ExpectingWords.com - Helping expecting couples find the right words at the right times

You show him the light pink line on the stick for the first time. “No, you can’t be pregnant. I’m not ready for that,” he says. You were happy, now you’re not.

For one dad-to-be, the initial jubilation after learning about the pregnancy lasted about 15 minutes before the reality started to sink in, causing him to utter this unfortunate comment to his wife: “you will lose the pregnancy weight right? I just need you to get back here to where you are now. That’s all.” Oh how lovely, like she needed another reason to worry about getting fat.

A few days after finding out about the pregnancy another future father told his wife, “so I’ve been thinking about this a lot…we’ve got important decisions to make. I’ll let you have baseball and basketball, but I need football.” Of course the fact that the wife hadn’t even had her first doctor’s appointment wasn’t on his mind. How could anything else matter when the crucial issue of Junior’s future Cleveland Browns fandom remained unsettled?

When a guy finds out he’s about to be a dad he enters a zone I call “brain spin.” It’s when his entire life flashes before him and everything goes dark. This less than lucid period lasts 10 minutes for some guys and up to a week for others. During that time men have been known to say some of the most bizarre, insensitive and just plain rude things to the person they love. You could get angry, or you could forgive his blunder knowing that it’s natural for a good man to suffer from this temporary insanity.

John Heald describes the mixed emotions he felt about his wife’s pregnancy on his blog:

Life as a pregnant father is bloody scary. On one hand, what’s going on seems totally out of your control. On the other hand, there is such joy in knowing that you helped make a baby and that your Thingy doesn’t just work when you are thinking about a naked Catherine Zeta Jones! And, as a man, people expect you to be strong and macho, but there’s so much to worry about and so many feelings that you’d like to share. There’s just so many emotions to go through – not too stereotypically manly, I guess.

John is right, men have a lot to worry about during the pregnancy and women should try to give them a little room for verbal error. In fact, why not go a little further and use Father’s Day as an opportunity to ask your manly man about his fears of being a dad. Encourage him to be honest with you and let him know that you can handle whatever he says.

Of course, you’d prefer he didn’t say things like this:

“I’ll do anything, but I won’t change a diaper.”

“What are you going to do with three months off? I wish I could get a vacation like that.”

“I still get to go out with my friends on Friday nights, right?”

“What am I supposed to do with my stuff in the second bedroom? I don’t have room to put it anywhere else.”

“Does this mean you’re going talk about the baby all the time now?”

Those verbal blunders are certainly not easy to take, but let’s be honest, each one is reflecting a deeper fear in the dad-to-be. When your partner makes a blunder, try not to get angry, just use it as a conversation opener about the underlying fear.

And whatever verbal blunder the dad-to-be makes, take it with a grain of salt because it’ll seem like nothing once the baby arrives and he starts to make actual parenting blunders! Read The Top 5 Dad Blunders in Will Wade’s article at  our365.com

Did your man commit a verbal foul when you told him you were pregnant? Please share it with us so we know we’re not alone in suffering from our partner’s brain spin.

And a Happy Father’s Day to all of our perfectly, imperfect Dads-to-be!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Emotional Support, Verbal Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.