The Young Father-to-be:
His Distresses
When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is
shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the
touch of the one in the play of the many.
TAGORE: _Gitanjali_.
With all the passion for children, with the protective chivalrous
feeling towards his wife which a well born and well knit man
instinctively feels, through all the joy of fatherhood that is coming
and the delight in its accomplishment, there must run a thread
of intense distress at his own helplessness to help. With every
consideration that the most resourceful man can think of towards his
wife, with every helpful, tender, encouraging, supporting thing that he
can do, how little is his share during all these months in the burden
of the coming parenthood. If, through sympathy, he feels each pang his
wife may feel; if, through sympathy, he curtails his activity to rest
with her, nevertheless it is a voluntary abnegation, and if it became
intolerable at any moment he could escape; he could run over the hills;
he could go for a day’s fierce solitude and activity wherever his feet
desired to lead him; but he knows that his wife _cannot_, that she is
chained, that not for a moment of the day or night for nine months can
she lay down the burden for a brief rest--that there is no exit for her
from this imprisonment of so many of her potentialities but through the
gateway of agonizing pain.
The instinct behind marriage is often a feeling of chivalrous devotion
towards a tender and confiding girl, and the desire to give her every
protection. The man finds, however, that his act has placed the one
whom he desired to _protect_ in such a position that she must bear the
greatest burden possible for a human being to bear, and must bear it
alone. This must be a deep distress to an imaginative man of integrity,
although the distress be mingled with other and joyous feelings. To
pretend that it is not so, to say that the joy of coming parenthood
should and does wipe out all such under-currents of thought is merely
to be callous or silly. To repress an intense feeling, to pretend that
it is not there, may give an apparent surface bravery or brightness.
But such repression is ultimately destructive to the consciousness and
whole physique of the one who, thus gallantly to himself, endeavours
to deny the truth, and is often apt to lead to deeper disorders. The
modern school of psycho-analysts who endeavour to set right the effects
of mental strain often discover that throughout life, perhaps dating
from childhood, a personality has been handicapped and weakened by some
deep suppression of an intensely experienced emotion.
In my opinion, the pretence that a sensitive man does not feel, and
does not endeavour to conceal his feeling about his relation to his
wife, particularly at the time of their first coming parenthood is to
dishonour man’s capacity and his imagination. Why imply that a rational
man does not experience what surely all but a brute must feel. It
impoverishes our life of emotional expression, and it tends to injure
the man himself, to increase the strain by the pretence that the strain
is not there. I know, for instance, one man who fainted at the time his
wife gave birth to their child, and who, under no consideration, would
allow her to have a second child, although he had intensely desired
and looked forward to the fatherhood of a large family before he knew
the actual physical experiences which it entailed. Such a man, in my
opinion, was a good father wasted by an excess of emotion made all the
more intensely destructive to himself by the endeavour to maintain
the totally artificial and indeed the crude attitude which is supposed
to be “correct” for a man, namely a sort of dissociation of himself
from his wife’s experiences and a hardened lack of recognition of all
that is involved. It is surely better to recognize that there is that
intense and poignant sense of helplessness, that the sensitive and
developed young man should and does feel it, but that it should be
recognized as the compensating price which he pays for fatherhood.
If we are ever to raise our race to the point when every child is
so precious that no child can be hungry, neglected or unwanted, the
conscious price which the _father_ pays for his children will be one
of the assets in valuing the children of the nation. It is, therefore,
better to acknowledge and encourage such sensitiveness in the father by
allowing the open and honourable expression of such feeling, and thus
to avoid that almost neurotic and destructive effect of the suppression
of such intense feeling as warped the father mentioned above. Because,
if the wife avails herself of the advice I give in this book, and if
the time for parenthood is chosen rightly and wisely in relation to her
general health, and it is ascertained before she embarks upon potential
motherhood that her bodily and bony structure is fit for motherhood,
then though the experiences of both will be difficult and profound
in their testing of the quality of each other, motherhood should
not result in any excessive strain, and should indeed be a time of
wonderful life activity.
With all needless ill-health, and wanton ugliness and wasteful distress
which at present are artificially involved in it, once swept away,
potential motherhood should not be an unendurable burden. Though the
father’s feelings should be intense and poignant on behalf of his wife
and though she may go through searching experiences, yet the gladness
should so preponderatingly weigh in the balance in excess of the
troubles and difficulties that no normally healthy and well endowed
young couple should ever suffer so much that they dare not face a
second maternity, as happens alas only too often to-day.
On quite a lower plane, but nevertheless on the one so essential that
it greatly affects all the rest of life, is the too frequent distress
of the young father-to-be about the more material provision of all
that is necessary for his wife. In counting the cost of the coming
parenthood, too often quite heavy expenses are unforeseen, and, with
a fixed income, the young man may have the intense distress of being
unable to provide all that his wife not only wishes but really ought
to have. Recent years, for instance, were times of extraordinary
difficulty for all women who bore children, and who had a naturally
healthy and proper desire to eat fruit. With oranges at a shilling
each, as they were in the winter of 1918-19, how could an ordinary
young couple afford a glassful of orange juice a day, which I recommend
as profoundly valuable (see p. 80). It was obviously impossible. Such
a time, of course, one hopes will never be repeated. It was a period
of undue strain, when none, considering the future of the race, should
have borne a child unless private reasons made it specially advisable.
But apart from such excessive and unprecedented difficulties, there
are, and probably always will be, difficulties for the young man who
desires to provide everything that can benefit his wife. Not long ago
in the newspapers, a budget of the cost of the baby in an ordinary
lower middle class home was given, and there was an item: “Dentist’s
bill for the mother, twenty pounds.” A wise comment was made on
this that, alas, it is by no means an unusual, indeed it is a usual
experience that the coming child adversely affects the mother’s teeth,
and both for the health of the baby and the mother they should be
attended to. Possibly, even her very life may depend on her teeth being
thoroughly free from decay after the birth. A heavy dentist’s bill is
too often an unexpected anxiety to the young husband, so that the
teeth are neglected. Neglected teeth either weaken, or may actually
result in the death of the mother from their decay, causing internal
poisoning, to which she is peculiarly liable after bearing a child.
Then too, there are unexpected and heavy expenses which are unforeseen
through a variety of circumstances, such, for instance, as the
uncertainty of the date of the birth. Those who go to nursing homes,
as many are now doing owing to housing and service difficulties,
experience this trial more acutely than others. They expect and plan,
perhaps, for the birth within a given week, and the baby may delay two
or three or even more weeks beyond the calculated time. Young couples,
scarcely able to afford the heavy expenses of a good nursing home,
who yet had saved sufficient to allow the wife three weeks there, may
have their plans quite dislocated by a delay of three weeks in the
infant’s appearance, resulting in the mother unexpectedly having to
remain double the length of time for which they had saved the money
for the nursing home. The young father is then faced by the sordid
difficulty of finding the necessary money, and unless he is gifted in
such a way as to make extra earning a possibility, is under a condition
of strain. Just when all his free energy and time should be devoted
to companionship with his wife and infant, he has to spend extra hours
working at high pressure in order to meet unexpected expenses. The
young father-to-be who wishes to maintain the right and beautiful
atmosphere around his coming child should inform himself of all certain
and likely contingencies of expense, and should make due provision for
these before the great act of calling into being one for whom he is
primarily responsible.
To a healthy man, also, there may be a period of chastening experience
in sharing daily life with one who is out of health. Though the
prospective mother _ought_ not to be in any way invalided, yet, alas,
as things are, too often she is, and only an unselfish man will fail to
resent the personal sacrifice which he endures as a result.
There is a certain self-centred type of man who may, with the most
model intentions and in order to lead a self-respecting life, marry,
and who may find the resulting pregnancy of his wife very disconcerting
to himself and very thwarting to his own requirements. With a certain
bitter selfishness, this attitude was unconsciously expressed by one
of my correspondents in the following words: “Something must be done
to prevent any more children; imagine what a wretched time I have
with my wife sick every day for nine months.” Perhaps the reader can
scarcely restrain a smile at so callously self-centred an attitude on
the part of a husband, but, nevertheless, that man does have a real and
difficult physical problem before him. One way, of course, in which to
help such a man would be to place such help and knowledge before his
wife that her motherhood should be more normal, and not so terrible an
experience for her.