My first blog post!

The Other Side of Pregnancy (Part 1)

                                                                                By Chase Procuro

“Women are made to be loved, not understood.”

–Oscar Wilde

(read that quote again, because when you’re done reading this blog , I hope you’ll find out that this maxim is devastatingly true)

My wife and I are newlyweds, or nearly newlyweds. We’ve been married for eleven months. And, as the children’s rhyme goes:

First comes love

Then comes marriage

Then comes baby in the baby carriage.

Well, thus far my wife and I have completed the first and second of the three happenings that subsequently follow the act of k-i-s-s-i-n-g. We fell in love, we got married, and now we are expecting our first child. That’s right, my lovely wife is now pregnant, and thus more/less lovely than she was when I first married her (the more/less part really depends on what day it is, to be honest).

With that being said: I love my wife. 

Anyway, as you men (and women) out there may not yet know, there are two sides of a pregnancy. There’s the woman’s side (the side you’ve all undoubtedly heard about) and then there’s the much less well known side, and that’s the side of the man. And, despite popular and mainstream belief, both sides are of EQUAL value.

That’s right ladies, I said equal. Pregnancy is not a one sided affair, despite what countless movies, magazines, and female hosted talk shows would have you believe. According to like What to Expect When You’re Expecting and The Pregnancy Bible, and shows like The View, pregnancy is ALL about the woman. All about her feelings, what she’s going through, and how she’s doing. In fact, the only tidbits in the book that offer men any kind of advice is virtually akin to admonishing us (men) to beware that we basically “have no idea what she’s going through, so just try not to screw things up or piss her off. ” Of course, in these baby books this sentiment is worded differently, using fluffier language to gently encourage men to be “reassuring, kind, understanding and loving” when it comes to dealing with their newly pregnant wives. Well, that’s easier said than done, I say.

The point I’m trying to make here is, when the subject of pregnancy is brought up in almost any setting, people immediately think of how it affects the woman. This, though, is the perfectly natural response to the situation (Just to be clear here, I don’t want anyone reading this to get the wrong impression of me. I get that pregnancy is a HUGE step in a woman’s life, maybe the biggest step she’ll ever take. But something needs to be said of the willing and expecting father as well). I’m not at all ashamed to admit I thought the exact same way as almost everybody else when my wife was pregnant. I had always figured pregnancy to be a woman’s thing, and had never really thought of how pregnancy could affect a man until after I saw the movie Knocked Up, and even then the idea of how a man must deal and cope with a pregnant woman didn’t really register (I mean, the move was a comedy, for goodness sake. How serious could anyone have taken it?). Long story short, I was in the same boat as everyone else before I found out my wife was with child. Pregnancy was something that women went through, while their male counterparts just kind of watched from the sidelines.  

How wrong I was.

What nobody really told me about is how the father to-be is supposed to get through the pregnancy, or what he ought to expect from his pregnant wife. Now before I go on, I know that all the books, magazines, shows and movies out there deal with this subject of an expecting father in some shape or form. But, it’s like I said before, all of these mediums are slanted toward women (and rightly so, I’m not an idiot here, they’re the one carrying the child), they all sort of give men the same generic “do’s and don’ts” that any man with half a brain would understand (Ex. When your wife is crying, try to comfort her. When the house needs cleaning and she is hunched over a trashcan for the umpteenth time that morning, pitch in and do the chores for her, etc.). But what I wanted, what I needed, was some concrete, experiential, and most importantly of all, practical counsel on what I should expect when my wife is expecting.

And, as you can probably surmise from the nature of this article, I didn’t get that. No, instead I had to learn the hard way. I had to learn my lessons through one of life’s toughest teachers: experience.

So, to all men out there reading this, I have one piece of advice to you: Learn from my mistakes.

My story goes like this…My wife has been pregnant with our first child for a total of two and a half months (it feels like it’s been longer than that). We are newlyweds, and young to boot (we’re both 22), and unlike like the majority of married couples in the world today, we both waited until we were husband and wife to both, 1) live together, and 2) have what I like to call “baby-making dry-runs” (i.e. sex).    

When I found out she was pregnant, I admit that I was (and still am) unbelievably excited. Really, I am. Her telling me through teary eyes and chocked sobs that she was pregnant was one of the better moments of my life. It filled me with joy, with hope, and with the expectancy of something wonderful and lifelong; the honor (and proud duty) of becoming a father. The prospect of this, of becoming a father, had always been a desire of mine, especially the father of a son.  You see, my brother and I are the only ones left in my entire family to carry on the family name of Procuro. And also, I am a huge fan of the writer Ernest Hemingway, and somewhere I read that one of his (Hemingway’s) stipulations for being a “real man” was to (among other things) father a son.

However, I now believe that Hemingway not only meant that in order for you to be a “real man” you had to pass on your surname, but to also survive the process of your unborn child’s mother’s pregnancy (I like that he thought of the pregnancy process as a kind of crucible. Hemingway might actually have. Read “Hills Like White Elephants” and you’ll see what I mean…maybe. It’s a good story regardless.).

Anyway, the seriousness of being a father didn’t kick in until later, when my parents and my wife’s parents told us how difficult everything can be and how complicated things can get for a newly married couple, especially with a little baby around the house. But I just shrugged this off, like I did with their heartfelt, but nonetheless overly dramatic, words of advice on marriage. I figured everything would be alright. After all, marriage was not nearly as difficult or painful as they had made it out to be. I mean it has had its ups and downs, but it hasn’t been that hard. I’d always been fine, and my wife would be fine. And, when the baby came, it’d be fine too. “Things will work themselves out,” I told myself, because for me, they always did.

But this turned out to be different. Pregnancy was a new animal all its own. “A horse of a different color,” you might say (if you’re a cowboy, or Lt. Aldo Raine. Inglorious Bastards reference anyone…anyone?) These first two months of pregnancy have turned out to be much, much, much more than I ever expected.

With that being said, this surprisingly, unexpected, unnaturally, strangely colored horse-like experience of my wife’s first two months of pregnancy comes in two distinct parts.