Baby on board

That’s right, we’re pregnant.

That sounds weird. Because, um, the last time I checked, I lacked a lot of the anatomy necessary to carry a baby. But I can’t tell people ‘oh, my wife is pregnant,’ because, as she points out, she didn’t get knocked up by herself. Someone else had a hand in this, someone who looks an awful lot like me.

Although I’ve been sitting on this post for over two months, at the time of its writing I’d known we’d been preggers for two weeks. And I don’t think I’ve slept soundly through the night since we found out the good news. And it is good news, great news in fact. But it’s also terrifying and frightening. I don’t know anything about being a parent. I still spend a healthy part of my weekends watching morning cartoons. Now the giant man-boy, more concerned with comic books and computer games than one-sies and strollers, has less than nine months to pull his shit together and start laying the foundation for a new kind of life. A life that incorporates the DINKs we used to be with the overworked, overstressed and overrun parents we’re about to become.

Despite what I think (and hope) I can already conclusively say that our pregnancy won’t be much like this. In fact all of my knowledge of what to expect when you’re expecting comes from TV. And apparently that bastard has been lying to me half my life because I don’t know anything.

All I have is questions, and a big gaping black hole between my ears where the answers are supposed to be hiding. So I do what I always do when I bump against something I don’t understand, I grab all the books on the subject that I can find and read the shit out of them. Although rather than solve my dilemma in this case it really only seems to be lead to even more questions. But I take solace in the fact that they seem to be more focused and relevant, somewhat along the line of When is a good time to start bottle feeding? as opposed to, Babies come out of where now?

But what I’ve really noticed is how the arrival of our little peanut has caused me to take a good long look at myself. As S would say, only I could take our pregnancy and use it as an excuse to make it all about me. But she’s not quite right. I’m looking at myself because now I have to make some very real choices about what kind of parent will I be.

How will my parenting style differ from that of my own folks? Or, even more chilling, what will the similarities be? Will I be able to find the right line between doting parent and disciplinarian-for-hire when necessary? What sort of experiences will I expose, or not expose my child too? And when? I don’t even like cleaning the cat’s litter box how will I manage dirty diapers. Oh god, I was a horrible teenager, will my kid be as bad as I was? How will I deal with that?

You can boil all these questions down to a single thought, what kind of person am I?

Because you can’t really take responsibility for someone else’s life until you’ve got a pretty solid understanding on the elements that make up your own.

I’ve got a lot of thinking ahead of me, and some pretty important decisions that are going to come out of it all. This is the pre-season right now*, where I get the luxury of doing all the work on paper and making strictly theoretical plans. It’s a time to blue sky and imagine all the wonderful potential for the season ahead. But soon enough, the regular season will come and I need to make damn sure that I’m prepared. Because that’s when reality sets in and the choices I make won’t effect just me anymore.

*Oh god, I’m using sporting metaphors to illustrate child rearing. This is how it starts.