Day 30: Research

The only person who knows Mary is pregnant is a friend of ours who lives nearby, has delivered two children at Mass General, and was in a position to give us a great recommendation on an obstetrician. The last thing she told me during our phone call was "keep Mary off the Internet".

Mary has not been kept off the Internet. She tells me that 97% of babies are delivered free of birth defects. That seems to me like a very low number. 3% is a lot of babies.

She has also researched some of the physical realities of the delivery process, and has announced that, given the option, she might well prefer a C-section than to actually going through "the experience" of natural childbirth. I say that if she carries my baby for 9 months I'm in no position to to demand she put her body through one or the other type of trauma.

Can one elect for a C-section? Did I read somewhere that planned C-sections are in fashion in Hollywood?

Day 25

For a few days now Mary has been noticing a heightened sense of smell. Last weekend we walked through the North End and she kept calling my attention to this strong garbage smell or that strong garlic smell. Throughout our relationship I've been the one to complain that the woman in front of us in the airplane was wearing too much perfume, or the neighbors downstairs were cooking something funky. Now the tables are turned. She called me just now to say that she had been stuck in a meeting at work where the smell of the white-board markers were too intense.

Of course I'm thinking "get the hell out of there, this is the worst possible time for strong chemical fumes" (because, obviously, I'm now an expert in fetal development, having studied several web pages on the topic in the past two weeks).

Will the reality of this whole thing begin to sink-in only in response to perceived dangers? Right now our lives still feel almost completely unchanged. Something about that scares me, makes me feel inadequate. I have the sense that if I were any kind of prospective father, I'd be thinking and behaving very differently than usual, starting right away. As it is, all we've done is think about clearing-out the junk we've piled in the second bedroom.

Day 22: The News

According to Mary, today is the beginning of week 5 of her pregnancy. It's actually day 22 since conception, and it's been less than a week since she emerged from the bathroom wielding a pee-stick with a positive reading. This will be our first baby.

We've researched prenatal health. We've read all about the likelihood of miscarriage. We've examined diagrams showing what the fetus looks like now, and what it will look like at each phase of the pregnancy.

We should be talking about how to save the money we'll need to raise this child. We should be talking about whether we'll need to move from our Boston apartment. We should be assembling a list of the city's best doctors. Instead we talk more about names, and how we're going to fit a child and all its associated accouterments into our existing place, and how Mary's mom will react, and the merits and demerits of boys vs. girls.

This news has clearly not sunk in yet. We've changed almost nothing in our lives in reaction to this new fact, except there are now a few things Mary doesn't eat/drink, and there's a vitamin she takes every day... and we talk about it. But I haven't actually done anything yet. I haven't started saving for college, or started building baby furniture, or researched the local public and private educational options, or done any of the other things I imagine a new dad-to-be should do.

Maybe it'll seem more real once we're past the danger-phase, and have begun announcing it. But that's still seven weeks from now.