The Expectant Father. Armin A. Brott
you may not want to discuss with your partner is your dreams. According to Berkeley, California (where else?), psychologist Alan Siegel, a lot of expectant dads experience an increase in dreams about having sex—with their partner, old girlfriends, and even prostitutes. For some guys, these dreams are an expression of their concern that the pregnancy will mess with their sex life. The brain is probably saying to itself, “Well, big guy, if you can’t get any in the flesh, you can still have some pretty wild fantasies … ” For other guys, sexual dreams are a way of reassuring themselves that fatherhood—and all those mushy, protective feelings that go with it—in no way detracts from their masculinity.
STAYING INVOLVED
Going to the OB/GYN Appointments
The general rule that women connect with the pregnancy sooner than men has an exception: men who get involved early on and stay involved until the end have been shown to be as connected with the baby as their partners. And at this stage, the best way to get involved is to go to as many of your partner’s OB/GYN appointments as possible.
Although I always love being told that I’m healthy as a horse, I’ve never really looked forward to going to the doctor. And going to someone else’s doctor is even less attractive. But over the course of three pregnancies, I think I missed only two OB medical appointments. Admittedly, some of the time I was bored out of my mind, but overall it was a great opportunity to have my questions answered and to satisfy my curiosity about just what was going on inside my wife’s womb.
There’s no doubt that you can get at least some basic questions answered by reading a couple of the hundreds of pregnancy and childbirth books written for women. But there are a number of other, more important reasons to go to the appointments:
• You will become more of a participant in the pregnancy and less of a spectator. In other words, it will help make the pregnancy “yours.”
• It will demystify the process and make it more tangible. Hearing the baby’s heartbeat for the first time (in about the third month) and seeing his or her tiny body squirm on an ultrasound screen (in about the fifth month) bring home the reality of the pregnancy in a way that words on a page just can’t do.
• As the pregnancy progresses, your partner is going to be feeling more and more dependent on you, and she’ll need more signs that you’ll always be there for her. While going to her doctor appointments may not seem quite as romantic as a moonlit cruise or a dozen roses, there are very few better ways to remind her that you love her and reassure her that she’s not in this thing alone.
• The more you’re around, the more seriously the doctor and his or her staff will take you and the more involved they’ll let you be (see pages 75–76 for more on this).
Looking for Validation
If you’re adopting, the time between your decision to adopt and the actual arrival of your child could be considered a “psychological pregnancy.” Unlike a biological pregnancy, you won’t, in most cases, know exactly how long it’s going to take from beginning to end. But what’s interesting is that most expectant adoptive parents go through an emotional progression similar to that of expectant biological parents, says adoption educator Carol Hallenbeck. The first step is what Hallenbeck calls “adoption validation,” which basically means coming to terms with the idea that you’re going to become a parent through adoption instead of through “normal” means. During their psychological pregnancy, adoptive parents often experience the same kind of denial that I described above, not letting themselves get too excited out of fear that the adoption could take far longer than they expected or that it will fall apart completely.
If you and your partner have hired a surrogate, there’s a good chance that you’ll be going through a psychological pregnancy as well. Unlike an adoptive couple, you have a much better idea of when your baby will be born, but you may still go through what might be called “surrogacy validation.”
This may seem straightforward, but it’s usually not. For many parents, according to researcher Rachel Levy-Shiff, adoption (or surrogacy) is a second choice, a decision reached only after years of unsuccessfully trying to conceive on their own and after seemingly endless disappointments and intrusive, expensive medical procedures. Infertility can make you question your self-image, undermine your sense of masculinity (how can I be a man if I can’t get my partner pregnant?), force you to confront your shattered dreams, and can take a terrible toll on your relationship. If you’re having trouble accepting the fact that you won’t be having biologically related children, I urge you to talk to some other people about what you’re feeling. Your partner certainly has a right to know—and she might be feeling a lot of similar things. In addition, the adoption agency you’re working with will probably have a list of support resources for adoptive fathers. Give them a try.
If you’re planning to go to your partner’s checkups, you’d better get your calendar out. Here’s what a typical schedule looks like:
| MONTH | IF YOU’RE EXPECTING ONE BABY | IF YOU’RE EXPECTING MULTIPLES |
| 1–5 | Monthly | Monthly |
| 6 | Monthly | Every other week |
| 7 | Every other week | Every other week |
| 8 | Every other week | Weekly |
| 9 | Weekly | Weekly |
Of course, taking time off from work for all these appointments may not be realistic. But before you write the whole thing off, check with the doctor—many offer early-morning or evening appointments.
Screening and Testing
Besides being a time of great emotional closeness between you and your partner, pregnancy is also a time for your partner to be poked and prodded. Most of the tests she’ll have to take, such as the monthly urine tests for blood sugar and the quarterly blood tests for other problems, are purely routine. Others, though, are less routine and sometimes can be scary.
The scariest of all are the ones to detect birth defects, most commonly Down syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities. One of the things you can expect your partner’s doctor to do is take a detailed medical history—from both of you. These medical histories will help the practitioner assess your risk of having a child with severe—or not so severe—problems (see pages 59–60 for more on this). If you’re in one of the high-risk categories, your doctor may suggest some additional prenatal screening.
The words screening and testing are often used interchangeably, but there’s actually a big difference between them. Noninvasive procedures such as ultrasounds and blood tests are used to assess potential risks. If the risk is high enough, the doctor may order a test to confirm a diagnosis. Those tests are usually invasive (to your partner and your baby) and involve some risk. The OB will be able to help you decide whether the benefits of taking the test (knowing whether your baby is healthy) outweigh the potential risks (causing a miscarriage).
If you did ART and PGD (preimplantation genetic diagnosis; see pages 298–299), you and your partner may not have to be tested at all—the lab was able to test the embryo itself for more than a hundred diseases and abnormalities. If any were found, that particular embryo wouldn’t have been implanted. However, because there is a small risk of getting a false negative on the PGD, many fertility doctors