I thought I knew what a real man was...

There are few things in this world that provide a man a greater opportunity to experience the advent of true manhood than experiencing the pregnancy of one’s wife, girlfriend, or partner for the first time. I say this coming from the perspective of thinking I knew all about what it meant to be a “real man,” only to find out that I knew nothing at all. Let me explain…

And then my wife got pregnant.

For the first time in my life I began to understand what being a real man means. It means being giving, wise, resourceful, and caring. It means providing and creating a safe space for your family to prosper. It means being there, every step of the way for your partner. It means getting your life in order so when the little one comes there will be food on the table, and a roof over everyone’s head (and maybe even cable too, so you and your partner to can laugh your way to your delivery by watching episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm).

After hanging up my jump boots, I began a career in television and film in New York City up until the time I learned Lauren was pregnant. Suddenly I woke up, realizing the freelance lifestyle wouldn’t work for my particular family, and immediately set about finding steady work that provided benefits, health care, and a paycheck we could count on. Fortunately I found my way into the natural products industry, joining my wife who had been working in the industry for as long as she could legally file income taxes. I had already begun to adopt a natural lifestyle before actually working in the industry, but being in a green work environment helped me realize that the only way for us to navigate this pregnancy, and later raise our child, would be for us to do it naturally and organically. So here’s a few things that I did that I recommend you give a try:

1. Take a class. I joined my wife and enrolled in a pregnancy and child birth class. We chose Realbirth in New York City. (www.realbirth.com). This class was great because it had a catch-all kind of curriculum, in that Organic Green Mommies and Daddies would get a lot out of it, but it also covered more traditional mainstream ideas associated with pregnancy and child birth. And the truth is, it’s better to all about epidurals and c-sections, even if you’re planning on “going natural,” ’cause as Mr. Forrest Gump tells us, “Life is like a bowl of cherries, you never know whatchu goin’ to get.” More on that in future posts…
2. Read, brother.  Read. I read a couple of great books, besides flipping through the prerequisite “What To Expect When You’re Expecting.” One, which I recommend for everyone, OG Mums and Dads and mainstream folk alike, is “The Happiest Baby On The Block” by Dr. Harvey Karp (www.thehappiestbaby.com). This book gave me the confidence I needed to basically take over the lion’s share of the care for our newborn, considering my wife was down for the count for the first couple of days after the birth, recovering from her c-section.
3. A couple other great books that I read were definitely less conventional than Karp’s book, but filled me with wonder and awe about the child birthing process as well as the period covering the first several months and years of childhood. One of those books was, “The Magical Child.” This book has some unconventional concepts, and I quite frankly didn’t have use for all of it, but certainly learned a lot and thought a lot about its ideas, which concern the development of the child’s mind-brain from birth to adulthood, the importance of play, and the stages of detachment from the mother, through the womb, and into the world. The other interesting book I read was called, “The Continuum Concept,” in which the author describes her experiences observing indigenous cultures raise their children basically in the wild. Obviously most of us can’t live in the manner in which she describes, but her book definitely provides food for thought regarding abandoning some of the counter-productive and negative consequences of living in the Western-pharmaceutical-media-driven mainstream world.
4. Get help! The other thing I did was help my wife select a Doula for our birth. What the heck is a doula, you ask? Well, the word comes from the Greek, meaning “a female servant” (don’t get any funny ideas), and doulas are basically birthing assistants that can provide a professional level of support for our partners that quite frankly most of us men, even the “real men” aren’t capable of providing. At the very least, they form an integral part of the birthing team and can fill in for us when we need to take a break or aren’t present during labor for whatever reason.
5. Get involved with the delivery team. The same goes for the midwife or medical practitioner. It sure helps for us real men to understand who these people are and what their roles are during the process. Often times, the practitioner your partner may often see during check-ups and appointments isn’t the one who is present during the birth (usually for scheduling reasons) so it’s advisable to go with your partner on as many of her appointments as possible so you can meet as many of the people in the practice as possible. Knowing the personalities of these people can definitely be helpful, especially if any problems arise during the process.
6. Help create a Birthing Plan. One of the most important things we can do as real men is to have many conversations with our partners during the pregnancy with the goal of creating a “birthing plan” for the big day. I advise even writing one down so both partners understand what is expected out of one another, and writing things down often indicates whether or not we may be missing or forgetting something. As it turned out for us, we planned for a natural birth but were sure to at least talk about and create rudimentary plans for what we would do in the event something changed.
7. Enjoy your partner during this process. One of the most fun aspects of the pregnancy were the rather unexpectedly frequent opportunities for intimacy. So much so that I’m actually planning on writing a book called, “My Wife is a Hot Pregnant Mamma, and Other Observations From a First-Time Father.” You do the math.
8. Take lots of pictures. Along the lines of the previous point, take the opportunity to photograph your partner. As an expecting father it is wild how your perceptions of beauty and attraction mature. My wife was so amazingly beautiful to me during her pregnancy and I am glad that I took several opportunities to capture that beauty in tasteful and artistic photography.
9. Step up to the plate. Understand that many times you must be serve as the voice for your partnership and will be called upon to speak up for your little family’s best interests. My wife was diagnosed with gestational diabetes early on in the process and had to undergo a ridiculous amount of additional testing to include traditional diabetes blood sugar monitoring and very frequent ultra sounds. Because of this condition, our hospital in which our birthing center was housed tried over and over again to get us out of a natural birth and into a pharmaceutically-enhanced medical birth, even labeling us as “high risk.” There were several instances in which I had to fight for our birthing plan against teams of doctors who no doubt for liability reasons were trying to alter our plans. My wife, who passionately shared our desire to birth naturally, at times was overcome with emotions and hormones and was unable to speak up in the same way. I had to step up and protect our plan and speak for her, which is why sharing the birthing plan is so important, as it may turn out to be up to only you who makes sure it happens. This will continue through the birthing itself, which I will cover in a future post.
10. What about registering? I was not terribly involved in the baby registry process and some ways regret this. I am basically allergic to shopping so it usually takes a Herculean effort to get my real man’s butt involved in things like this. However, if I could have avoided shopping in stores and just done it online on a registry like ours, it would have been a lot more fun for me. The reason I bring up this point is that there were a few items that we registered for – a few MAJOR items, like the car seat, the high chair, and the stroller – that we were unhappy with and if I had only just participated in the process, might have found this out before it was too late. The cardinal rule in relationships: don’t complain about something if you didn’t participate in planning it.
11. Don’t wait until the last minute…to get the nursery and the carseat set up. In fact, make these some of the first things you do. The nursery can be a lot of fun and there will undoubtedly be a lot of physical labor type stuff like moving and building cribs and hanging things that your partner will probably need you for. We also set up a co-sleeper in our bedroom which took like three weeks to figure out. See, your “due-date” isn’t necessarily the big day so it would behoove you to have all of these details in order well in advance. As far as the carseat goes, my wife and I often look back fondly to the days when we used to drive around with an empty carseat, just waiting to fill it up with our little bundle of joy.