Ok, to start with…No, no you are not.I’ve known quite a few males who have uttered this statement to me when they find out they are having a baby. “We are pregnant!!”. I have been genuinely happy for them. However, the happiness is always tinged by a touch of revulsion at the statement. I can definitely say that I feel happier for other people who have chosen the far less emasculating “We’re having a baby” or, “My wife is pregnant!”.
I don’t know why this statement fills me with disgust. I’d say I like hearing that statement as much as I’d like to hear the words “Administer rectally” from my doctor. I’m fairly certain that these same men don’t go around proclaiming “We are having our period” or “We’re staying in to watch Lifetime tonight”. Well, maybe some of my friends would say that last one.
To be honest it sort of feels like they are stealing some of the thunder from the woman who is actually pregnant. They are the ones who are about to go through the ordeal of pregnancy and need to cope with the myriad of issues involved with it. Physical and emotional changes, keeping track of what’s happening to ensure good health, hot/cold/hot/ super hot flashes, potentially becoming suddenly allergic to foods (shellfish and cooking in my wife’s case), aching backs/feet and the biggest hit…no booze!!! Meanwhile, the worst thing we men have to watch out for is late night food requests (honey, do you know anyplace that serves Moo Shu Pork , venison and Blueberry Brownies at 3 am??) and a touch of the batshit crazies here and there. We can’t go around claiming that we are pregnant because of it! If anything we come out way ahead in so many ways! Just think, no more arguments over who is going to drive home from your friends’ barbeque. 9 months of free designated driver duties!!!!
So, the next time a friend cracks a celebratory beer, smiles broadly and announces “We are pregnant”, I suggest you wind up and punch him directly in his “baby-laden vagina”. Hopefully this will remind him that while he is a major part of this, he is not actually with child.
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This post and photo was reprinted from Life of Dad.
About Patrick Quinn
I don’t know…I’m four months pregnant and my husband puts up with a lot more than late-night food requests and “a touch of the batshit crazies here and there” (understatement of the year). I don’t have any problem with him taking some of the credit.
Karen, you are demeaning yourself . Your husband “puts up with” you for carrying his child? Your husband should be taking on additional responsibilities just as you have taken on the responsibility of carrying his child. What happens to a woman emotionally during pregnancy can be very difficult, and your state of mind may be different and seemingly erratic, but it’s your body preparing you to be a mother. Describing your pregnant thoughts as “batshit crazies” shows really low self-esteem. Hopefully your husband is not calling you batshit crazy while simultaneously taking credit for carrying the baby.
In a way, Karen is right. We aren’t carrying the child for the man. We chose (usually with our partners) to start a family and it can be just as difficult for the father (or other mother) as it is for the mother. Especially when your partner is a freaking Empath, like my fiance’. Poor guy has more sympathy pains than I have skin cells, and some of us like it when the partner chooses to say “we’re pregnant”. Hell, I asked my man to phrase it that way and he was more than happy to do it. They aren’t taking credit so much as just sharing in the experience as much as possible and I find that to be very awesome! After all, he’s not saying “I’ll be carrying it and pushing it out!”
I agree with you. A lot of times it’s tougher to watch someone you love go through something than it is to go through it yourself. You’ll experience this the first time your child is sick especially when the child is too young to tell you what is wrong.
BSH–!! That line is so full of crap. Any honest man would never say it.
[This is in reply to Katie's comment yesterday in which she suggested I was not ready to become a father. The comments from her and other people got so deeply nested this wouldn't even look like a direct reply if I used the Reply button, so I'm starting a new branch.]
Wow, Katie, you’ve gone from bad to worse. You could have explained why the phrase “We’re pregnant” once worked for you and then didn’t, and left it as a difference of opinion. Instead, you look like a hypocrite for having once embraced the phrase, but now disparage anyone who would dare to do so. You display no empathy toward people who might have their reasons, just as you once did. Your criticism seems based on generalizing your own experience to everyone else, so that nobody could possibly feel or mean that phrase differently. Much worse than the phrase, though, is how you are applying your own experience and opinions to pregnancy and parenting in general, well beyond what phrase people choose at the beginning.
You don’t know squat about my “readiness” to be a father, and pretty much everything you’ve said is contradicted by my experience. That doesn’t mean I expect your experience to match mine – obviously it hasn’t – but you have hurled more insults than you know by way of explaining for us how pregnancy and motherhood really work, and yes, relegating fathers to the sidelines. (How could they belong anywhere else if you’re so convinced they have no clue what it’s really like?). Short versions aren’t my strength, but I’ll try to give one about how I came to be a father to almost 3-yr. old twins.
Conception did not occur easily, or by accident. It took years of emotional, physical, and financial investment by both my wife and me to achieve pregnancy and parenthood. My wife had to endure more physical discomforts than I did, which I never denied or tried to pretend otherwise, but if you’re picturing some ejaculate-and-wait kind of dad, you’re not picturing me. I literally had a piece of a testicle removed to become a father, so that sperm could be found, extracted, and injected to create embryos, because the usual way was not an option. I did that with only a 25% chance of finding any, and while we got very lucky and found some, we were prepared on that day to use donor sperm if that’s what it took to become parents. Pregnancy was not just a physical state that happened to my wife as I spectated – it was a goal we worked toward together, enduring good news and bad news together, over the course of years together, until we finally got pregnant together.
It was a twin pregnancy, so like most twin pregnancies, it was even more complicated and uncomfortable than usual. I did not share in the uterine or direct hormonal aspects of my wife’s pregnancy, but there was no part of her pregnancy in which I wasn’t involved, or that didn’t affect me. I took care of her willingly and gladly, because I loved her and she was growing our babies. I was at every doctor’s appointment and ultrasound (we had several with twins). I worked the doppler ultrasound we rented so we could listen to our babies’ heartbeats. I abstained from sex when the doctor ordered it, which was all but about 2 months of the pregnancy, during which she wasn’t very interested anyway. I took her to the ER at month 6 when she was hospitalized for serious gallstones. I took care of her when she was discharged and ordered on strict bedrest for the rest of her pregnancy. A month later, we were back at the hospital together when our babies were born a little more than 8 weeks premature.
While my wife was recovering from an emergency c-section, I was the first one (not counting medical staff) to touch or hold our babies in the NICU. While she recovered from that surgery and then another surgery a few weeks later to finally have her gall bladder out, I was attentive as both a husband and father, helping my wife with things she needed help with, and being at the NICU twice a day for over 5 weeks to hold our babies for an hour at a time, glad to be able to change diapers or give baths when we were finally allowed. If you pay attention to the math involved, my daughters spent the last two months of what is normally part of gestation, when according to you, “Baby has been with mommy … and all he knows is her sound, her movement, her voice, her smell,” knowing my sound, movement, voice, and smell. I wore the same soft shirt every time I held them in the NICU, and left it in their isolettes when we left so my smell would stay with them. Before birth, I was a frequent tummy toucher and talker, which I know is not the same as being the body they’re in, but your picture of total daddy sensory deprivation during a 9-month gestation again failed to capture the variety of pregnancy experience that is possible.
My wife breastfed as much as she could, but between milk supply and what our babies were capable of, most feeding happened first by a tube through the nose, and later by bottles, which I always shared in giving. I’ve never shirked diaper duties, including the poopie ones. Whether it’s been feeding, bathing, cuddling, changing, holding, comforting, or otherwise physically caring for and bonding with our girls, I’ve done it all, and continue to do so. You know that moment of gut wrenching heartbreak you described most dads having when darling baby wakes up and sees it’s not Mommy holding them? Never happened to me.
Given our experience and my level of involvement and enthusiasm at every step of the parenting, from pre-conception to our present state as parents of healthy toddlers, I would be not only insulted, but deeply hurt if my wife had your attitude, minimizing my role or ability to understand pregnancy and parenting because I don’t have a uterus or breasts like she does. If she, like you, claimed the babies as more hers than mine, saying it was my role to be fulfilled as a man by tending to her and her babies, that I should never expect to bond with as much as her, or if she had argued that pregnancy only affected her and not me, I would have been…I don’t even know. Furious is the word that comes to mind, but it would have been so incompatible with my view of being a father and husband that I would have hoped to find that out before it ever happened, and break it off before ever making the mistake of having kids with her. Luckily, that didn’t happen.
Just want to say, Marcus, thank you for sharing your very personal experience and story.
Thanks for sharing that, Marcus. I second Heather.
Marcus, I sympathize with your fertility problems. I never experienced it, but I’m understand the stress as my sister and her husband had to undergo many infertility treatments, some which resulted in miscarriages, and I was with them every step of the way. Additionally, my best childhood friend and her husband were both infertile and unable to have children.
My husband and I never “embraced” the phrase “We are pregnant” and I never “disparaged” anyone for using it. We were young and naive and like most newly expectant couples didn’t fully understand what the pregnancy and child birth experience actually entailed when we exclaimed this phrase. As I repeatedly explained in comments, as my pregnancy advanced we learned how wrong “we’re pregnant” is and no longer used the expression. My husband and the dads in our parent groups often joked about it because it is so out of the realm of reality.
If more young men and women had accurate information about what the real pregnancy and childbirth experience entailed, couples would be better prepared maybe would share the work more evenly and stay together longer.
“I never experienced it, but I’m understand the stress as my sister and her husband had to undergo many infertility treatments, some which resulted in miscarriages, and I was with them every step of the way. Additionally, my best childhood friend and her husband were both infertile and unable to have children.”
Sorry, but since you didn’t experience it first hand, you do not understand. It is beyond the realm of your comprehension or imagination.
What I just wrote, right there, that was extremely snarky and rude. I don’t actually believe it, by the way. But I’m trying to use it as a comparison to a lot of what you’ve been saying about men and pregnancy. Right – wouldn’t you be offended and pissed off if someone told you that you cannot possibly understand the stress of infertility because you did not experience it? Of course you would! You have a sister and friend who went through it – and you were right there with her and her husband while they experienced it. You understand it, of course you do.
Similarly, there are men (and women) out there who have close friends, family, partners, etc, who have been pregnant. They were with them through the experience….through the good times and the bad. Through the ups and the downs. (insert another cliche here. lol.) And so when you say something like “you cannot possibly comprehend this,” it is insulting. Because they do understand (just like you understand what your sister and her husband went through).
By the way…I do not mean to pick on you Katie. I’m really not trying to…I’m just trying to respond to what you are saying.
Heather, I’m going to stop debating with you right here. You have not been pregnant and have had neither the male or female experience. Your best bet is to purchase a stack of pregnancy and early childhood books and start making your way through them instead of arguing about something you know nothing about.
Then explain it to me. Explain to me how you saying you understand the stress of infertility by being with your sister and her husband through the experience is any different than a man (or friend, or family member) saying s/he understands pregnancy by being with his/her wife/friend/whatever through the experience.
Heather, you have a reading comprehension problem and I can’t help you with that. Understanding “stress” is not the same thing as understanding “Infertility.” Capiche?
You were referring to the specific stress of infertility yes? Not generalized stress. If so Heathers question stands. Humans have an extraordinary ability to imagine and empathize . If you can imagine and relate to their infertility stress it stands that Marcus and Eric and Heather can imagine and relate to pregnancy. Else we’d never have writers, storytellers creating amazing tales of things theyve not personally experienced.
And though she was too kind to mention it again, Katie, Julie already strongly disagreed with the generalizations you’re making to all pregnancies, and she is an actual veteran of pregnancy (a.k.a. “mother”), so even pregnancy is not the magic key to agreeing with you that you keep asserting.
The strong reaction you’re getting is much less about the phrase now (“we’re pregnant”) and more about you denying men or even never-pregnant women the ability to have genuine empathy, which is rather astounding since you claim a capacity for empathy yourself when it comes to infertility, based on second-hand experience.
Marcus, I’m talking to a very small population of readers and employees of a men’s rights website with an agenda, so when five commenters/moderators say “We all believe this so you’re wrong!” – it doesn’t mean that much. It’s like walking into a Newt Gingrich moon colony planning committee meeting and voicing skepticism. Most of the MRA beliefs expressed on this website are not those of the general population. Most expectant fathers do not view themselves as pregnant and most proudly say they don’t do housework or child rearing and that their wife does it all.
You’re entitled to your opinions, but obviously you’re going to hear strong disagreement.
Katie, your disagreement may be strong, but your arguments are weak. How do reconcile your claim of understanding about infertility stress – which you have not experienced firsthand – with your denial of anyone else’s ability understand pregnancy unless they’ve been been pregnant?
I’m trying really hard to find some common ground, so here’s a bit I can agree with:
I agree! Even men who say “we’re pregnant” do not view themselves as pregnant. No one ever said they did. What men and women who say that often mean, however, is that they view themselves as a couple as pregnant. It’s a cutesy shorthand way of saying they’re both expecting a child and involved in the pregnancy, and in some cases, a way of celebrating a mutual goal they’ve both been pursuing. (To really overdo the cutesy part, they might say, “Schmoopsie and I are pregnant!”) Not everyone feels that way, so it’s not a phrase that fits everyone, but no one who says it expects anyone to think it means that the man is claiming a direct firsthand physical share of what “pregnant” means in the medical sense.
Even when you used to say it yourself before souring on the phrase, I’m sure it meant something at the time other than your and the father’s belief that he was also carrying the baby inside his body. Is it really so hard, then, to acknowledge a sometimes broader meaning of “pregnant”, and use your powers of empathy to imagine couples who might not sour on the idea of it being a shared experience, if they’re first-hand, direct, non-imagined, real-world experience of pregnancy does not proceed in every respect exactly as your own did?
Also, can we agree that Julie isn’t on the MRA roster?
That’s hilarious! There have been a few MRAs to post here accusing Tom and the site of being a feminist takeover! Imagine my surprise that I might be considered an MRA!
I’m a humanist mostly with a long and storied history in feminist thought, LGBT issues and human sexuality.
I’m also an artist with a firm belief that human beings have the creative capacity for imagination and empathy. Otherwise like I said no one would ever ever be able to create novels or movies unless they’d done all the things in them.
I’m also pretty clear people use words differently and there probably aren’t actual men believing that there bodies are pregnant, but that they as a unit of marriage and family are expecting and it’s a shortcut. Point being, people short cut with words at times.
Marcus’s point about the reaction to you seems right to me. What’s funny about your comment (with it’s fun allusion to conspiracy theories, nice touch) is you now seem to indicate you are NOT an MRA woman, but I sort of had assumed you were and that’s why you were arguing to deny the gentlemen here (Marcus and Eric) their experiences in some kind of conservative gender essentialist stance. Surprises are around all corners.
I think the middle ground of the semantics argument might be, “She is pregnant, both are expecting.” But I firmly believe that the father (or lesbian non birth parent, or gay adoptive parents working with their pregnant surrogate) can have an extremely empathy building, up close and personal, day to day connecting, catching the baby/cutting the cord, physical parenting role that gives each parent (though yes the birth mother has that edge) a very immediate and close role with the baby. From pregnancy forward. I’ve seen it done. My husband was quite that way and stayed at home with our child.
Families are comin’ in all shapes and sizes and both parents are doing more and more for the non birth parent to be as much as part of the experiences as possible.
I think that’s beautiful personally.
Well I’d like to add that I’m in complete agreement with Marcus and Julie, here. Also…I think I’m more surprised than Julie at being given the label MRA. Just a hop, skip and a jump away on another article I’m fervently trying to convince a couple people that I’m not a radical feminist.
Anyway…other then that I’ve got nothing to add.
“Most expectant fathers do not view themselves as pregnant and most proudly say they don’t do housework or child rearing and that their wife does it all.”
Post proof that MOST say/do that please, otherwise you’re just generalizing in a negative and quite misandrous way.
Well said, heather.
@Heather
I agree well said.