goal.                            And it is a change which lasts.                    Anyone
could tell you that these days I am, first and foremost, a dad.

#    #    #

Michael
Finley, a St. Paul advertising consultant, is writing a book on The
Pregnant Man: Anxiety and the Expectant Father.