Hello dads,
I’ll be a dad myself shortly, and it’s entirely planned, we discussed the idea and then worked towards making it happen. My wife is over the moon and loving the whole process and I’m struggling to see it as a positive change. All I’m seeing is more bills and tasks.
I want to be excited and enthusiastic during the pregnancy (and of course afterwards) but I’m struggling to see this as a positive change for our next - at least - 5 years.
It’s causing some stress between my wife and I, when really I’d much prefer we were bonding now in preparation for the stress our relationship is going to need to endure after the baby arrives.
I guess this is partly just venting, I feel like anyone I know that I might say this to, would think I’m a bad person considering it was entirely planned and now I’m not feeling it after its too late to undo, but if anyone has some ideas on how I can focus more on the positives (I do see them… watching their personality growing, seeing the world from their fresh perspective, a sense of investment in the future, etc. I just struggle to focus on them) of this and less on the incoming bills and sleepless night and relationship stress, so my wife and I can bond, it’d mean a lot to me.
I’m also concerned that I’m seeing the baby as a problem instead of a… Source of joy? and that this might mean I don’t really have a natural parental instinct, so I won’t love it like I should, but instead see it as a series of chores and costs and problems.
There’s a lot of great advice here, and I was definitely in your boat, faking it for my wife’s sake quite a bit.
This is an important takeaway: what you are feeling right now is not unusual.
But seeing my daughter, holding her for the first time, watching her grow, learn, develop a personality… her first “dada”, mush mouthed “love you”, her big grin every morning when she sees me, when she hops off mama’s lap and crawls over to me babbling “dadadada” then a few minutes later crawls back to mama and then tries to get us to sit in a way where she can be touching both of us… there are so many moments nearly every day that make it all worth it.
I think your main issue is how you’re framing this in your mind (or at least how you’ve framed it here) and how I assume you’ve framed this with your wife.
This isn’t about whether or not you made the “right” choice. It’s far too late for that now anyway, and framing it that way carries a shit ton of subtext for your wife that you probably aren’t cognizant of.
Do you not want a kid? Do you not want to be a father? Do you not want to be doing this with her? Do you just want to not have responsibilities? Do you feel like you were pressured into this? Is this some resentment towards her? Will you resent the kid?
These are only some of the really fucking negative ideas that could be put into her head when you say you aren’t sure you made the right choice.
Or is this what’s going on (the far more likely situation with most future fathers): You’re scared as shit about everything coming towards you, you’re scared about the amount of work this will be, concerned about how this will effect your relationship with your wife, worried about how your life will change in ways you can’t even imagine from this side, lamenting the loss of free time and freedom you see coming, worried you might not be ready to handle this or raise a kid properly…
Fears, being scared, worrying? Those are things you might be able to bond over. I’d be surprised if your wife wasn’t scared of a lot of these things too. My wife and I were scared.
But what seems like just a subtle semantic difference between “Oh shit what have we signed up for” and “I’m not sure this was the right choice for us” has a massive gulf in terms of emotional meaning and undertones.
I highly reccomend you try to take some time to try and figure out what you’re really feeling here. Maybe you are resentful of the situation. I hope you aren’t. Like I said earlier, most future fathers go through some terror of “what the shit am I in for what did I agree to?”
If you’ll excuse a bit more ramble, what you’re feeling now might come back from time to time after your kid is born. Particularly when things feel tough, it’s not unusual to feel the weight of all the work you’ve stepped up to do. I still do from time to time, a year and some months in.
But this is what you signed up for. Just like marriage is for better or worse, and relationships can be hard fucking work, so can children. You’ve made the choice with the idea or gamble that what you get out of it will make the toughness and hard times worth it. The overwhelming amount of the time, it absolutely will be.
You’ve made the choice to do this, it’s too late to turn back. So are you going to trudge through it like a member of a chain gang, or are you going to cherish every little thing there is to cherish and be there for your wife who is giving up just as much or more than you will be?