Journey of a Dad-to-be

Your partner may look relaxed and au fait with the finer points of perineal massage but what’s really running through his mind? We asked writer Dominic Utton to give us the lowdown on pregnancy, from a man’s point of view..

My wife Heidi and I had always talked about having children – but nothing really prepared us for the changes that lay in store when she became pregnant last year.

And although there seems to be plenty of information and advice for mums-to-be, you don’t hear so much about what it’s like for the expectant man.

Dads-to-be go on a journey themselves; pregnancy for them can be a time of incredible change too. I’ll be honest: I didn’t know what the hell was going on most of the time.

There’s so much that, as a man, you’re never really told, so much that you simply don’t know how to deal with.

Mums-to-be have hormones and instinct and the whole of human evolution to help them cope with those extraordinary nine months – we just have to make it up as we go along…

The Beginning

When we started trying for a baby, Heidi and I made a conscious decision to downplay the whole thing. We didn’t know how long it would take, we didn’t even know if we were both able to conceive – and, after one positive test turned out to be a false alarm, we were determined not to go through the same emotional turmoil every month.

Consequently, when we finally did confirm that, yes, this time it definitely was going to happen, it was through the fog of a hangover. We’d been out the night before and had ended up drinking Mojitos till the early hours... so our initial elation was immediately followed by guilt: poor little embryo was barely five weeks old and we’d already pickled it!

Naturally, being a bloke, I did what blokes do and decided to assume control of the situation. One trip to Waterstones later and I thought I was ready to be a Dad. Armed with three separate “week by week” pregnancy books, a fresh notepad and a new pen, I established a bit of order.

First off was a list of things for Heidi to avoid. Booze, obviously. And soft cheeses. It was a shame, I mused, that booze and soft cheese happen to be Heidi’s favourite things. Still: parenting is all about sacrifice, right…

Reality hits home

I spent the first trimester trying to stay calm – but my mood swung in an emotional yo-yo that was to continue throughout the whole nine months and that would come to a head at the birth itself: incredible excitement tempered with extreme terror.

“Bloody hell!” I wanted to shout, “I’m having a baby! I’m going to be a Dad!” I wanted to hug strangers, buy a round in the pub, dish out cigars and invite people to wonder at my incredible sperm… then immediately afterwards I would be touching wood and reminding myself not to tempt fate or count chickens or get ahead of myself.

Of course, I didn’t tell Heidi any of this – any time she worried about the little person growing inside her, I had to be unswerving in my belief that everything would turn out just fine.

But the thing was – at this stage we still only had those Clearblue tests to tell us that we were having a baby at all. Heidi wasn’t showing, and we hadn’t seen, heard or felt any evidence to back them up.

Despite my confident front, I couldn’t help thinking to myself: what if we’re not pregnant after all?

After the first midwife visit, however, all that changed. At the end, after we’d filled in the first pages of our blue book, she produced a little microphone and asked us if we’d like to try to listen to the baby.

What followed remains the most extraordinary, exhilarating sound I’ve ever heard. A bit of muffled swooshing and then… BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

My baby had a heartbeat! Not only that – it was a goer, a racer. It had a brilliant, hammering, joyous, triumphant little heart! I immediately filled up.

A week later we had the Nuchal scan and all those feelings came flooding in again – only doubled, trebled, magnified beyond measure. I swear that at 12 weeks our baby looked like me.

It had my cheekbones, my little beer belly. We decided we didn’t want to know its sex. We christened it The Bean – because (as well as looking like its dad) it looked a bit like a kidney bean.

For the next few months, as the congratulations poured in, the tears and laughter and champagne and slaps on the back, all I could think about was The Bean’s heartbeat, its little fat tummy.

It was tiny – not even the size of a pear – but I had fallen completely, unconditionally, in love with it.

Mental changes

As the weeks rolled by and the bump got bigger and The Bean began to kick, the physical stuff seemed to be well catered for. We had our books – every week we’d sit in bed and read how the baby was developing – and the midwife visits were taking care of any other questions we had.

What I wasn’t expecting, however, was the way the pregnancy was affecting me mentally. Heidi’s changing body, even her changing moods, were all expected – but I found my whole outlook on life was changing too.

Suddenly I was starting to worry about things I’d never given much thought to before: job security, interest rates, even the structural integrity of our house! Up to this point I’d always been fairly laissez-faire about money and my career – easy come, easy go was my philosophy, something will always turn up.

Now I found myself considering the idea of a second job. It hit me that I had to look after this baby for the next 18 years or so; that I had to provide for it, nurture it, take care of it; that I had to make sure it got the best possible chance at life. Suddenly I had to become responsible.

It even seemed (whisper it) there was a chance I might be becoming something like my own dad!

Let me help

It’s a funny feeling, being an expectant father. The rush of incredible responsibility – a whole new life to look after! – is accompanied by strange sensations of uselessness.

The pregnant woman nurtures the baby all the way from a single split cell… but until the birth itself, it can seem like the dad-to-be doesn’t have much of a practical role. “What can I do?” I kept asking Heidi.

Luckily, it turned out there was plenty to do. I’d always been hopeless at DIY: suddenly Heidi’s nesting instinct dictated that, as well as converting the study into a nursery, we needed to repaint the kitchen and sort out the attic.

I realised that all those handyman skills that dads have – all those little jobs they can do around the house – are learned during pregnancy.

I could barely bang a nail in beforehand: by the third trimester I was assembling furniture, putting up mobiles and stencilling owls on to the wall.

Of course, it’s a bloke thing, the DIY. It’s about taking control. There’s so much happening that we can’t affect, so many massive changes happening daily in the womb… us chaps need something we can point to and say: “I did that for the baby.” And the irony is, the biggest job of all is the most obvious one.

Most important of all is to look after the mum to be. From helping her with the shopping to helping her find her perineum (I didn’t even know what a perineum was a year ago); reassuring her that she’s never looked more beautiful than she does nine months’ pregnant; from learning how to rub her back in readiness for labour to biting your tongue during labour when she screams at you never to touch her again… it really is all about her.

And in a funny sort of way, that’s part of the journey of a dad-to-be too: discovering just how amazing the mother of your baby is.

Eithne Rose Bean Utton was born on 22 February 2007, weighing 8lb 5oz. She loves what her Dad’s done with the nursery.