How to be a prospective father

Note that this advice relates purely to being a prospective father, not an actual father. I have no idea how to be an actual father. This relates to point 1.

Point 1: Worry endlessly that you’re not going to be a good father.

We’re mostly born into this life with a father, and if we’re lucky we get to keep him for quite some time. At first we assume that Dad knows everything, or at least, if he doesn’t know it immediately, he can go and look it up in a special book he keeps hidden called “Everything you’ll Ever Need to Know Ever” (Chapter One – How to bleed radiators).

Part of the whole horrible experience of growing up is the slow realisation that your Dad doesn’t know everything, is making most of it up as he goes along, and what’s more there is no book.

But, the thing is, even without a book my Dad did pretty well. He knew how to bleed radiators. He knew how to Do Things With Cars. He even once, during a traffic jam caused by a faulty traffic light, got out of the car, sauntered up to the light, opened up the back, twiddled with some wires and made it go green. The people in the other cars cheered, and I knew then that my dad could do fucking anything.

Okay, so he was working for the company who were doing the roadworks and put up the traffic light in the first place, but still, to a young boy that was pretty awesome. I bet Superman never made traffic lights change.

The thing is, at 15 you kind of rely on your Dad for all the little things that require a special tool. Dads have all the special tools. But I was still relying on my dad for stuff like that at 35, and starting to worry that I wasn’t “grown up male” material, let alone “dad material”.

And then, one day recently, I realised that I owned (partly due to consolidation with my wife’s belongings), not one but four wood saws, and a lot of other tools and gadgets for DIY. I didn’t have a collection of sticks for stirring paint, but I’ll know what one looks like when I see it.

Being able to do Dad Stuff sort of snuck up on me. As, I guess, it snuck up on my Dad too. Except he was 22 when I came along and I’m the wrong side of 35. So maybe it takes longer to pick up that stuff when you don’t have the pressing need.

It was my birthday a few months ago, and my dad bought me a complete set of spanners. It was, I realise now, a symbolic handing over the reins of Dadhood. Not quite a book on how to do bloody everything, but it will have to do.

Point 2: Worry endlessly about your wife, and the little tiny fragile thing growing inside her

Okay, so women have been having babies for, what, about a hundred years now? I’ve not checked Wikipedia but it’s got to be at least that. So I shouldn’t be worried about how it all works, should I?

But, what really stops him getting all tangled up in there? It’s worrying. Really.

And, each individual horrible disease, genetic flaw, whatever, they’re all pretty rare. But when you’re rolling the dice so many times…

I just really hope it all goes okay.

Of course, everyone’s supposed to say “whatever happens I’ll love him” and of course that’s true for me too. But it doesn’t stop me really really hoping that there’s nothing at all wrong with him.

We had a couple of hiccups, early on, with a worries about ectopic pregnancy, or no pregnancy at all. It all turned out okay, but I can’t really remember dread like that before, and I don’t want to experience it again. Worried because I could see Jane so worried, and I knew how devastating it would have been for her, and worried because I began to realise how much I wanted a child now.

The rest of the pregnancy has gone pretty much without a hitch, so now there’s just the other things to worry about, that he’ll have everything in the right order and not be… different. And feeling guilty about thinking like that. But I do.

Point 3: Worry about the future

Up until now, my life story has been scribbled, figuratively speaking, on scraps of paper. I never bothered to write what was going to happen next, when a new thing came into my life, I just found another scrap of paper to write it on. There was no next year, next decade, sometimes there was barely a tomorrow. The only post-dated scrap of paper had written on it “drop down dead”.

And then I got married and suddenly having Some Kind of Plan seems like a good idea. Maybe at least planning what you’re going to eat for the rest of the week. Nothing major.

Then a baby comes into the picture. And you get handed a great ream of blank note paper. With chapter headings dated up until 2050 and beyond. Things that are going to happen to this young person, and I want to be around to see them.

Before, the future was unknown, but I didn’t care because it only affected me. Now, the future is unknown and I care a lot because it affects someone else.

I’m still working on that one. I think it needs to be approached from two angles, both mitigating for what could happen, and also realising that there’s nothing that going to stop it happening, so it’s best not to worry about it too much.

I’ll let you know how I get on with that.

In summary

So, you may have got the gist that being a prospective father is worrying about a lot of things, all those above and more.

Worrying, but then dealing with each worry one by one; and doing it in a way that you look like you know what you’re doing.

So that maybe, somewhere down the line, some small person might think you’re Superman too.