Fatherhood Adjacent

Support & Uselessness

As a father, your primary experience during pregnancy is adjacency.

It’s surprising how unsurprising it is. You tick off tropes you’ve somehow learned by heart one by one. The morning sickness. The pregnancy test. The cravings. You recognize it, but only as a voyeur.

You’ve seen the joke before and can hear the laugh track except now you’re here, part of an impossibly long cultural and biological chain of humanity and yet the physical reality of it all is happening to someone else.

You observe (probably), support (hopefully), and react (definitely) and you notice daily that every page of this unfolding story has little to do with you.

There’s an adjustment period before you realize that whatever experience you enjoyed before, you are now clearly no longer the protagonist. This adjustment hits harder if you’ve never noticed the subtle and not so subtle ways society defers to you. The unfolding moment of pregnancy feels weird and decentering because it literally is. Mama is pregnant, not you, and her needs dictate the schedules, trajectory, and every important decision you’re making for the next 9 months.

You are used to being able to do something. You can fix it. You can lift it. You can solve it. You can improve the situation or manage the outcome or at the very least avoid the worst of it by being proactive. If you can do something you are useful and if you are useful you have value and control.

The journey through pregnancy can break dad’s model of self.

You can’t fix mom’s nausea. You can’t carry baby. You truly can’t shoulder the physical burden for her in any meaningful or significant way.

You can drive to the store, get the food she’s craving, move stuff around the house (if she’s not trying to do it herself in month 8 when you aren’t looking), and you can sit with her as she’s puking. But when she’s getting assaulted by her body day after day, it’s just as likely she wants you to give her some goddamn space when she’s feeling like dogwater.

Preparing for baby as a dad feels like every day you’re punching at air.

It’s a creeping unease that squeezes harder as the pregnancy drags on. The more competent you are and the closer the big day comes, the more awareness you have of how little you’re doing relatively speaking.

So you compensate.

You turn towards the parts of your life where you feel like you can win.

Work. A project. Something in the yard. Anywhere you can identify a problem and visibly improve it. It’s the only place where your feedback loops of self worth still work.

This self-soothing is your body’s panic response to your identity shifting in real time.

Every ultrasound, heartbeat, and baby kick makes the impending outcome more real and still all you can do is support.

You know you’re supposed to be doing something.

But you have no idea what.