Robert Lore was in awe of the physical exertion he watched his wife endure every day during her pregnancy, so he embarked on his own fitness challenge to prepare his mind and body for becoming a dad.
—
My wife and I compete hard for the best spouse award. So when Grace threw down her ability to grow life in her belly, I knew I was going to have to step up my game.
After minimal reflection, narrowly focused on what I had to contribute with my seemingly inadequate XY chromosome, I decided to undertake the buff-baby-daddy-boot-camp fitness challenge. If my wife was expressing her biological assets to produce life, I would express mine to protect it, I thought.
As our baby entered the world and changed our lives, it seemed time to share my reflections on a man and woman’s role in prenatal care and offer a defence on why fitness can help get you fit for fatherhood.
The buff-baby-daddy-boot-camp fitness challenge was a commitment to a rigorous 90-day workout routine over my wife’s third trimester. I followed the “P90X” workout program, but “Insanity” and “UFC Fit” are other popular programs that can be structured into a 90-day routine. Halfway through, work life and the need to take over more of the running of our household made the daily demands too much and I transitioned to a more suitable workout routine of long-distance running, swimming, and mediation (fitness for the brain).
Off the bat, there are some clear mental and health benefits expecting fathers will achieve through a 90-day workout routine to help prepare them for a newborn:
- Improved fitness will increase energy, helping you manage fatigue from altered sleeping patterns and improve the quality of sleep you do get.
- Fitness is critical to stress management and acts to suppress cortisol, which triggers our fight or flight stress response. Regular exercise helps you keep calm under fire, even when that fire is coming from your baby’s battle cries and poop canons.
- A commitment to exercise and healthy living encourages a culture of fitness within the family. Without being insensitive or superficial about it, this will help support your wife in re-establishing her own fitness routine post birth.
If I’m honest with myself, however, my initial motivation was seriously primitive in nature, rooted in a sense that I needed to take control, to feel empowered over the prenatal period, and to do something “worthy” of my wife’s glorious transformation. Truth be told, the ability Mother Nature granted men to fend off threats to mates and unborn children has lost its lustre in world lacking the threat of a saber-tooth-tiger roaming through the living room. No doubt my DNA-induced testosterone top-up has predisposed me to physical activities that utilize the incredible versatility of the human body. Surfing, fishing, lifting heavy objects, or running long distances, the man juices coursing through my veins have shaped who I am, my passions, and a special kind of relationship with my body.
But, really, surfing and fishing and heavy lifting seems pretty unimpressive next to the life creating that was happening in my wife’s body. As far as “wow-factor,” making life where there was none is a pretty kickass super mutant power. We so often talk about the miracle or magic that is conception, pregnancy, and birth, but it’s not a miracle—my partner was doing it with her body. I witnessed her on a nine-month marathon of life creation, capped off with a labour that was the most astonishing three-day sprint to the finish. Credit should be paid where credit is due—the incredible biological systems possessed by women.
We do not give woman enough proprietary credit for these essential contributions to the advancement and continuation of the human species, especially given the economic and physical (and mental and emotional) toll endured by women through pregnancy. Pregnancy is amazing and beautiful, but it is a serious undertaking. The costs of pregnancy only became apparent to me after watching my wife go from racing half ironmans (or half iron-womens as she likes to call them) to something representing a slow R2D2 unit. And despite Sheryl Sandberg’s well-intended advice to women to professionally “lean in” over this period, sharing her body with another being for nine months has impacted my wife’s professional productivity. I can’t imagine how my work would suffer if I were to strap on a bladder-kicking, sleep-interrupting, twenty pound sac.
An interesting side note from a paleoanthropological perspective—as humans began to walk bipedally, women’s birth canals narrowed, resulting in extensive birth pains not suffered by any other primate. Babies born through these narrowed canals require a longer period of postnatal care, including being carried and comforted by their mothers. A leading theory for the development of humanity’s advanced capacity for language comes out of this transition in human evolution as our vocalization expanded as mothers soothed their infants and infants expressed their distress. While our creation story blames one disobedient woman for the pain of childbirth, the actual cause may have also resulted in our amazing language abilities and, with it, the collective wisdom of humanity.
So there I was, my wife making our child, and me focused on making muscles, but at a loss for how this man-ness served my unborn daughter. In fact, dichotomizing men and women like I was doing would most likely serve to repress my daughter’s potential. My presumptions on how genetic roles play out in prenatal care felt symptomatic of those social forces that work to impose gender roles on men and women. This didn’t strike me as a big deal until I thought about how it contributes to all the misogynistic and homophobic hatred in the world. Gender roles enforced in families, on schoolyards, and in the media that devalue women, that devalue effeminate men, have no place in the world I want my daughter to live in. This system of control and oppression has never been okay with me, but nothing has seemed so urgent since I learned I was having a baby girl.
Gender roles enforced in families, on schoolyards, and in the media that devalue women, that devalue effeminate men, have no place in the world I want my daughter to live in. This system of control and oppression has never been okay with me, but nothing has seemed so urgent since I learned I was having a baby girl.
|
I could not let this system of injustice confine my daughter’s potential to lead an empowered life. Not one to focus on the negative, I found in my buff-daddy-boot camp a power and privilege granted to me as a man that became symbolic for a lesson I hope to teach my daughter. As brilliantly articulated by Dr. Caroline Heldman in her Ted Talk “The Sexy Lie,” men are taught that their bodies are active subjects, their way to interact with and conquer the world, while women are taught to be consumed with their appearance and that their physical bodies are valuable only as deemed so by others. The boot camp pays homage to my body as a vessel for all the incredible experience life has to offer. This is what I will teach her. Our bodies are not objects, they are a source of empowerment. This source of power, this way of being in the world, should be as accessible to women as it is for men. My daughter will not be denied this.
No matter what her physical (dis)abilities, my daughter will know her father sees her as a subject and not an object. I will teach her that her physical being is not for looking at, but for fishing and surfing with her father, it is for play and honest hard work, it is for making love and for praying and it is for thinking for herself.
Eve is two-weeks old tomorrow and I feel spiritually, physically, and emotionally whole, something I can attribute to my family, friends, and the love she has brought into our world. My capacity to thrive, enjoy, and sometimes just survive this period has been made possible, in part, by being healthy and fit. On this side of fatherhood, I encourage all daddies with babies on the way to consider a buff-baby-daddy boot camp.
♦◊♦
Image courtesy of the author
Really sweet and funny post! But got stuck on the one disobedient woman in “our” creation story. Always thought that was just Cristians, is it the all three of the book based religions? Not American n not christian so haven’t really heard it put that way b4.
GREAT READ. Thank you. I love the combination of respect / reverence and playfulness in this post. Way to go. And I am taking on your commitment to make sure my daughters know I see them as AGENTS in their lives – subjects not objects. Thank you.