Saratoga News

Point of View

Carl Heintze

A father can carry a child, but only in his arms

Lately for no good and apparent reason, I've been wondering what it would be like to be pregnant.

Pregnancy is a joy, a sorrow, a curse, an ordeal and an experience which has been denied me--for fairly obvious reasons. It's one I clearly will never be able to carry out.

But I did sit through three pregnancies trying very hard to be sympathetic--even, so I am told, suffering a few pseudo symptoms of pregnancy. I'm no longer sure what these were, but they may have been the loss of a tooth, a wisdom tooth at that.

I got to do all the things prospective dads still get to do: feel empathy for the prospective mother, touch her rounded tummy in wonder, massage her back when it hurt, help with birthing exercises. I didn't have to boil water or get newspapers, for whatever good those two items might have done, but I did get to feel the baby kick, and I spent a lot of time after it was born walking the floor and patting its back.

But none of that , of course, is the same as being a pregnant woman, and somehow I feel I have missed something. I don't mean that I wanted to have morning sickness or feel bigger and bigger until it seemed I would burst. Nor have I wanted to feel the pain of childbirth.

But it would have been nice to know that little lump of life living within me, the tremor of something that soon would be human, to feel its unexpected first kick and to experience that sleepy, wonderful feeling of knowing that you are going to be a mother.

Because being a father is not the same as being a mother. Being a father means you don't know for certain that a baby has arrived until it is placed in your arms approximately nine months after it was created. Unlike its mother, you don't have that certain knowledge from the first faint stirrings of its being that you have been able to produce someting new and alive. You just have to take Mom's word for it.

I know it's true that that living thing, soon to be an individual, would not be possible without a father to, well, father it, but a mother will always have a deeper, more personal tie simply because it was in her, it grew in her, she was its home and she provided it with the comfort, safety and nourishment it needed to survive.

When you get right down to it, fathers are really only necessary to babies when they are created. Oh, I know there's a certain mystique to being a father, and I don't mean to imply that children should grow to adulthood without two parents--although these days all too often they do.

I only mean that being a father often seems like being the fifth wheel on the wagon, superfluous. I've observed the instinctive way mothers bond to their children, the way they just seem to know what you're supposed to do with a newborn baby.

I had to learn those things a step at a time. That has always made me feel inadequate.

Not that I have not enjoyed being a father. I've enjoyed handing out money on occasion and advice, even when it wasn't asked for. I've done those things fathers traditionally are supposed to do, like taking both my son and daughters backpacking, but I've never been very good at teaching any of my children what seem to be the natural lessons mothers dispense: cooking, for example, or learning how to run a sewing machine, or simply being able to make a house a home, you know, like putting flowers in the right place at the right time, planning a dinner menu for guests and giving the house what in general is known as a woman's touch.

Those are motherly skills. I know of almost no men who know how to carry them out and even fewer men who want to exercise them. Indeed, even when they try, few fathers are any good at them, even so-called present-day house husbands.

I suppose all of this flies in the face of how contemporary American women feel about the equalization of the sexes. Most think they can do as well as most men. Some think they can do better--and, on occasion, I guess they can. They can carry out equal work and they ought to get equal pay.

But the plain fact is that no father is ever going to be a mother. He is never going to be able to bear children, except in his arms.

Fewer still, even in these days of single parenthood, are the men who can organize and beautify a house--making it a nest, as it were. Mothers know how to do that, but they don't seem to pass it on to fathers.

But I have digressed. What I have been trying to say is that women who get to be mothers have a great advantage over men who are able to be fathers, and try as we may, we're never going to catch up. And that's why I have been thinking lately about what it might be like to be pregnant.

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