The Young Father-to-be:
His Delights
A Garden enclosed is my spouse, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
_Song of Solomon._
It is said that men naturally have a more casual interest in fatherhood
than women have in motherhood. It is sometimes even definitely said
that men do not have a passion for fatherhood or care profoundly for
young children. This is not my experience. A much larger number of
men than are credited with it feel an intense desire for fatherhood,
and take a great delight in young children. Though they should share
the joy equally, yet the father often has a larger proportion of the
pleasure of the little child, while to the mother comes a larger
proportion of the burden and the difficulties. To the child itself,
too, the father is often more precious than the mother. An accidental
testimony to this effect was given by the little daughter of one of
those “devoted wives and mothers” who thought woman’s place was only
the home, and a mother’s duty only to care for her children. The child
and I were chatting and the little one misunderstood something I said,
and thought that I asked which of its parents it loved most. The child
quickly answered, “Oh, I like father best, _of course_--mother is
there every day and she washes us.” The privilege of being a child’s
favourite is no small one, and, as this child shows us, a father may
win it with unfair facility.
The conscious dream of parenthood, a parenthood which shall give the
children the best possible chance in life undoubtedly lies behind the
majority of marriages. Hence when the young man who has married with
the desire, perhaps not for immediate, but for ultimate fatherhood,
first learns the definite fact that he has already inaugurated the
beginnings of his child’s development he must experience an intense
and unique wave of feeling, which, as in the early days of marriage,
with all its freshness, and with the actual physical difficulties yet
unfaced, must be one primarily of buoyant delight.
There is also in the earlier months, for the man of artistic
perceptions, an unique experience in the appreciation of his wife’s
enhanced beauty. It is perhaps known that the most critical artistic
view of woman claims the highest point of perfection in her form
about the third month of her first period of motherhood. To a pair of
lovers who have delighted in their bodily beauty, as all natural and
healthy and well formed young people should do, this period, when the
loveliness of the woman is at its very height, and when the man can
feel that he has contributed to its perfection, must be a time of very
special entrancement. That it is something from within his most sacred
being that has added this glow and radiance in perfecting the rounded
form of the body that he adored in its virginal grace, must give a man
with artistic and poetic potentialities an all too brief but never
to be forgotten experience. The young father-to-be should not lose a
day of these swiftly passing weeks, for this phase, like all human
developments, but even more intensely so than most, is passing and
transient, only to be immortalized in the permanence of a perceptive
memory.
When, as is inevitable, it has passed, and is followed within another
month or two by a phase so acutely, perhaps agonizingly its reverse,
the crucifixion of the mother’s sensitive feelings which is entailed
should be hallowed and elevated in both their minds by that deeper,
less personal, and more profoundly racial delight, the picturing with
each other of the radiance, the strength, the power, the purpose and
passion of the life which they are creating. So tragically soon after
the days when he has feasted his eyes and filled his memory with her
beauty, she will, she must withdraw her body from him and for months
to come he will be shut out entirely from all sight of her. The reward
will be an inner experience of the mind.
A day will come when, for the first time, the father-to-be may lay his
hand upon his wife below her waist and feel the sturdy little kicks of
his future son or daughter, and can know that, though hidden from him,
still there is beside him a vital and independent being whom he has
wakened to life. The presence of this little creature whom he has not
seen colours and permeates every hour of their joint existence, and
links the family in an extraordinary unity, the full significance of
which I will consider in Chapter XII.
When the later months pass, the father-to-be will have lost one of his
most exquisite memories if he has not already talked and laughed with
his future child, and if he and his wife and child together have not
united in that most mystical union possible to human flesh.