When my wife got pregnant with our first child, I was the happiest I’d ever been. That pregnancy, labor, and the baby’s birth was a time of incredible closeness, tenderness, and passion. Long before we’d married, my wife and I had made a commitment to participate equally in raising our children. And it seemed only natural that the process of shared parenting should begin during pregnancy.

Since neither of us had had children before, we were both rather ill prepared for pregnancy. Fortunately for my wife, there were literally hundreds of books and other resources designed to educate, encourage, support, and comfort women during their pregnancies. But when it finally hit me that I, too, was expecting (although in a very different kind of way), and that the pregnancy was bringing out feelings and emotions I didn’t understand, there simply weren’t any resources for me to turn to. I looked for answers in my wife’s pregnancy books, but information about what expectant fathers go through (if it was discussed at all) was at best superficial, and consisted mostly of advice on how men could be supportive of their pregnant wives. To make things worse, my wife and I were the first couple in our circle of close friends to get pregnant, which meant that there was no one else I could talk to about what I was going through, no one who could reassure me that what I was feeling was normal and all right.

Until fairly recently, there has been precious little research on expectant fathers’ emotional and psychological experiences during pregnancy. The very title of one of the first articles to appear on the subject should give you some idea of the medical and psychiatric communities’ attitude toward the impact of pregnancy on men. Written by William H. Wainwright, M.D., and published in the July 1966 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, it was called “Fatherhood as a Precipitant of Mental Illness.” (Another wonderful title that came out at about the same time was: “Psychoses in Males in Relation to Their Wives’ Pregnancy and Childbirth.”)

As you’ll soon find out, though, an expectant father’s experience during the transition to fatherhood is not confined simply to excitement—or mental illness; if it were, this book would never have been written. The reality is that men’s emotional response to pregnancy is no less varied than women’s; expectant fathers feel everything from relief to denial, fear to frustration, anger to joy. And for up to 80 percent of men, there are physical symptoms of pregnancy as well (more on this on pages 74–79).

So why haven’t men’s experiences been discussed more? In my opinion it’s because we, as a society, value motherhood more than fatherhood, and we automatically assume that issues of pregnancy, childbirth, and child rearing are women’s issues. But as you’ll learn—both from reading this book and from your own experience—that’s simply not the case.

WHO, EXACTLY, HAS WRITTEN THIS BOOK?

From the very beginning, my goal in writing The Expectant Father has been to help you—the father—understand and make sense of what you’re going through during your pregnancy. The rationale was simple: the more you understand about what you’re going through, the better prepared you’ll be and the more likely you’ll be to take an interest in—and stay involved throughout—the pregnancy. Research has shown that the earlier fathers get involved (and what could be earlier than pregnancy?), the more likely they are to be involved after their children are born. And that’s good for your child, good for you, and good for your relationship with your child’s mother.

All that’s very nice, of course, but it’s clearly dependent on your partner’s being pregnant. So a good understanding of her perspective on the pregnancy—emotional as well as physical—is essential to understanding how you will react. It was precisely this perspective that Jennifer Ash, along with my wife and hundreds of other expectant and new mothers I’ve interviewed over the years, provided. Throughout the process of writing the book, all of these women contributed valuable information and comments, not only about what pregnant women are going through but also about the ways women most want men to be involved, and the impact that involvement has on the entire pregnancy experience.

A NOTE ON STRUCTURE

Throughout the book I try to present straightforward, practical information in an easy-to-absorb format. Each of the main chapters is divided into four sections, as follows:

What’s Going On with Your Partner

Even though this is a book about what you as an expectant father are going through during pregnancy, and how you can best stay involved, it’s critical that you understand what your partner is

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