MM Dad's eye view
Mark Woods from Comic Relief offers dads to be a frank and funny guide to what to do, what not to do and what to avoid like the plague when supporting your partner throughout her pregnancy. Here he tells us how to know ‘it’s time’...
show time! It’s
The father-to-be: A well-intentioned but peripheral figure present throughout the delivery, but never managing to establish a clear role. Often gives off a self-conscious air of being neither useful nor an ornament. Or so popular culture would lead us to believe. The panicking
and ineffectual father flapping around the delivery room, water spray in one hand, roast beef sandwich in the other, has almost become a comedy staple. Yet figures put the percentage of men attending the birth of their children in the UK at somewhere between 90 and 98 per cent – which is a staggering number when you consider that, 50 years ago, the practice was all but unheard of. Chances are therefore that you are going to be there, so,
assuming you can stop yourself screaming ‘Blood, blood, I can see blood’, let’s look at the crucial role you can play in supporting your partner. Providing you keep your emotions in check, you can bring calm
and comfort to your partner in a way that no one else can. Just being there can often be enough. It’s a tough job, of course, and you’ll get cursed and worse, but let’s face it, you’d take sitting next to the bed over being the one on it any day of the week, wouldn’t you? But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; we’re about to find out
what having a baby is really like – from the initial faint twinge to the first family cuddle.
4 Modernmum
Action! – what actually happens We know what’s meant to happen – but how do things tend to pan out? What’s having a baby really like? Are we nearly there yet? For many years, it was believed that the mother’s body was
responsible for starting labour, but research now points to the baby itself as the one to kick the whole thing off by pressing the hormonal eject button and sending a message to his mum to get a move on. Whatever starts it, one of the most curious things about
childbirth is that for something so profound, so dramatically life- changing, it almost always starts with more of a whimper than a bang. In fact, it’s next to impossible to be absolutely sure in the very
early stages whether this is the start of it all, or just a bit of backache. To add to the frustration, when you ask someone in the know how you’ll know, they just say with a smile, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll know!’ just writing that has brought all the annoyance that phrase conjures up, flooding back. The only other time in my life I remember being given such wet
advice was when learning to drive. Me: ‘When do you change gear?’ Instructor: ‘You’ll know.’ Me: ‘No, I don’t know, how will I know when to change gear?’ Instructor: ‘Don’t worry, you’ll just know.’
>
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
