Chapter 1: Contemplating the Abyss

From the section “The 10 Dumbest Reasons to Have Kids”

1. It will improve your marriage.

No, no, a thousand times no. There may be exceptions; I’ll grant that. Somewhere out there, I may yet find a couple that was on the rocks, had a kid, and then their relationship became all sweetness and light. But the odds are overwhelmingly against it. Children in general, and babies in particular, are a massive source of stress and domestic discord. (Again, more on this later.) If the two of you are at each other’s throats before kids, the tension with kids will likely be unbearable.

I can tell you that having children deepened my relationship with my wife. We have now shared more, had to communicate more, and work through more differences as a result of being parents. But does this make me love her any more? No. I respect her more, for sure. You can’t watch a woman give birth and not be in awe of her physical and emotional capacity. But I don’t think we love each other any more or less. Fortunately, the five married years we shared before children gave us that foundation we needed to survive the sleepless nights, fleeting blame games, and countless misunderstandings that accompany newborns. That foundation is what keeps our relationship solid—not the children.

Chapter 2: Gettin’ Bizzay!

I trolled around the Internet and several library sources trying to find the most common modern beliefs about pregnancy. As you might guess, some were just outright dumb. Take this one from Pregnancy Week: “If your legs resemble tree trunks, it's a boy. If they're trim and fit, it's a girl.” If that were true, America would be in serious trouble. Our national obesity rate is nearing the 70% mark, right? If 70% of American pregnancies resulted in boys, we’d soon be importing women along with everything else from Asia.

....

Some believe that a man orgasming first will favor the creation of a boy and the woman orgasming first will favor a girl. Other sources note that if the woman reaches orgasm before the man, she will secrete a special alkaline fluid that will help favor male sperm on their way to the egg. I could have tried to dig up stats on the legions of girls premature ejaculators must be spawning, but I’ll leave this for some other enterprising author.

Chapter 3: The Buying Guide

Like any business, the baby industry has its own set of jargon, and one of the first unknown terms you might encounter is “layette,” which is a fancy way of saying “starter clothing set.” Because the word layette is French, sellers can charge more for it. We never got a layette and didn’t miss it a bit. Would you buy a starter business suit set? . . .

I’d like to find the guy (it had to be a guy) who decided that baby clothes needed buttons in the front or snaps in the back and give him a love pat upside his head with a 2x4. Nothing is simpler than zippered pajamas, although I’ve had several times when I wasn’t paying attention and accidentally caught a little bit of baby flesh in the zipper teeth. I like the design with snaps up both legs and through the crotch but not at the ankles. Some PJs only snap up one leg and continue up the front. This saves you the time of snapping up two legs, but as the kid grows and the pajamas get tighter, it gets harder to crank up that one leg to slip into the no-snap side. On the other hand, trying to fasten snaps at the ankles of a baby who is spastically practicing judo kicks at your nads is no easy feat, either.

Chapter Four: Ignored Elephants

How much do the details of insurance matter in handling childbirth? We’ve already touched on the potential impact of preferred vs. non-preferred service providers, but let’s look at the big picture. The price range for a complete start-to-finish delivery can be massive depending on the number of complications and methods used. According to an estimator chart on Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina’s site in early 2007, vaginal delivery without complicating diagnoses entails an average two-day stay in the hospital with a combined doctor and hospital cost of $8,505. A Cesarian Section with complications consumes four days and $16,660. Numbers given on Providence’s site in the same period note $7,069 for a vaginal delivery and $11,948 for a C-section. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in Rockville, MD, places the average cost of a vaginal delivery at $5,574 and an average C-section at $11,361. And this is just for the delivery. All of those prenatal visits are extra. Clearly, the details of your insurance coverage are going to have a serious impact on your finances leading up to and immediately after birth.

On top of all this, there is evidence that lack of insurance may lead to prejudice in some hospitals or clinics. I don’t like using statistics to incite fear unnecessarily, but I was shocked by some of the bits of information I came across while researching. For example, in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine 321 (1989), there is a 130% greater chance that an uninsured newborn will suffer an “adverse hospital outcome” compared to a privately insured newborn. The U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2000 that 13.9% of our country’s children were uninsured.

Chapter Five: Saving for Education

Upromise (www.upromise.com) is a marketing aggregator with a simple proposition: Shop at certain places and/or buy certain things and a given percentage of your purchase price will go into a 529 Plan for your children. All you have to do is register your any credit, debit, and applicable store cards you want tracked and Upromise takes care of the back-end tracking work.

In less than six years, we’ve racked up over $2,500 in our Upromise 529, which now splits evenly into separate accounts for both kids, and that ain’t bad considering that we did nothing differently in our purchasing than what we were doing already. Sure, we switched into credit cards that paid back a percentage in Upromise contributions rather than, say, frequent flier miles. And every once in a while we’d eat at a Upromise-participating restaurant over one that wasn’t. And given a choice between two otherwise equal breakfast cereals, I’d pick the one with the Upromise tag on it, even if it cost a little more. But the point is you don’t have to go out of your way or create a new monthly budget item to start saving in this tax-advantaged college vehicle.

Chapter Six: Sanctioned Insanity

Also called sympathy pregnancy, couvade comes from the French couver, meaning “to hatch.” The couvade condition is when men take on the secondary female symptoms of pregnancy, such as weight gain, bloating, nausea, and mood swings. Men tend to report such symptoms less than their partners report them on their behalf, but couvade occurs in varying forms across all cultures. . .

As it turns out, there may be a physiological side to pregnancy in men that could serve to bond the man and woman closer as well as the man with his infant. In an intriguing Ask the Experts posting at Scientific American’s Web site, Queen’s University professor of biology Katherine E. Wynne-Edwards writes:

There are hormone changes associated with fatherhood. Prolactin is highest in men in the weeks just before the birth, testosterone is lowest in the days immediately after the birth, estradiol levels increase from before to after the birth, and cortisol peaks during the labor and delivery (although it remains an order of magnitude below the hormonal experience of the laboring mother). Alison Fleming of the University of Toronto and her colleagues have shown that maternal cortisol is linked to social bonding with the infant. . . .

Put simply, the male body may be programmed to subtly alter its chemistry so that we don’t eat our young—an impulse all too easy to come by in the first weeks of fatherhood. Mess with the chemistry and you’re likely to get odd side effects, some of which may be the couvade symptoms we know and love so well. So if your spare tire inflates during pregnancy and you find yourself crying over Hallmark cards...yes, it may mean you’re a pansy who has cashed in his 40-week-all-you-can-eat token. Or it could mean that being a good dad is baked into your DNA, and this is Nature’s way of helping you start a successful family.

Chapter Seven: The Hospital

Some things could have helped the situation. Somehow, I might have been able to get far enough ahead on my work to have not had that pressure hanging over me. I could have gotten more rest in the week prior and not been left trying to cope with acclimating to Planet Newborn on one hour of couch sleep. Dumb as it may sound, I would have benefitted from having read this book, if only to let me know that, in the real world, entering parenthood isn’t all smiles and cigars. That freaking out on the inside is entirely normal. That even here on this oxygen-starved planet where it feels like your eyeballs are going to pop from their sockets, where none of the old rules of the universe seem to apply, this too shall pass. It’s all going to be OK. For real. The reason this planet is oxygen-starved is because you’ve stopped breathing. So close your eyes for a minute, keep those peepers in their sockets, and breathe.

But no one told me that. No one told me to pack a roll-up foam mattress and sleeping bag because the guest furniture in maternity wards was designed in the ‘30s by Nazi torture doctors as a new form of sleep deprivation device. No one told me that “baby blues” or “maternity blues,” which is a different condition than clinical postnatal or postpartum depression, strikes up to 80% of postnatal women after childbirth, lasts up to a week, and can also occur in fathers, just like couvade symptoms.

With women, the passing of that hormone factory called the placenta inevitably results in a massive, almost immediate change in hormone levels that will inevitably affect mood and often cause some withdrawal symptoms. With fathers, the reasons for baby blues aren't as well studied or understood, but according to a 1981 study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 62% of fathers get the baby blues. Should the attendant symptoms of weepiness, mood swings, anxiousness, irritability, indecisiveness, poor concentration, insomnia, and/or feeling of being distant from the new baby persist for more than a week, then you may be looking at actual postpartum depression. According to an August 2006 article in Pediatrics, 14% of new mothers showed signs of moderate to severe postpartum depression—but so did 10% of new dads. Again, this is a form of clinical depression and should be treated as such.

Chapter Eight: Baby’s First Weeks

Speaking for myself, I’m a guy with a moderate libido—not too reserved, not a raving horndog. However, once my body adapted to the shock of getting almost no sleep (about one week), I found myself abnormally fixated on my wife’s curves. Maybe it was the fact that she kept fondling those luscious, newly inflated melons with their erect nipples throughout the day before my sex-starved eyes. (Some call this breastfeeding.) Maybe it was the fact that her body was no longer ballooning but in fact slimming. After two weeks, my wife had dropped 25 pounds from her pregnancy high. Suddenly, she had a waist. Her bust stuck out farther than her belly. She had ankles again. For God’s sake, when was the last time I found ankles sexy? Was I channeling some Victorian teen-ager? I kept thinking about sex with her all day, every day, and it started really freaking me out.

My wife, on the other hand, was like most women after giving birth. In her mind, it was no longer making love; it was coitus excruciatus. Our second kid was born at 10 pounds, 6 ounces, and he came out like a cannon ball. On Day Four, my wife caught me looking at her that way and casually said, “You should see this.” She laid on the floor spread eagled and directed me to the area of interest. There, stretching from front to back, was a Lilliputian, transorifice railroad of stitches.

“Oh, my God!” I exclaimed.

“Right,” she said. “And that’s just what’s on the outside.”

This was my wife’s pleasant, subtle way of saying, “If you try anything down there, I’ll rip out your spinal cord before you can say, ‘Who’s your daddy?’”

Chapter Nine: Peer Pressure

Who do you let hold your baby? This is really about physical contact, trust, and invasion of private space, and it’s the next step beyond complete strangers wanting to gently stroke your partner’s pregnant belly. Like puppies and kittens, most everybody loves to touch a newborn baby. So think this one through. If you’re nervous about someone handling your kid, consider: Will this person suddenly turn, sprint away, and try to unload the child on the black market? It’s possible, but probably not. Will the person drop the kid on his head? Maybe. And this is why you see new parents handing over their babies as if their palm’s were glued to the child’s back and head, only surrendering contact when it’s obvious that the new handler has the child in a vise grip. Even then, the parent is likely to stay within arm’s reach and never take his eyes off the infant or the other person’s hands.

Personally, I use The Wallet Test. If someone walked up to me and asked to see my wallet, would I give it to him? If the person were a friend or family member, sure. (OK, there are some exceptions in my family.) If the person were a stranger and I got ooky vibes from him, hell no. Go get your own damn wallet or baby.

Chapter Ten: Revelations

The crazy thing is that many of us were pretty ambivalent about children before having our own. Kids were fine so long as they belonged to someone else, although they could turn annoying on you at the drop of a hat. Now, you suddenly become a gushing, blithering idiot about your own kid. You won’t shut up about him. In fact, I bet that you, like me, will eventually find yourself wondering if you’ll ever have a second kid because there’s no way you could possibly love another child this much. You will have gone from being ambivalent to being a fanatic.

Need proof? (Gross-out caution here. The squeamish should skip ahead.) Garrett was very prone to spitting up as a baby, and, apart from feeding time, there seemed little rhyme or reason to it. Essentially, it was Russian roulette with baby vomit. Well, one day when he was a few months old, I was playing with him, lifting him up in the air and such. We were doing the airplane thing, with him zooming around overhead. And sure enough, just when he was doing a fly-by over my upturned face, he let loose and splattered me, including my open mouth. I didn’t cry out or yell, no. I lowered my boy, cradled him in my arm, and laughed. It was just too absurd not to be hilarious. That’s how you know a new dad is actually crazy with love. No sane man could take a bile bomb in the kisser and think it was adorable.

So this is a positive revelation: You will change. Even if you’ve never cared a whiff for a baby in your life—and I never did—you will fall head over heels for your own. Maybe you don’t believe me now. Just wait.