# Father. A Book for Those Just About to Become One. > Russian original: [russian.md](russian.md). > Machine translation from Russian. Not edited by a human translator. The Russian version is the authoritative text. ## Preface I'm a software developer and a brand-new father. This book is for those who want to become a father — for fathers, not for mothers. I'll try to describe what it's like: what thoughts I had and what I came to. Maybe I'll save someone time and nerve cells they can spend on more important things. Humanity, after all, knows how to accumulate knowledge — this is my contribution. Right away, about the genre: this won't be a reference manual. You'll need to read and learn a lot more, and in every chapter I honestly mark where I end and where the doctor, the doula, or a normal childcare textbook begins. My task here is different: to organize your psychological setup. To come to an agreement with yourself about what's coming. You won't fool yourself and you won't hide from problems — they'll come out at the wrong moment anyway. Better to deal with them in advance. There are plenty of reference manuals without me; my task is to make sure you actually want to use them, and use them well. I once saw an illustration of how accumulated human knowledge is structured. A large circle — everything we as a species know. At birth, you're a point in its center. Gradually that point expands into a circle: you pick up knowledge from every field a little. At some point specialization appears — the circle stretches in one direction, you go deep. If you're lucky and have the strength, you reach the edge of the common circle and stick out a little past it — adding your own small new piece. Not everyone manages this; that's normal. It's still worth trying. This book is my attempt to add a small piece in exactly this area: in what humanity knows about a man before fatherhood. *(Illustrations with circles are needed here.)* The book is for a man whose first child is coming soon (or someday). Six chapters, each with subsections, personal notes, and a list of **tricky questions** at the end. To expectant mothers, the book will at times come across as cynical and male-fixated. Trust me, we recognize the full importance of what you're doing. The goal isn't to shift the focus, but to help the father do his role well; for that, some things have to be left out of frame. If you're not ready for the thought that men also have problems requiring independent solutions — don't read. The tricky questions aren't rhetorical. You want to answer honestly, and rarely manage on the first try. Under each one are answers from real fathers from the interviews: a spectrum, with no right or wrong, just different living positions. The signatures on the answers are shuffled. The same father appears under different signatures across questions, so you can't reconstruct any single person from several answers in a row. The author's own voice is among them too, without a separate label. ### Recurring ideas A few thoughts that repeat from chapter to chapter. Not from forgetfulness — they're the frame for everything else. - **There is no readiness.** If you're asking yourself the question about readiness, your self-reflection is already at the right level — consider yourself ready. The rest is specifics, and they're simpler than they look from far away. - **Don't expect gratitude.** Not from the child, not from your wife, not from the world. If you catch yourself waiting for it — go back to chapter 1 and reread: why you needed this in the first place. - **Closing tasks.** The main skill of a father. A closed task is a task your wife no longer thinks about; not one you did, and not one you do regularly. - **Anxiety is treatable.** Like any normal medical task. Before birth it's much easier to do than after. - **Life is brutal and unfair.** Every family is happy in the same way; unhappy each in its own. Comparing your family to others is useless and painful. Even if you did everything right, you can still get unlucky; that's no reason to lose it. Solve the tasks that can be solved, and don't forget your own state. - **The hard phase is finite.** The dense regime of the first two or three years feels like the new permanent norm — and it should. From outside, it isn't the norm. Remembering that the phase is finite is a separate resource that no one will fetch for you. --- ## Chapter 1. Why do you want a child? The most important chapter of this book and the most skipped. Most books for expectant fathers start with swaddling and strollers, and that's understandable: swaddling is a skill, it can be described, it's useful, the reader leaves satisfied. With the question "why do you want a child at all" — it doesn't work that way. You probably don't have a finished answer in your head, and the one that's there is embarrassed by its own sound and hides. So most books bypass the question: it's taken for granted that a man holding a book for expectant fathers has already answered "why". This assumption is wrong. By the time you're holding the book, you probably have several reasons in your head, and you'll openly admit to some and not to others. The unadmitted ones usually do the most work: they shape the expectations against which you'll later judge the child, yourself, and your wife. You can work with admitted reasons. You can't work with unadmitted ones, because to work with them you first have to see them. This chapter is about seeing. If you're already on the way and someone is kicking inside your wife's belly, formally it's late: the exercise in 1.3 won't stop the pregnancy and shouldn't. But answering "why" is useful at any term. A late answer doesn't work on the decision — it works on navigation: it will help you for the next decade in making other, smaller decisions, which without that answer become endlessly hard. ### 1.1. Why nobody asks this question When a man first says out loud that he's planning a child, the reaction of those close to him is usually the same: "about time", "great", "congratulations". No one asks why. This is especially noticeable if before this the person made any other big step — moved to another city, changed profession, chose whom to live with. For every such step you had to explain what for. For fatherhood no one needs an explanation. The decision passes through without customs. At first it seems pleasant: you're not interrogated, not doubted, not talked out of it. But on closer look, behind the absence of the question stands not trust in you, but society's certainty that the question shouldn't exist. Everyone knows why people have children. Everyone knows: for happiness, for continuation, for meaning. So the "why" question is read as rhetorical: if you're asking it, you must have a problem. There seem to be three reasons no one asks this question. The first is social pressure. It works not as agitation but as background. Distant relatives ask about "plans", which in their dictionary means not plans in general, but plans for a child. Friends with children start talking to you like a schoolboy who hasn't yet caught up to the place: they're there, you aren't yet, and that automatically makes them smarter. At the office they joke "when already", and the joke carries special weight if it's the boss joking, because in his joke you hear "when will you ripen into the adult status that I apparently already have". This pressure doesn't look like pressure: no one specifically pressures you. The decision "I guess I should" comes from somewhere on its own, and afterwards you don't quite understand whether this is your decision or one borrowed on credit. A useful check: if you had simply never heard "when already", would you still want it? If "not sure" — the borrowed portion in your "yes" is bigger than you think. The second is the biological and cultural autopilot, which drives on its own until someone interferes. By thirty, the average man has a set of pictures in his head: house, car, child, family vacation by the sea. It seems these pictures are innate. Actually they were put there by cartoons, school, advertising, and movies, over decades of your upbringing. This set sits especially firmly at the life point where biology also unfolds: before thirty, testosterone is high and the focus is on conquest; after thirty, testosterone drops a little and the focus shifts to preservation. Biology and culture coincide, and from that coincidence comes the feeling that it can't be any other way. To get out of autopilot, you don't have to turn it off. It's enough to sit down once and ask yourself: are these pictures definitely mine? What in them came from my own desires, and what came from the fact that the people around me lived in such a composition? Some of these questions won't have good answers, and that's normal. The main thing is to ask. The third reason, and the most interesting: the fear that an honest answer turns out ugly. That you want a child because you're tired of being alone. Or because without a child it's not very clear what to fill the next ten years with. Or because you want to prove to your own father that you're better. Or because your relationship is about to fall apart, and it seems a shared child will knock it back together. These reasons don't make a person bad. They make him honest, and an honest person is uncomfortable — first of all to himself. To say such things out loud is almost impossible: you'll be immediately moved into "not ready". Your wife will hear "you don't love our future child", your mother will hear "you have issues with your father", your friend will hear "you need to see a psychologist". All of this may even be true, but it doesn't work as help — it works as a renaming of an honest answer into a diagnosis. So such an answer stays inside, and in its place is voiced the one that's comfortable to hear: "because we're ready", "because we love each other", "because it's time". For this to work in your favor, you don't have to say the honest answer to anyone else. It's enough to know it inside. The "why" question isn't for judging yourself and refusing the child. It's so that later, at three in the morning on the fifth day of the child's life, you remember what all of this is for. If there's an answer, it works as a support. If there's no answer, resentment and the search for someone to blame will turn on out of nowhere — and the one almost always blamed is the wife. ### 1.2. Catalog of reasons Below is a list of reasons why people have children. It was compiled from living conversations: with father-friends, with strangers in smoking rooms and on trains, with those who see therapists and recount what they learned about themselves there. The list has no "right" and "wrong" ones — it's just an inventory. - Love and the wish to share it with a new person. - Curiosity: "what will he be like?" - Biological instinct. - Continuation of the line / family line. - A response to your own childhood (good or bad). - Fear of being left alone in old age. - Desire to become someone new yourself (parenthood as initiation). - Religious or worldview motive. - To save the relationship. - To prove something to parents. - "It's expected" / age / wife wants. - To fill an inner emptiness. - "So there'll be someone to help." - To bring into the world a person you participated in forming. The list is deliberately shuffled. Not for aesthetics, but for practice: if you sort the reasons into "real" and "fake" in advance, you'll pick from "real" ones and convince yourself they're yours. If shuffled, you'll have to look at all of them — including the ones you'd automatically cross out. It's worth saying a few words about each category, because in finished form they look equally weighty, but they actually work differently. "Love and the wish to share it" — a reason almost everyone believes in and almost no one privately puts in first place. Love itself is the background on which other reasons become possible. As a standalone motive, it's weak, because love between two people doesn't need a third for its existence. If you say "I want a child because I love my wife", you're actually saying "I'm ready to share the next big project with her"; the second formulation is more honest. "Curiosity" — an underrated reason. It doesn't sound noble, but it's often one of the most alive. You're curious what he'll be like, who he'll resemble. Curiosity is one of the best foundations for a relationship with a child, because it's genuinely directed at him, and not at your role next to him. "Biological instinct" — the most unverbalizable reason on the list. From inside it feels like a quiet hum: an impersonal pull that arises before any formulations. You can't rationalize it — there's nothing to rationalize. But it's reliable: it doesn't burn out in exhaustion, doesn't change with mood, and doesn't turn sideways to the child the way other reasons do. There's exactly one downside: you can't verbally produce it for anyone. Not for yourself at three in the morning, nor for the child himself when he's twenty-five and has his own similar question: he'll look at "I just wanted it" differently than you. Those who have the pull, it works silently. Those who don't won't be able to fake it for themselves, and this will still show up later. "Continuation of the line / family line" — a traditional formulation in which at least three different reasons are mixed. Biological (passing on genes), cultural (the family name shouldn't end), and personal (something of you should remain in the world after your death). All three can be real, but they should be separated and named individually. In undivided form, "continuation of the line" is often a cover for the fear of finitude. If that fear genuinely bothers you, a child won't solve it: he's a separate person with his own finitude. "A response to your own childhood" — the most frequent reason and the most painful. If childhood was good, you want to repeat it and give your child what you had. If bad — to fix it and give the child what you didn't have. Both forms work, but both contain a dangerous mechanism: you check yourself against your own childhood as a standard or as a negation of a standard, and not against the actual child in front of you. "Fear of being left alone in old age" — a reason almost nobody says aloud. It's dangerous not because of its moral coloring, but because it doesn't work. Children don't guarantee presence in old age: they can leave, fall out with you, get sick, die before you. To make a child into insurance against loneliness is to hang on him a role he didn't sign up for. "Desire to become someone new yourself" — parenthood as initiation. Many men phrase this as "I want to become an adult", as if before the child they weren't adults. There's truth in this: the appearance of a child does indeed restructure a lot for you. But this is a side effect, not a goal. Having a child in order to become an adult is the same as doing renovations to grow up. It changes you, but not the way you expect. "Religious or worldview motive" — this book doesn't connect a religious frame. One note: if such a motive is genuinely yours, and not inherited from parents, it's likely more stable than most others on this list. If inherited, it's worth checking, because it works as a cultural autopilot, just with a different source. "Save the relationship" — the most dangerous reason of all. Not because it's "bad", but because it almost never works. A relationship that already has a crack breaks faster after a child is born: lack of sleep, hormones, and new responsibilities don't heal — they expose. A child conceived to save a relationship becomes, at the very first crisis, a shared accusation: "this is all because of you". If this reason is on the list — better to deal with the relationship before a third appears, because afterwards it's ten times harder. "Prove something to parents" — a frequent reason among those who didn't manage to settle things with their father or mother in time. "Show how it should be" and "get the approval you never got" are two forms of the same mechanism, and both turn the child into a tool for settling scores with your past. The child can't bear this and shouldn't. "It's expected / age / wife wants" — not one reason but a whole set of passive agreements. If you have a child only because "it's already time", you don't have an answer to "why", and at three in the morning on the fifth day of the child's life that emptiness will show. It'll be especially hard to live through if your wife drops out of the set of reasons: it'll turn out you didn't have your own reason, you were just following her. "Fill an inner emptiness" — this is a reason where the child plays the role of an antidepressant. It works, but not for long: the first months of novelty really do suppress the emptiness, because there's physically no time to notice it. When the novelty wears off (usually by the sixth month), the emptiness returns, and now next to it sits a child who isn't coping with his role. "So there'll be someone to help" — a simplified form of "fear of old age" plus a model in which a child is perceived as an investment. I'll invest now — there'll be a return later. This model doesn't work in human relationships. If you apply it, you'll regularly feel cheated. "Bring into the world a person you participated in forming" — a reason with an unusual optic. The child here is a standalone unit, on whom you managed to influence in the first twenty years. After that he lives on his own and runs his life his way, sometimes not at all the way you'd want. The addressee of such a reason is the world: in it, something useful will appear with your participation. In terms of stability, it wins out over most of its neighbors on the list: it doesn't expect gratitude, doesn't assume help to you, and doesn't settle scores with your past. The one weak spot — it requires accepting in advance that the result is largely out of your control. If that thought doesn't scare you, this reason in this form works. If you're reading now and thinking "well, mine isn't because of that" — that's a common illusion. Reasons rarely sit alone. Usually there are several; some you admit, some you don't. The most dangerous are the ones where the child plays the role of an instrument: save the relationship, fill the emptiness, prove something to someone. They're dangerous not from moral wrongness — morality has nothing to do with it. They're dangerous because they don't work. A child doesn't save a relationship. He fills emptiness for months, not for years. Your parents' parents will still say you're doing something wrong. For most people there turn out to be several reasons on this list: one you could write in a greeting card, and two or three that are awkward to say out loud. The awkward ones are usually the real ones. They shouldn't be defeated — they should be seen and left alone. Once admitted, they stop running things in secret. ### 1.3. Exercise: real versus fake Go back to the list and mark each reason as "real" or "fake". You don't need help — you already know everything. If the urge is to think for a long time about each, that's already an answer: reasons that require a long defense are usually not real. If you want to do this seriously, the format is this. Read the whole list silently. Put a "+" (real for you) or "−" (no) next to each reason. Close the notebook and don't open it for a day. After a day, open it and go through the same list again without looking at the old marks. Compare. The reasons where the marks matched are a stable answer. The ones where they didn't are places where you haven't decided with yourself. By the end of the year, two or three reasons usually remain among the "real" ones. That's enough to keep living with them. Now the second pass of the exercise, and it's more important than the first. Put yourself in the child's place. The exercise sounds awkward, and from that awkwardness it's often skipped — but it's exactly this that changes the picture. Open your eyes in someone else's life into which no one invited you. The body is unfamiliar, and you can't manage it: you can't stand up, can't eat, can't speak. Above you bends a man who brought you into being. Why are you here for him? What does he expect from you? What do you need to do to earn your existence? Do you like this answer? How would you want to see it yourself if *you* were asked? If among your reasons there's "so he'll thank me", "so he'll continue the line", "so he'll help in old age" — you're getting life wrong. Think again. This exercise scares many people, and that's normal. Most men on the first pass discover that their list contains at least one reason that looks unpleasant from the future child's position. This knowledge is half the task. The other half is not to defeat this reason, not to "outgrow" it, but simply to see it and not let it run the relationship. ### 1.4. What changes if you know your answer When you have an honest answer to "why" in your head, three things change. They don't happen instantly. They'll show up in a year, in two, in ten. But without the answer they won't show up at all. Fewer resentments toward the child. "I gave you my life…" is a conversation parents start when they didn't get the expected form of gratitude from a child. The inner logic of this conversation: "I gave you a resource, you have to give it back". If from the start you've talked with yourself that you're having him not for him but for yourself, this conversation has no occasion. You got what you wanted at the moment of his appearance and later — in the moments when he laughed, talked, leaned in. That is the payment. After that you have no debts to each other. Fewer outbursts at your wife. When you don't know why all of this, the crisis of meaning has to go somewhere, and the closest place is her. She's tired, she wants the impossible, she "doesn't understand how I'm doing right now". If you've answered "why" honestly, her bad day doesn't cancel your answer. Her day stays bad, but you have your own support: your "why" sits inside and doesn't sway with her mood. Without such support you'll attach meaning to her, and a person who is your source of meaning inevitably becomes a source of resentment — because no one person can carry that amount of meaning. Decisions about school, city, work become easier. You check against your own formulation, not against anxiety. This shows up especially clearly at big forks: in five years you'll be offered a job in another city with a big salary, but without the environment your child is growing in. If "why" was answered, you compare the offer with that answer and the decision comes fast. If there was no answer, you'll thrash between "I'm doing it for the family", "I'm doing it for the money", "I'm doing it for me", and out of that mess usually grows either the wrong choice, or the right one but with great resentment. And the last thing, which only becomes possible when you already know your answer. You can honestly look at the scale of what's beginning. A child and a pregnant wife are a lot of resources: money, time, nerves, body, sleep, head. No one will say "thank you" at the end of the day, and on average over the year — also no. The only thing that really works here is unconditional love for both of them. Not the love that's "because they earned it" or "because they're mine", but the kind that simply is. You first need to find it in yourself, and then consciously cultivate it. After the fact, under screaming and lack of sleep, it can no longer be built up. ### 1.5. "Two weeks before the first concert" Now imagine the date is already set. Not "someday", but in nine months — a child. In a month or two — the first ultrasound. What are you feeling now? Did it get easier? Probably not. Beginning rock bands have a dangerous state — "two weeks before the first concert". They're just about ready to go on stage; a little more rehearsal needed. That "a little more" can last for years without any real movement. The band always has an argument: "we'll finish one more song and then we're definitely going out". The argument works from inside because it looks responsible: we can't go out unprepared, we'll disappoint people. In reality this "standard" is a way to never go out, because hundred-percent readiness is unattainable in principle. At the same time someone gets the idea that the best song is always the unwritten one: in your head it sounds perfect, but as soon as you record it, this isn't right and that isn't right either. So they keep it in their heads. With fatherhood it's the same. Everyone's ready for "someday, probably". Almost no one's ready for a specific date. Between "potential readiness" and "actual readiness" lies a gap, and in most cases the couple lives on the potential side without realizing that they may never cross to the actual one. This difference has to be talked through with yourself in advance: what if right now? what if not? what if in a month? It's useful to do one more mental exercise. Imagine that today you found out your wife is pregnant. Today. What do you do in the first twenty-four hours? Who do you approach? What do you start doing? What scares you first? What pleases you? If in this exercise you're overwhelmed by panic and want to postpone the decision, you're still in the "potential readiness" zone. If there's panic but you can distribute it across concrete actions, you're already in the actual zone. A simple rule works here: better to go on stage and embarrass yourself than never to go on at all. And it's not even certain you'll embarrass yourself — why set yourself up for negative outcomes in advance. Preparation in terms of knowledge is a solvable task, unlike moral readiness, which "on its own" never comes. ### Tricky questions for chapter 1 1. If the child never thanked you and didn't "continue the line", would you still want him? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > My spouse and I didn't plan children; we wanted to travel the world. But someone decided we needed twins. And only five years later did I realize I did want children. Or got used to them. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > Children — that's not "why", it's "because that's how nature set it up". > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, one child 7–12. > > Yes. He's not obligated to be grateful at all. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, three children. > > Of course; he's still a child, and his opinion will probably change N times. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, two children. > > I'm a pragmatist here, I hold to Richard Dawkins's system of views ("The Selfish Gene"). The whole point is in the instincts that, through feelings, push us to create new containers for the same genes — that's how DNA chains reproduce. Our role here is to be a container. All noble feelings rest on DNA identity; "continuing the line" is the basis. As for being grateful or being a good son — not required at all. 2. What is your main fear connected to your own father? Do you want to repeat him or fix him through the child? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > I haven't closed this question to this day. The best thing about my father was that he could be silent next to me. The worst — he was silent when he needed to speak. I don't know if I inherited the first; in the second I regularly catch myself and try to correct. Sometimes it works, more often it doesn't. What I figured out in the first year: "fix it through the child" is the same trap as "save the relationship". You fix yourself, and the child gets the already-fixed version or doesn't. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, one child 7–12. > > My fear is the absence of communication with a living father. The family was divorced from my birth. He was kind of there, but until I was 15 we didn't meet. Exactly the age when he was needed for advice and support. I always envied full families where fathers go on hikes with their kids, fishing, teach them to ride a bike. By giving my children now what I didn't have, I'm compensating for that emptiness of fatherly care and advice that I missed. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > That I'll be angry at the child for not meeting expectations. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > Yes, I'd want my child not to lose his father as early as I did. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, two children. > > No, somehow my relationship with my father went normally. By the end of his life I fully understood and felt him, so no questions remained. What I'd want — to live my life strongly and worthily, so that at the end I could be proud of it. For my father, myself, my wife, and my child. The fear, correspondingly, is the opposite: to live below the level, pitifully and meanly. 3. If you remove "must", "it's time", "age" — does *yes* remain? > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, three children. > > For me — yes. And it was exactly checking it this way that reconciled me to what's ahead being hard. "Must" and "I chose it myself" have different economies of resource: "must" drains you many times faster, because every act of effort goes through inner resistance. "I chose it myself" gets you up at six without resistance, because there's no "why am I getting up" inside. If you've answered "why", you have a pass into "I chose it myself" mode. If you haven't, you'll work for years on "must", and the child will feel it first. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > In my case there wasn't "yes" to begin with. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > It's instinct. "Must", "it's time", and "age" — these are attempts to replace an atrophied instinct. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > Yes, that's not what it's about at all. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, two children. > > Not really. --- ## Chapter 2. Are you ready? Morally, in knowledge, physically. Feeling ready is impossible: no one feels it, and waiting for that feeling is pointless. Real readiness is determined by what you've concretely done from the list below. Between the feeling and the list there's a gap, and years get lost in it. Feelings inform you of a state you're already in, not a state that's still ahead. If you wait for the feeling, you'll wait forever, because there's nothing to reflect. The main conclusion of this chapter is simple. If you're at all asking yourself the question about readiness, your self-reflection is already at the right level — consider the moral part closed. This is a technical fact: people who have no self-reflection don't ask this question; for them everything is "obvious anyway". If the question is there, the instrument works. The rest is concrete actions, and the world has already figured out almost everything for you here; you just need to take it and do it. ### 2.1. Moral readiness By "moral readiness" people usually mean the emotional feeling "I feel ready". That feeling is useless. It either doesn't come, or comes at the wrong moment — say, after an evening glass of wine in a café when the weekend went well and nothing threatens. A week later this feeling will pass, and fear will take its place. So talking about moral readiness as a feeling is useless; the working moral readiness is a set of steps, and there are few steps. First — accept that fear during pregnancy is the norm. Its peak hits not the birth, but somewhere around the middle of the term, when formally nothing is happening yet. By the time of birth the brain is already tired of fearing. Knowing this in advance is important: you won't take your own fear for "everything is falling apart". When you're waiting for something big and unknown, your head can't sit in a neutral mode for nine months straight. It looks for something to hang anxiety on, and finds it — sometimes very small things: for example, an incorrectly assembled crib, which you can think about for three nights in a row. In reality the crib isn't dangerous; fear just found a hook. If you know this mechanism, it's easier not to get tangled up. Second — talk with your wife about roles, expectations, money, parents, faith, school, vaccinations. Before birth, not after. After birth you'll mostly be discussing sleep and pumping; everything you didn't sort out before will burst out in the first six months with predictable noise. Often couples fall apart not on the child, but exactly on these unsorted topics: whose money, whose responsibility, whose mother. The conversation "how our parents interfere" is better done three times, because once isn't enough. On the first pass everyone usually says "let's not let them", and both think they've agreed. On the second pass it comes out that one of you has "but mom is still experienced" or "but if grandma comes herself, I can't send her home". By the third conversation a formulation works out that both of you can live with calmly. This is a general principle: important conversations don't close on the first try. And one more frame, to lift the impossible volume off this task. At school the task in front of you isn't to "cover all the knowledge in the world" — the task is to develop your brain and learn to learn. With pre-birth conversations the same logic: the goal isn't to go through the whole list and predict every collision, because you won't go through the whole list and won't predict every collision. The goal is to develop the very skill of negotiating. The more you train this skill before birth, the more easily it'll turn on after. A lot will still come up unexpectedly, because the volume of changes in daily life with the appearance of a child is such that you can't model it in advance. By the time it comes up, you'll already have a working process for handling such things together. Third — talk with yourself about the scenarios inherited from your parents: shouting, silence, punishments, three-day grudges. If you don't do this, those scenarios will still play out through you onto your child. In a moment of fatigue, your head pulls out what's lying on top, and on top lies how you were treated at that age. If you want something else delivered — put that something else there in advance: how I speak in a moment of fatigue, how I am silent, how I apologize. This point is the hardest of the four, because you can't work with it on a schedule: the scenarios surface as triggers. You hear a neighbor shouting at his son through the wall, and something inside you reacts. That reaction is material for work. Without it, you don't understand what's sitting inside you. Fourth, and the main one — find three types of support. A peer father, someone a generation older than you in parenting tenure, and someone completely on the side: a psychologist, a friend without children, a men's chat. Anything, just not your wife. Why three and not one? Because each has its own function. The peer father helps with tactics: which diapers are better, how we solved the kindergarten question. The senior in tenure helps with strategy: how this will look in three years, in ten. The one on the side helps you not drown in the role: with him you talk about something other than the child, and in those conversations you stay yourself. Of these four, the main one is about support, and it's worth unpacking, because it determines how you look from outside and what's inside you. From the outside, for your wife you have to be an unshakeable rock: calm, understandable, reliable. Not in the sense of "a man should", but in the sense of her real need during pregnancy and the first months — to have next to her a point where nothing wobbles. If you yourself start wobbling in front of her, she loses the only support she can lean against. You're allowed to be weak, but in another place: with a friend, with a psychologist, with yourself alone. Not with her, because she doesn't have the resource to pull you out during this period. The tricky part is that you can't pretend to be a rock. You can only be a rock if you yourself have somewhere to drain fear and weakness, and to drain them *not onto your wife*. A friend, a colleague, a father, a psychologist, a men's chat — anything, just not her. Otherwise the rock crumbles exactly at the moment when it's most needed: you complained to your wife, she lost her support, and now there's no one for either of you to complain to. This is a very common scenario: at some point the husband breaks down and says "I can't take it anymore", she breaks down in response even harder, because her last support just discovered its own fragility. And another important thing. Don't get angry at yourself if you don't always manage to shield your wife. This is a zone where almost no one succeeds on the first try, and rarely succeeds a hundred percent in principle. In the IT and design community there's a semi-insulting polite formula for when you're shown a weak piece of work: "you have potential". Here it reads without irony: you'll always have room to grow in exactly this zone, and that's for the long haul. Accepting that you're not perfect at shielding your wife from your fear — is a separate important step. Without it, every personal failure in this will read as a personal collapse, and from it will grow either hardening or secondary guilt, both of which get in the way of making the next attempt cleaner. An even trickier moment: you can't be a rock on all sides. You have to be a point of support for your wife and for yourself, but if you're hard with everyone all the time, you'll break. Today you're a rock for your wife; tomorrow you complained to a friend about life. Men complain and cry, and then go hunt mammoths. There's no contradiction here: one is a function in the family, the other is a function inside your own head. And finally. It's impossible to be ready for everything. You can be ready for not being ready, and act according to circumstances. That is the full formulation of moral readiness. If you try to write it in one line, it sounds like: "I know that I don't know a lot, I know who to go to, and I know that in the moment of crisis I won't be standing alone." And one more. No person can match all the advice written in books for expectant fathers — including advice I give myself. No person will fit the role of father for this particular child better than you. Nothing will turn out perfectly, and that's no reason to spoil your own enjoyment of the process. ### 2.2. Knowledge You need enough knowledge to understand what the doctor, the doula, and your wife are talking about. The bar isn't very high: the target level is "a person who doesn't get lost in the discussion"; specialist level isn't required. This is enough not to be a passive observer where you're a participant. In decreasing order of urgency. Basic medical literacy by trimester. Not to argue with the doctor, but to understand what he's saying. What the first-trimester screening is and why it's not postponed. What happens at twenty weeks. What preeclampsia is and why doctors say "swelling" with different intonation: sometimes it's the norm of late pregnancy, sometimes a signal that blood pressure needs to be measured immediately. You don't need doses and protocols; you need a vocabulary — the ability not to confuse NIPT with screening, toxicosis with preeclampsia, CTG with ultrasound. Five to ten minutes of reading in any normal source will do for each of these terms. Physiology of birth. Here it goes a little deeper. The phases — latent, active, pushing — the norms of intervals, signs of real labor versus practice. And the main thing: where the line is between "tough it out and breathe" and "call an ambulance". This line is the most important thing you need to know, because in the moment of contractions you won't have the resource to google. In your head should sit a conditional flowchart "if she says A, we do B". Useful trick: run through several scenarios out loud once. "What do we do if waters break at home?" "What do we do if contractions start but intervals are still twenty minutes?" If you both have the same answer to these questions, you're ready for the fact that in reality it'll turn out differently, and that's normal. Basic infant care. Swaddling, diaper, bathing, feeding (and help with breastfeeding), safe sleep, car seat. Half of these are your zone entirely, not help to mom. All of this is learned in two weeks. Material for learning is plentiful in the world. The downside: if by discharge you don't know how to hold the child's head, you'll be learning under her gaze, which is noticeably slower. Not because of her — because learning a new awkward skill under anyone's gaze is always harder than alone in a calm setting. Red flags in a newborn. Which symptoms can wait "until morning" and which can't. You should have a saved list of five to ten points: temperature such-and-such, color such-and-such, hasn't eaten for so-and-so hours — we go. As long as the list exists, your head doesn't spend resource on "is this normal?"; it checks against the list. Better to make this list with a pediatrician in advance, in a calm office, in normal language. Assembling it yourself from the internet is possible but risky: different sources say different things. Infant psychology in the first year. Attachment, sensitive periods, crying as a form of communication. Here it's important not to memorize but to reconfigure: the child isn't "fussy", he's communicating. If you read this correctly, your relationship with him forms faster. The shift from "fussy" to "communicating" isn't cosmetic. These two pictures have different consequences. If he's "fussy", it's logical to "calm" him — that is, suppress the signal. If he's "communicating", it's logical to understand what exactly, and respond. Over the long term the difference is enormous. Information hygiene. In the first month of the child's life you'll google a lot and badly: tired, at night, with one hand. Before birth, agree with your wife on which source you trust — a specific pediatrician, a specific book, a specific resource. And at night go only there. If there's no such agreement, parallel googling starts: one reads in one place, the other in another, and at three in the morning a discussion arises of "but in that article it's written differently", which doesn't get resolved by anything. The main thing about knowledge at this stage is not depth but breadth. It's important to picture what kinds of things even exist: that there's screening, sleep regression, colic, tonus, two schemes of complementary feeding. The specifics you'll clarify later with a doctor, a doula, with Google. But to clarify something, you have to know what to clarify. Without this breadth, any consultation turns into "do as you see fit", and responsibility ends up on anyone but you. ### 2.3. Physical readiness This block is underrated. Everyone discusses whether you're ready morally and financially. No one discusses whether you're ready in sleep, in your back, and in physical condition. And in vain: the first month after birth tests exactly the body, not the head. The head exhausts and shuts down first by that point; the body keeps working. Sleep. Sleep now is your reserve for later. If for the last six months you've been going to bed at one and getting up at seven, you don't have a reserve, and a week after the birth a deficit will start. Sleep. Don't finish the "last little thing" at night; don't sit over a TV series. Going to bed earlier is harder than sleeping longer: the head doesn't want to shut off because evening is the only "own" time. Replace the show with something less sticky (a book, a walk, a conversation), and falling asleep will shift on its own. Back and forearms. Carrying and rocking are yours. First a five-kilogram being in an ergo carrier, then seven, then eight, and on through the year. Plus the car seat, plus the stroller over curbs, plus grocery bags. If your back is weak now, it'll be constant pain at exactly the moment when you can't relieve yourself: after the child there's no normal time to get to a neurologist. Go to the gym, start doing planks — anything. The goal is to be in shape where you don't break down on everyday load; "bulking up" isn't required. Concrete minimum: thirty to forty minutes of strength training three times a week, plus stretching at least fifteen minutes a day. Check-up. Go to a general practitioner, dentist, measure blood pressure, take a minimal panel of tests. While nothing hurts is the best time. In a year you'll be hunting for time for a doctor between the child's sleep and work, and that's harder. Especially the dentist: tooth problems tend to wait for their hour, and that hour is often the first month after birth. Habits. Smoking, schedule, screens. The best moment to review them was a year ago; the second best is today. A useful reset: reviewing habits makes sense not from a sense of duty as "expectant father", but because in the first year of the child you'll work on your own resource harder than you do now. Habits that are "normal" now turn into problems under that load. A smoker in the first months will badly miss smoke breaks, because leaving the apartment for fifteen minutes becomes a luxury. Separately about alcohol. Here I'll say it straight from myself, because it matters. Don't drink. It's unnecessary. It steals your time, and time for a father is the most valuable resource. The morning after two glasses is a morning when you replace your wife slower and worse. The morning after a serious evening is a day in which you've dropped out, and the whole load is on her. The danger isn't in alcohol itself, but in that it shows up exactly in moments of fatigue. "I'll have a glass and relax" works once; the tenth time it's already a habit. I understand that a general recommendation will be read by everyone through their own story; and I'll repeat anyway — don't drink, especially in the first year. Food and household. You don't need a perfect diet. You need five simple dishes you can cook in half an hour. You need grocery delivery with set baskets. You need to fill the freezer before birth for a couple of weeks ahead. Without this, the first month turns into "let's order something" every evening, and the food bill flies to the moon. With most couples it flies; ready infrastructure holds it down. ### 2.4. Financial and household readiness A cushion of three to six months. Great if you have it. But it's a nice bonus, not a pass into fatherhood. Society demands that you close all financial questions before birth; great if it worked out, and fine if not all of it did. One thing matters here: the feeling "my cushion isn't the right size" is the most common feeling among expectant fathers, and it very rarely corresponds to actual financial position. That is, many of those worried about money actually have enough. The worry comes not from numbers but from responsibility: "I'm now responsible for two/three". That's a different feeling, and it isn't cured by additional money; it's cured by time and settling into the new role. If you and your wife have somewhere to live and something to eat — that's enough to start. A child and maternity leave really are a financial load, no argument, but there are things more important, and they can easily multiply all your accounting work by zero. Money is not on that list. By "things more important" I mean the health of wife and child, the relationship inside the couple, your own mental state. You can assemble a perfect cushion, and you still won't get a family if the above failed. Life is brutal and unfair: happy families look alike, unhappy each in its own way. Some have a full cup, some don't, and people lack different things. Comparison doesn't work here. Any attempt to compare your situation with someone else's gives the wrong answer, because the other situation is visible to you only in its façade part, while yours is from inside with all the cracks. Don't look for whom things are better with, don't look for whom they're worse with. Everyone has their own problems and difficulties; with some they're less visible on the façade — that's the whole trick. Your work is to solve your own tasks, and it gains nothing from someone else's façade except background envy or background condescension, both useless. Besides money, before birth it makes sense to close a few more things — banal, boring, but at three in the morning on the fifth day of the child's life you'll be grateful for them: - Insurance, documents, mandatory/voluntary health insurance, maternity hospital choice. - A list of what to buy in advance and what not to buy. - A maternity-leave plan: whose money, whose decisions, whose help, and who's responsible for what. Insurance and documents are a safety harness. Health insurance determines where you'll be admitted at all. The contract with the maternity hospital is usually signed a few weeks before the EDD, not an hour before. Choose not by "expensive and good" (which is often brand, not quality) but by concrete criteria: reputation of the specific doctor, distance from home, possibility of partner birth, reviews from people you know, not from the internet. The shopping list. Simple rule: anything that can be postponed until a month after birth — postpone. And a second rule: before every purchase read reviews from specific parents, not general overviews; and restrain the urge to buy "everything on the list". Many things that are "expected" to be bought in advance aren't needed at all: a changing table — a normal bed or dresser with a changing board is enough; buying clothes ahead doesn't make sense, because the child outgrows them in two or three weeks; diapers and care products aren't bought in sacks, because a brand may not work and will have to be changed. Before birth you need three big purchases: a crib (or attached, fastened to the adults' bed), a car seat in group 0 or 0+, and a set of first items (a few onesies, sleepers, swaddle blankets, small-size diapers). Everything else — toys, play mats, additional clothing — is calmly bought later. The maternity-leave plan is the hardest item. Money, decisions, help, and role distribution are all mixed in it. You can't sign it once and forget; it's a set of agreements that will be revisited. But the first conversation must happen before birth, otherwise it'll happen after, in inappropriate conditions, and leave scars. A separate storyline — putting things in order at work. Pregnancy, for a career, is the opposite — a good window: you can master new tools, expand your area of responsibility, lay the groundwork for a promotion or an internal transfer. The logic is reversed from the usual "fit everything in while there's time": spend the remaining time so that in the first months after birth, work doesn't become an extra source of anxiety. Good time management, cleared tails, agreements with the team about flexibility — all this should be ready by the time the child is already home. And separately — a financial conversation with yourself. If your current setup already has "nothing to live on", a child won't fix that. It's useful to talk through with your wife in advance how exactly you'll live in maternity leave: which expenses you cut, which you don't, whose money it is, and who insists on what. Not a table of numbers a year ahead — such a table won't survive. More a shared view: where your priorities are, what you don't cut under any circumstances, what you're ready to remove first. ### Tricky questions for chapter 2 1. When did you last change a diaper? And whose child? And have you held an infant in your arms for more than fifteen minutes? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > Before my son was born I never changed a diaper and never held an infant. Don't worry: you learn this in a couple of weeks. The trap isn't here. Read one or two books on care — it's really not complicated. The hard thing is different: living with the feeling of unrelenting responsibility, and books, unfortunately, don't help with that. 2. If your wife says "I can't cope" at three in the morning — do you have a plan, or will you improvise? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > There can't be a plan for this case. Make a plan for 3 a.m. — she'll say it at 4 a.m., when you yourself have a fever. You can't lay anything down in advance here. So the work isn't "come up with a plan", but treat your own anxiety before birth. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > Got punished, because responsibility is on both equally. If I myself couldn't cope at three in the morning — also got punished, because I let down my wife and the kid(s). > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, three children. > > Took the child onto myself, what else can you do. Wrote to work that I couldn't work tomorrow. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > Always helped. We both couldn't cope. 3. Whose parent will be the first to come "to help" — and do you both want that? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > By default — no one. If they come, it's a nice bonus; don't factor them into the plan. There are families where the grandmother really covered everyday life for the first three months and the couple recovered at her cost — that's great, I know such couples. And still: you can't count on it, because for every other couple it doesn't work out, and a plan tuned to the grandmother strikes exactly when you were expecting her and she didn't come. 4. Which *one* scenario from your childhood will you repeat if you don't change anything? > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, one child 7–12. > > The irreversibility of punishment. We agreed with the child that he'd prepare for school on his own and pass all tests with positive grades. Instead of preparing and working hard, he slacked off, played, did everything except prepare. A trip to a competition was at stake. Result — one negative grade, and I, as promised, don't take him. Although I don't want to do this myself. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > Shouting and taking offense at the child. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > Saying that playing video games is a direct path to becoming an idiot. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, two children. > > The child is 10; it's hard yet to judge realized scenarios. We do everything "the smart way": by logic, intuition, advice on YouTube. 5. What have you and your wife never discussed because "we'll figure it out later"? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > Ugh. This is exactly where you should start, not with picking a stroller. Here lies the most unclear, unsorted stuff. You have to understand that for some questions it's just not time yet (no point buying a car seat in the first month), and some are too scary to say aloud. Start with the latter. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, one child 7–12. > > We didn't discuss division of childcare. While they were breastfeeding, I had a panic fear of holding the child, because I was afraid of harming him. Visually I had a feeling of fragility. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > Boy, what hasn't come up. Every day is like crossing a minefield — already 11 years. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > The question of what we do if someone gets sick or very tired. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, two children. > > This was more or less thought through, so I'm at a loss to answer, or just don't know what to say. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, three children. > > I told my wife that household issues were on her. I think she took it as an insult. As a result we both had to discuss who owes and can do what. I think you can't agree on it in advance: the scale of change in everyday life is such that you can't imagine what exactly will surface as problem issues. 6. How many times have you been with her at an ultrasound? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > Stupid question. Every time. --- ## Chapter 3. What to expect? This chapter is about how it most often goes. Not how it should be, but how it goes. It's needed for one thing: so that reality isn't a shock, and so that in an unpleasant moment you don't suspect that something is specifically wrong with you. And it's also a chapter about closing tasks — the main fatherly skill, for which, basically, this book is written. We'll get to it in 3.5. Before that — a map of five directions in which expectant fathers' expectations usually diverge from reality: what to expect from yourself, from your wife, from the child, from the relationship, and from the world around. Each direction works independently, and each can unpleasantly surprise. ### 3.1. What to expect from yourself The list below isn't pulled from medical literature. It's put together from what many new fathers go through and don't expect. If you don't recognize yourself in any of the points, either you got lucky or you're still at the start and just haven't reached it yet. Most men go through at least three of five. Anxiety will be at its peak not during birth. It will be at its peak in the second or third trimester, when formally nothing is happening yet. A common picture: the first trimester passes on the adrenaline of novelty, the second on a strange background dread that isn't tied to anything concrete. By birth the brain is already tired of fearing; fear by that moment goes somewhere. This is counterintuitive, because it seems the closer the dangerous event, the scarier. Actually fear works as a preparation mode, and by the time the event has arrived, preparation is over and the mode turns off. Knowing this in advance is important: in the hardest month (usually the fifth or sixth) there's a temptation to interpret your own state as "everything's bad" and make poor decisions — change job, move, postpone parenthood to "later". Better to wait it out. Bonding with the child comes later than you think. Usually by the third month, and it's built through actions: bathing, carrying, night bottle feedings. Most fathers don't have a "flash" at the maternity hospital. You stand, hold the child, wait for something to click inside — it doesn't click. The most dangerous thing here is not knowing this happens to many people: the absence of the flash starts to be interpreted as "I'm a bad father" or "I don't love my child", and you carry this thought inside for weeks without voicing it. Bonding in men grows more slowly than in women, because women have a hormonal mechanism (oxytocin via breastfeeding) and men have almost no such mechanism — the connection is built through repeated actions, and every next bath strengthens it more than the previous one. A drop in testosterone is the biological norm in expectant and new fathers. It's a measurable, widespread phenomenon, not an individual quirk. It explains half the feelings of "I've stopped being me": less energy, quieter voice, wanting to cry from a commercial, uncharacteristic tenderness. The evolutionary explanation is simple — a father who participates in raising needs less dominant behavior and more patience. Biology adjusts. It isn't treated; it passes on its own a few months after birth. If the state drags on for a year — that's already grounds to check the thyroid and testosterone, not leave it to "it'll pass on its own". Irritability, withdrawal, apathy — this is the male form of postpartum depression. Sadness, the way women have it, almost doesn't appear in men; in its place — anger and the wish to be silent, sometimes a sudden wish to leave or to drink heavily. An episode may come at the fourth or fifth month of the child and pass on its own in a couple of weeks. In some it drags out to six months and ends with therapy. The distinction between "bad character" and "symptom" looks simple from outside: character doesn't come and go, a symptom comes and over time goes. From inside, in the first weeks, it doesn't look that way at all; it seems you've just become worse as a person, and that version is easier to accept than to look for a symptom in yourself. If you notice this in yourself and it doesn't let go after two or three weeks — go to a specialist, don't wait. Postponing here is strategically bad: depression in the first year of the child tends to break the attachment that's still only forming, and rebuilding it later is noticeably more expensive. A useful working picture: when the brain decides it can't anymore, it breaks down. Sometimes this is fleeting — tired on Wednesday, slept it off on Saturday, forgot. Sometimes — a signal of a systemic problem that's been accumulating for months. From outside you won't tell one from the other in the moment, and you shouldn't try. The logic here is "better safe than sorry": one extra conversation with a psychologist costs nothing and quickly closes the question; not going when you should have costs much more. Irrational fears (dropping him, breaking something) almost always accompany the first weeks. A typical picture: you bathe the child in the shower and fear your hand will slip. You're afraid to bathe him in the tub because the water might be too hot or cold, even though you just checked it with your elbow. You're afraid to leave him on a changing surface for half a second, even though he lies there and doesn't move. This is normal. It usually lets go by the end of the first month, as the body gets used to the new load and your own competence becomes visible to yourself. ### 3.2. What to expect from your wife A note up front: below isn't a "guide to your wife". These are collected observations about what often remains unclear to men before birth and has to be relearned after. If you treat these points as "rules", it'll go badly. Better to treat them as a map you can navigate by when lost. Hormonal swings through the whole pregnancy and after. The amplitude is such that almost everything wants to be written off to character. Don't write it off: behind the swings stands physiology, not character. If yesterday she cried because you put the socks in the wrong place, and today she laughs about the same thing, that's her background, not a message. A simple inner correction helps: "this isn't her speaking right now". Don't say it aloud — you won't be thanked. And don't use it as a universal explanation of everything: hormones don't cancel real problems, they only amplify their emotional experience. If she says she's tired of your mom — she's tired of your mom, and hormones are just an amplifier. Fatigue that doesn't pass "with one good sleep". A pregnant woman's heart pumps more blood, posture changes, pelvic bones spread apart, breathing volume drops. Behind this stands physiology in which the body works for two, and there's no "rest" mode in it. If you have a habit of saying "well, sleep, it'll pass", unlearn it now, because after birth it'll be even worse, and you'll be repeating the old formula. A useful replacement phrase: "let me take such-and-such off you so you have an hour". An hour is a concrete action; "rest" is an empty word. Shift of focus to the child in the first months. Behind this stands biology plus birth plus breastfeeding, which physically keeps her near the child 24/7. You during this time are service personnel for her, not a husband. You can't do anything about it; you can only not take it personally and keep in mind that the state is temporary, not the new norm: by the sixth–eighth month of the child she gradually returns. If by a year she hasn't returned, that's already grounds to discuss what's happening with you as a couple. Possible birth not according to plan — C-section, induction, epidural. There may be a "right scenario" in her head from YouTube or from a friend, and if she goes a different route, she'll be processing this for another six months. Your task is not to convince her that "everything went well", but to acknowledge her disappointment, even if from your point of view it's misplaced. "Everything went well" is a phrase that closes the conversation and leaves her alone with her feelings. "I see that for you it wasn't how you planned" opens a conversation that has room for both failure and acceptance. Postpartum depression and anxiety occur in 10–20% of women. Noticing them is your job: she's unlikely to notice herself, and definitely won't be the first to tell anyone. Symptoms: prolonged absence of joy, thoughts of her own worthlessness, loss of appetite, insomnia beyond what the child already causes, intrusive thoughts about something happening to the child. An especially alarming signal — if she starts avoiding the child or, on the contrary, can't tear herself away from him for a second out of fear that without her something will happen. If you recognize it — calmly raise the topic and take her to a specialist, not "persuade her to think about it". She has no strength to think now; she needs a concrete action — doctor's number, appointment time, you drive. ### 3.3. What to expect from the child The first month of the child is mostly care, not communication. He eats, sleeps, screams, poops. You won't meet any "personality" yet, and that's really how it's supposed to be. This point surprises many people the most: an expectation of a little person, and in reality — a being that reacts only to hunger, sleep, and warmth. This disappointment is normal and passes on its own by a month or two, when he develops the first meaningful reactions and you start to read individuality. Colic, gas, sleep regression, growth spurts — each has its own name and literature. It's important to know this, because at three in the morning, without a name, any deviation seems like a catastrophe. Typical scenario: a couple has colic for the first time, thinks for three nights that something critical is happening with the child, and almost drives to the ER. Then someone googles "4-month sleep regression" or "infant colic peak", reads the first thing that comes up, and both exhale. The lesson: google the basic terms in advance before birth. Not to know them by heart, but so that at three in the morning your head has "ah yes, this is colic" instead of "what's even happening". Minimum list: colic and its peak, sleep regression at 4 months, growth spurts at 3 weeks, 6 weeks, and onward, lactostasis in mom, weight loss in the first week and the norm of its recovery. The first conscious smile is usually addressed to you and comes closer to 6–9 weeks, not on the first day, as books about perfect infancy promise. Before that the child smiles in his sleep or reflexively, with no addressee. The social smile appears when the child's vision focuses at the distance of an adult's outstretched arms, and he starts to see a face. From this moment exchange appears, and a lot in the relationship with the child starts exactly here, not at the maternity hospital. ### 3.4. What to expect from the relationship There will be more conflicts. On average — several times more; most will be about lack of sleep, not about something real. Simple rule: in the first six months, revisit every argument 24 hours after it. Nine out of ten seem pointless. This knowledge is useful to hold in your head during the argument itself: "I'm angry now, but I know that tomorrow I'll be embarrassed about what I'm about to say". Sometimes that's enough not to say it. Sex returns noticeably slower than "after 6 weeks" from the brochure. The real pace is different for each couple, the range from a few weeks to a year, and this whole range counts as normal. The main thing — don't count to yourself how long it's been. Counting is the first step toward resentment; resentment to the conversation "we've stopped being a couple"; the conversation to actually stopping being a couple. Useful trick: instead of "we haven't in a while…" switch to "what's good with us right now", and be content with what's there. Closeness comes back not "on schedule" but as a byproduct of you both being okay. Division of invisible labor (mental load) is the main battlefield in the first year. This is exactly the work that isn't visible: remembering when to do tests, when to buy formula, who to call about the vaccination, what ran out in the fridge, whose birthday is in two weeks, which documents to gather for kindergarten. Many men long don't understand why their wife is more tired, even though tasks are split roughly evenly. It becomes clear only when you sit down and try to list what's spinning in your head about the child right now. Take a piece of paper, two minutes. You'll get three to five points. Give her the same piece of paper — she'll write twenty to thirty in the same time: formula by morning, cough, Thursday with the babysitter, vaccination, hat for fall, order vitamin D, sort through clothes for the next size, mittens in the wash, reply to the pediatrician about the rash, don't forget about the nursery for next year. There's another asymmetry that's often discovered through an argument, because it's rarely talked through. Your wife's job is gone for a year and a half, yours isn't. Two different life modes form: she's dropped out of the schedule of external affairs and lives in constant closeness to the child; you return to your mode in a few weeks. From inside her experience, "work was cancelled" feels like a new shared norm, and she silently starts expecting that for you everything is also cancelled. This leaks into complaints that at first seem pointless to you: why didn't you come back for dinner, why did you refuse to visit her sister on Saturday, why do you still remember about some deadline. You don't have to fully adjust to her mode — your circumstances really are different. It's just useful to bring up this difference in words early, before it hardens into the form "do you not have a child or something". In detail on invisible labor — see 3.5. If you skip that section, this whole book wasn't worth reading. ### 3.5. Closing tasks: the main skill of a father This is about to be the most practical thought in the whole book. Don't expect gratitude (see chapter 1) and listen. A closed task isn't a task you did. And not even a task you do regularly on schedule. A closed task is a task your wife no longer thinks about. Simple example. Your wife doesn't think about when to change the oil in the car. She doesn't need it done by a specific date. She doesn't fundamentally need it done at all. It's enough that you say: "next Monday we don't use the car, I'm taking it to the service". That's it; the topic is out of her head, you've stated the limits that matter to her, the rest isn't her concern. Find the service, get there, oversee, pay. Or do it yourself, also a great option. With dishes and the dishwasher — the same. The goal isn't for dishes to always be clean. And not for it to be you specifically washing them. The goal is for your wife not even to have the thought "oh, dirty dishes are sitting, need to wash them, husband, wash the dishes". This thought has to be crossed out of her mental activity — period. At the start it's hard. The first month you'll have to wash often and without reminders, so that your wife develops confidence: dishes — on you. After that you can relax. If they sit dirty in the evening, that's fine, you'll wash them in the morning. The main thing — don't return this load to your wife. Dishes here, obviously, are an example. The principle is broader: zones have to be taken off your wife whole, not "help sometimes". The same logic works with money. To earn — an obligation. To run the budget — an obligation. If you're doing it, do it, however banal it sounds. And here's what matters: you won't be reproached for earning little or for not being able to buy something (you can't buy everything anyway, sure). You'll be reproached for the fact that your wife had to dig into the topic herself. The more closed zones you have, into which she doesn't need to climb, the fewer reasons for war you both have. And again: don't expect gratitude. Go back to chapter 1 if you forgot what all this is for. ### 3.6. What to expect from the world around Friends without children will gradually drift away. No one to take offense at: you have different schedules and different topics. Normal statistics — one or two of your five close friends drop off, not because you quarreled, but because when your last strength runs out at ten in the evening, you stop calling just to call. There's no betrayal here on either side. Over time others appear in place of those who dropped off — fathers from the maternity ward, fathers from kindergarten, fathers from the neighboring yard. With them you'll have common topics that were closed to you before. Parents — yours and hers — will "know how it's supposed to be". Get ready in advance: the conversation "thanks, we do it differently" will have to be repeated to the same people several times, calmly and without explanation. Explanations work against you; the more you justify, the more room for argument. The best formula is "we decided so". Period. No reasons. Reasons open a negotiation, period closes the conversation. This is a hard skill, because parents want to be useful, and cutting them off harshly feels ungrateful. But it's exactly the refusal to explain in detail that preserves long-term relationships with them: fewer reasons for conflict, fewer accumulated resentments. With grandmothers and grandfathers — one of the toughest storylines of the first year. In some families it closes with a short "we don't do it that way", and the period works. In others — no: grandma came, doesn't leave, gets into feeding, into bedtime, into formula choice, into the name. There's no universal solution, and you'll have to find your own — with your wife, in each specific family configuration. The main thing — find a solution that honestly works for you. Every compromise in this place that you made "so as not to fight, we'll sort it out later" stays inside like a tiny needle. You can carry them for a year, two; over a decade they keep pricking, because each one rests on someone else's decision passed off as yours. The more needles, the harder it is to live with them, and at some point they start to interfere with the relationships with the parents themselves far more than a timely "no" would have. There's a separate unpleasant asymmetry. More often it's the wife's mother who's active; the husband's mother statistically less often ends up in the first circle. That's how it goes. This can leave a noticeable bitterness — especially if your mom would want to participate: the place is, in a sense, there, and in a sense isn't given to you. Two calm moves help here. One — invite the parents on your side to the same volume in which the other side participates. Another — agree with your wife in advance that into the couple you let parents in equally from both sides. Raising the topic matters before the asymmetry settles into a habit; after it grows into a resentment that conversation no longer cures. And one more option people undeservedly rarely use — paid help. A couple of hours a week is enough: a walk, a nap, time for you and your wife to sit somewhere as a couple. A full day with a nanny isn't needed here. A pleasant side effect — grandmothers lose the role of "the only possible help" and return to the role of loving relatives. Asking for help from them stops being a necessity, and the tone of the relationship evens out. Work won't "understand", even if in words everyone is for work-life balance. Boundaries will have to be not explained but held: at eight in the evening you no longer answer, on weekends you're gone, in the first six weeks vacation or "I'm on a business trip". Those at work who want you "the way it was" usually aren't malicious — they just have their own plans. They'll adjust if you don't move first. If you move even once, the system will remember and start testing again and again where your real boundary is. Better to set it once and hold without discussion. It's important to keep balance. You can't take everything on yourself, or you'll tear. You do everything until you're tired, and then half again. Joke. Go back to chapter one and reread: all of this is for you, not for anyone else. From outside, no one will produce this motivation for you — that's how it's set up. ### Tricky questions for chapter 3 1. Which scenario of birth and the first months have you *never* thought through, because it's scary? Think about it now. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > I didn't think through the scenario in which the child is born with a severe disorder. I knew that if I started thinking it through, I'd look for an answer in myself — can I cope or not — and I had no answer. I still don't. I thought about it seriously only when I was writing this chapter. 2. Are you ready for the fact that you won't feel a "flash of love" at first contact? What will you think about yourself in that moment? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > I had no flash. I held my son in my arms for the first fifteen minutes and thought mostly about not dropping him. A few days later this frightened me more than the fact of fatherhood itself: I was waiting for the click, and it didn't click. It clicked much later, through actions, not through realization. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > There was no flash. When I saw her for the first time, I just wanted to meet her, talk, learn more about her. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, one child 7–12. > > No. Everything happened later. I understood with my mind that here he is, my son, but the feelings came later. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, two children. > > Was present at the birth and was the first to hold him after swaddling. There was a moment of euphoria, and then just tenderness. We brought him home — and the first thought: "Now what do we do with him?" > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > Feelings in me develop slowly, over weeks. Here it was the same: first shock, then acceptance, then the instinct to protect the child, and only then something on the theme of love. Love in general is more about personality, and in a just-born child personality clearly hasn't formed yet. The older — the more interesting with him, and more "personality", less "service" and routine. 3. Can you say to your mother "no, we do it differently"? > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, one child 7–12. > > I learned by the third month. Before that I couldn't — I heard offense in her voice and immediately backed off. What helped: agreeing on a wording with my wife in advance and sticking to it word for word, not getting into a debate on the merits. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > Such a phrase happened, and more than once. There were grievances from mom because we didn't accept and use her advice. The first time was something like choosing sandals for the kids for summer. We didn't agree on the style. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > My mom didn't interfere in the process at all, unless directly asked for advice. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, two children. > > No, mom set the right tone right away. She said we used to do it this way, but you probably do it differently now. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > Yes, we didn't really let her in from the start. Usually the mother and grandmother from the wife's side actively get into the kids' upbringing. Husband's parents are statistically shortchanged, because women "divide the territory". The wife's grandmother helped us in the first three months, and at a later stage we hired an educator-grandmother by the hour — more for development than for just sitting. --- ## Chapter 4. Pregnancy Nine months is your only window for preparation, and skipping it in the mode "wife gets pregnant, I observe" is a strategic mistake. The child needs you mediately for now: through your wife, through everyday life, through your own head, which is much more convenient to put in order before birth than after. And one more thing: pregnancy is one of the few phases you go through together in normal concentration, without a child between you. If you use it only as waiting, you can lose what no longer repeats. ### 4.1. Trimester 1 (weeks 1–13) In the first trimester the child is still a few cells, but in the woman the whole body has already changed. The size of consequences in her life — toxicosis, fatigue, emotional swings, aversion to smells you used to consider favorites. A typical example is food: smells of meat, fish, fried onions suddenly become unbearable. Adjusting here is you, not her, and that's the first small lesson of fatherhood: you'll have to change your habits, not wait for her to adjust. Toxicosis is a separate story. Not everyone has it (about 70–80% of women), it comes in different forms (from mild nausea in the morning to uncontrollable vomiting several times a day), and usually passes by 12–14 weeks. If your wife's nausea doesn't stop and she's losing weight — that's already hyperemesis, not "regular toxicosis", and you need to go to the doctor on the next business day, not "when convenient". The marker watched for: inability to keep fluids down for 24 hours. Who to tell about the pregnancy is a separate conversation you should have together. The biology of the first trimester is unstable: a significant share of pregnancies in this period don't reach the second trimester. So the rule "no one before 12 weeks" isn't superstition, but a way not to end up in a situation where, after congratulatory calls, you have to call the same people back with different news. The decision of whom to tell before twelve weeks is also a shared one. Usually the circle is narrowed to parents on both sides plus two or three closest friends. That's enough to get support and not enough to need to call a large group in a bad scenario. Screenings and tests of the first trimester you should know minimally: NIPT (non-invasive prenatal test), screening at 11–13 weeks (ultrasound + biochemistry). They aren't "postponed to later", because after week 14 they're no longer done. Write the dates into your calendar; don't leave it to her: her brain is busy with other things right now. Useful trick — synchronize both of you with the gynecologist for one shared discussion of the results: then you both hear the same thing from the source, and afterwards there's no "but the doctor said…" with different interpretations. What not to do. Don't ignore her condition ("oh come on, I felt bad at your age too"). Don't "distract her with fun" — she's tired, she needs quiet. Don't pester her with mood analysis. Don't comment on her appearance, even with compliments: during this period most compliments read as comparison, and it doesn't work in your favor. Don't invite her to movies, restaurants, long trips without her direct initiative — toxicosis makes any of these unpredictably hard. ### 4.2. Trimester 2 (weeks 14–27) This is the "golden time". More energy, toxicosis retreated, you can act. Not "live like before", but specifically act: sign up for classes, choose a doctor and maternity hospital, discuss the maternity leave plan, finish what's long been put off at home. After week 28 her mobility drops again, and much will no longer work out. Learn the sex, if you want. And agree on whether you tell people around you. This conversation is better held in advance: a typical scene — the husband cheerfully tells the parents, the wife was planning to keep quiet for a while. After that the argument drags on for weeks. The choice itself "find out or not" is a separate question. Those who know in advance have less confusion with clothes and names; those who don't have more surprise element in the birth itself. Neither option is the "right" one. Classes for expectant parents. Sign up together, go together, don't send her alone. If you skip two classes "because of work", you'll be googling exactly what they covered, at night, with one hand. Better not to skip. The classes mostly give what's also in books, but two things work only live: the chance to ask the instructor questions and meeting other couples in the same phase. The second is an underrated value; new acquaintances with couples whose EDD is within a month of yours later turn into the first circle of support. Choosing a doctor, maternity hospital, and insurance is your task of gathering information, not hers. You make a list, she picks from it. This division of labor works and doesn't require her to dig into reviews and forums. Concrete set for the choice: the doctor's reputation (from reviews of real patients, not from the clinic's website), distance of the maternity hospital from home (matters in the moment of contractions), possibility of partner birth (not everywhere allowed), the presence of neonatology on site (in case of complications with the child), price and contract terms (if it's a paid birth). First kicks are your cue to participate. Put your hand on the belly, talk to the child out loud. Nothing to be embarrassed about; the child isn't evaluating, the wife — even less. This is the form of bonding with the bump that works through sound: by the twentieth week the child distinguishes voices, and the father's voice, having sounded next to him regularly, becomes familiar to him by the moment of birth. The mechanism — neurophysiology, not general words. ### 4.3. Trimester 3 (weeks 28–40+) In the third trimester the wife becomes physically vulnerable and heavy. This is your main operational quarter. By the start of the third trimester the child weighs about a kilogram, by the end three or four. She carries the weight on herself around the clock, and any action that used to be "ordinary" — bend over, lift, walk — is now either hard or impossible. The one who adapts here is you, not her. Preparing the home. Where the child sleeps, where you change him, where you wash him, where you put dirty things. Approach concrete locations in your apartment, not abstractions. A typical example is the changing table, which seems convenient until you try changing a diaper in the evening, under the main light. Sometimes it turns out the lighting and angle don't work, and you have to redo it. Better to find that out now than on the first night. While you're at it, check whether there are outlets in the right places (for the baby monitor, the humidifier, warm night light), whether it draws from the window where the child will sleep, whether heating works normally in winter months. The hospital bag is your responsibility from start to finish, not "help me pack". You'll find the list in any source; what matters is that you're the one assembling it, and she doesn't have to remember anything in the moment of contractions. In a separate bag — your own things in case of partner birth: change of clothes, a bottle of water, light food, phone charger, spare cable. This is your minimum supply, without which you'll work worse in the delivery room. Car seat installed and tested in advance, not an hour before discharge. In advance means "drove up, installed, put a toy in it, checked, unfastened, took out, put back". An hour before discharge is the worst time to be figuring out how the belt threads. Many fathers went through this and don't recommend it. Useful trick: watch a YouTube video of the correct installation for your specific model, not "in general". Every seat installs slightly differently, and general principles don't cancel concrete buttons. Birth plan. Who's nearby, who's on the phone, who's with the dog, who's with the older kids. If you have none of this — the plan in one line: "we go together, the car is gassed up, phones are charged". After that come contractions, and nothing can be controlled in them in advance anyway. If you have older kids — that's a separate plan, and you need to talk it through with the person who'll be sitting with them, not the day before birth, but several weeks ahead. Signs of labor beginning and an agreed plan of "when we leave". This is the second conversation you'd better hold aloud. Not on paper, but aloud, to make sure you both understand the same thing. Concrete points to agree on: at what contraction interval you leave, what counts as "waters broke", in which cases you call an ambulance and in which you drive yourself, who has the car keys, and whether there's gas. These points seem obvious until the moment comes when half of them turn out not to be obvious. Maternity-leave plan: your schedule, your sick leave or vacation, your real role in the first weeks. Under the Labor Code, a father is entitled to five paid days at the birth of a child; that's not enough. It's useful to agree in advance about an additional week or two at your own expense or a flexible schedule. With the employer this agreement should be formalized before birth, not after. After birth you'll have neither the time nor the state to negotiate; you need to do it while you're in normal shape. ### 4.4. The father's emotional work during pregnancy Going to ultrasounds — every time, no rescheduling, no "I have a call". Not just for your wife — first of all for yourself: you see the child for the first time not as an idea but as gray spots on a screen that move. These gray spots do more for bonding than all the books. And another thing: at ultrasounds they often say unpleasant things (a doubtful indicator, additional tests needed, we'll move the check by two weeks). If you didn't go, she'll hear it alone, and then process it alone, and at the next conversation will process it again, because there's no one to witness. Witnessing is your function. Don't compare her with "other pregnant women", even if you really want to. Especially with her sister, mother, or friend. Comparison works only one way: they "coped" there, she "didn't". It never works. The issue here isn't her sensitivity, but the inner logic of pregnancy: every pregnancy is hard in its own way, every one has its own set of difficult things, and there's no common denominator. If you catch yourself comparing inside your head, don't say it out loud. If she catches you — she doesn't have the resource right now to soften your phrasing. Take on what she's physically stopped doing: heavy things, bending, household chemicals, walking the dog on ice. These tasks transfer fully into your list, not as "help". Closing tasks, see 3.5. The principle here is simple: if you do something "when she asks", you're not helping her — you're adding the necessity of asking to her load. Unloading works only when you yourself see what needs to be done and do it. Your own fear — don't dump on her. Here it's worth saying it harshly, because the temptation is great: never show her how scared you are. She's scared many times more — bodily, hormonally, physically — and any of your "I'm not great either" she'll read in that state as a demand on her resource, which she no longer has. There's nothing to compare here; don't try. It doesn't work as a symmetric "everyone has their own fear, let's share" but as an asymmetry in which your fear lives in another place — not in her hands. So fear has to be put somewhere, and that's an independent task. A father-friend, a psychologist, a men's group. It's useful to go to a psychologist in advance, not waiting for things to get really bad: the main work there is restructuring the habit of being silent about the uncomfortable. This habit will be useful for the whole first year. A fathers' chat on Telegram is a working option, if you find a live one, not a marketing one. A father-friend from your close circle also works, especially if his child is slightly older: he remembers his own fear and can recognize yours. Separately — about her informational load. A pregnant woman has to absorb a huge volume of everything: about physiology, breathing, nutrition, contractions, breastfeeding, scenarios of birth not according to plan. That's her work, but your task is to unload her where possible. Sign both of you up for classes for expectant parents and go together. Find a doula in advance, meet with her before birth, discuss her participation. Download and print the materials she needs instead of putting research on her too. At some point she'll stop pulling all this herself — and it's good if by that moment she's already prepared rather than confused. ### 4.5. What you don't control That was her informational load. Now — about your head, because this part no one will do for you: not your wife, not the doctor, not the courses. Accept for yourself the fact that you can't strongly influence the negative scenarios of pregnancy and birth. More than that, if they unfold, feelings and emotions will help you least. You'll have to act with a cool head: solve problems, negotiate with people, find options, paths, money in the end. And all of this is easier to do not when you're shaking with fear. Accept the fact that you won't be able to foresee everything, and there's no fault of yours in this. Pregnancy is a very complex and hard process, but it's natural. Do everything that's necessary for its normal course, even when it goes easily. Listen to the doctors, memorize, write down, study, consult. The main thing — don't panic. Fear is a normal phenomenon. When a person walks across a bridge and runs the scenario in their head where they fall off the bridge, that's normal. It's our evolutionary mechanism: run negative scenarios and thereby switch from fear of the unknown to fear of something specific. Just don't let it take over. But if the bridge scenario spins by itself, without stopping, and you can't turn it off — that's no longer fear, that's anxiety, and it's treated, not endured. Everything will be fine. If it isn't fine, thoughts of exactly how it won't be fine won't help you in any way — you'll have to solve problems. Be ready for the fact that something will go wrong, but don't behave as if it already has. ### 4.6. What you'll miss if you don't engage now Bonding with the bump isn't made up. Fathers who talk with the child before birth attach to him faster after. Skeptics are usually convinced by something simple: by the twentieth week the child distinguishes sounds and reacts to voice. After birth, the child recognizes the father's voice that sounded in the belly and calms down to that sound faster than to a new one. At first, talking with the bump may feel idiotic. After a couple of weeks the feeling passes, and it becomes a normal part of the evening. The habit of addressing the child before his birth carries over later. Fathers who talked a lot with the bump speak more easily with the infant — and an infant who is spoken to a lot starts to recognize speech as speech, not as background, earlier. No predictions "years ahead" follow from this; there's simply already a familiar connection between you, and it works from day one. And one more. The head you didn't put in order during the nine months won't have time for that in the first weeks after birth. What hasn't been done during pregnancy doesn't get done for a long time after. This applies to everything: conversations about parents, agreements about shifts, working through your own fears, household preparation of the apartment. Two months after birth, any of these tasks, if not closed in advance, turns into a source of conflict. ### Tricky questions for chapter 4 1. What did you do around the house that you'd never done before? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > I started cooking on my own, even though I'd never stood at the stove before. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, two children. > > Renovations. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, three children. > > Yes, I did everything to share the household. Since grandmothers were very far away, we got used to doing everything ourselves — and the same here. 2. Who *besides your wife* did you tell that you were scared? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > Wife — not allowed, see chapter 2. I started talking to a psychologist at 28 weeks. Before that, silence. Silence was worse for me than the first consultation. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > I was scared around twenty. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > No one, but I needed to share. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, one child 7–12. > > I wasn't scared in principle. But at first I was afraid to pick up the infant — I hadn't thought they were so tiny. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, three children. > > I consider it inappropriate to discuss a man's feelings (a man is definitely scared) when a woman is going through this: she's not just scared, she's terrified — thoughts of dying in childbirth, of medical errors. Deal with your fear separately, don't push it onto her. 3. Which *of your* projects will you consciously close before birth so it doesn't hang in your head? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > I had four projects in work at the same time. One I closed consciously, two I handed off to colleagues, one I dragged through pregnancy and regularly regretted it. The rule I arrived at: first you try to close. What doesn't close — you hand off. What doesn't hand off — you put on pause. Business tasks you can do at fifty; the birth of a child is a moment that doesn't shift. If you can't close a project "because it's too important", it's the first candidate for any of the three actions above — usually for pause. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > Recorded an unfinished song. The rest didn't work out. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, one child 7–12. > > There were no projects. Then I just worked office hours, 10 to 6. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > We were trying for a child for four years, and the moment of success came suddenly: some things got closed, some didn't. I think it's completely unimportant. I wouldn't look at "projects" at all: calmly pause any business activities — you can do them at fifty, but the birth of a child is a moment, and a much more important one. --- ## Chapter 5. Birth The most intense day of your life — even if you're "merely" nearby and formally not doing anything. The active phase can last many hours; the usual picture — the father doesn't sit down the whole time and afterward doesn't remember whether he ate that day. Behind such a picture stands the normal physiology of stress wakefulness: the body keeps you in readiness mode, and as long as you're in the maternity hospital, the switch to "normal" mode doesn't happen. The main thing to understand about this chapter: it's about events you don't control. Controlling birth is impossible — not for you, not for her, not even for the doctors; mostly they accompany. So the focus of the whole chapter isn't on how to make the birth go well, but on how not to interfere and how to be useful in each of the possible situations. ### 5.1. Before: the last weeks Practice contractions start as early as the second trimester. They're distinguished from real ones by three signs: irregular, don't intensify, stop with a change of position or a hot bath. Real ones intensify and don't go away. If in doubt — call the midwife and say. Better to call five times for nothing than not to call once when it mattered. Midwives handle this; for them it's a working protocol. Route, bag, documents, who to call and in what order — all checked and printed. Useful practice — gather everything into one envelope or folder marked "BIRTH", leave in the hallway. Recheck a week before the EDD. When contractions start, no need to search for anything: just take it off the shelf. In the envelope: both passports, your wife's mandatory or voluntary health insurance, the exchange card, the maternity hospital contract (if there is one), cash for unexpected expenses, car keys. Separately — a bag with her things and your minimum one. The decision about partner birth is made together. Not "you decide for both" and not "you agree to her scenario because it's awkward to refuse". It's a conversation you should start at least a month before the EDD and not back away from. If you change the decision in the last two weeks — it's a signal that something wasn't sorted out; don't go silent, finish talking. If you're not going into the delivery room — that's normal, but it has to be discussed in advance. Best scenario: the couple comes to a decision together, the wife finds a doula, the husband waits at home, both content. Worst: didn't discuss in advance, husband in the hallway, wife in the delivery room alone — and took offense for ten years ahead. Don't repeat the second variant. Don't listen to those who say being in the delivery room isn't needed. And don't listen to those who say it definitely is. The decision is only yours and your wife's; outside opinions have no place in it: they're easy to mistake for your own, and then end up in the delivery room (or outside it) against your will. There are many voices around this topic — your mom, your mother-in-law, colleagues, YouTube, the doctor at the paid clinic, the men from "Kvartet I". Each says their own, and each sounds confident. Among these voices you need to hear two: your own and your wife's. After that the rest become background by which the decision isn't made. While we're on the topic, let me say a word about the other side. In the general conversation it's bypassed, and without it the picture is one-sided. Three considerations to keep in mind before you end up in the delivery room. First: what you see will stay in memory. In some men this later changes how they perceive their wife in their sex life. In not all — and you can't predict in advance; there's also no "undo" button for such a change. Second: empathy plus helplessness. You'll feel how much it hurts her and how scared she is, down to your spine, and at the same time you won't be able to help — the doctors are working there, and they're the main ones in that moment. In many men, a dull sense of guilt grows from this combination, surfacing later in unexpected places: a year later, two, without visible cause. Third: practically speaking, your usefulness for medical staff in the delivery room is usually zero, sometimes negative. If your wife hasn't delegated a specific role to you and the midwife hasn't agreed anything with her, you're an extra pair of eyes and hands with nowhere to go. Want to go — go. Don't want to — don't. The outside inertia of "it's accepted that the husband should be nearby" can be pulled out of your head only before birth; from the delivery room these three considerations can no longer be retrieved. If you decide to be present, make yourself one promise: be an advantage, not a load. That is, don't distract the staff's attention, don't demand more care than the child, don't faint. Prepare physically: maybe sleep standing up or on a chair; maybe not sleep at all; maybe eat cold food in the corner between contractions. If that sounds too hard, it's a normal signal and a normal reason to discuss with your wife the option where you aren't in the delivery room. ### 5.2. During: phases of birth and what the father does Latent phase. Contractions are irregular, at home. What to do: feed (if there's appetite), give water, distract, count intervals, and don't panic ahead of time. A useful activity at this time is something simple and slow: cook soup, read aloud. Not for the use of it, but to not sit watching the clock. Count intervals in writing or in an app: when they started, how long they lasted, how long until the next. This data will be useful when you call the midwife: it helps her quickly understand what phase she's in. Active phase. Already in the maternity hospital. Breathe together, massage the lower back, water, change positions, protect her from extra people (student interns, an extra nurse with an extra question, relatives on the phone). If she says "don't come" — step back two meters and stand; if she says "come" — come. No hypotheses of your own about what she needs right now. Men's hypotheses in this moment are usually wrong; the correct signal is her direct request. Lower-back massage is a working technique, and you need to learn it a little in advance. Point of application — the sacrum, pressure strong, rhythm slow. They show this at the courses for expectant parents, and it's worth remembering not with the voice but with the hands. In the moment you won't have the strength to remember or the voice to ask — it should work on autopilot. Pushing. Look in her eyes, not at the perineum. Hold her hand. Don't panic out loud. If you feel dizzy — sit on a chair and lower your head between your knees; don't shout to the doctors that you're dizzy. They're already busy. If it gets really bad — crawl off into a corner, but without a loud exit: the staff's attention should stay on her and on the child. Birth. With natural birth, you'll most likely see your son or daughter before your wife does — the doctors are still finishing up with her. With a C-section, you're with the child in the children's ward; she's separately. In both cases your role is to be next to the one who can be supported right now. Usually that's the child, but not always; sometimes — her, and then your daughter or son will spend five minutes with the nurse, not a big deal. Neither of them in this moment is evaluating you by whom you went up to first. That's your own fear; let it go. First skin-to-skin contact is also your right, not just the mom's privilege. Ask. If the child was taken away (for example, for a C-section), and you're offered to hold him — agree, don't "give way". This moment won't come again. It works on several levels: for the child — temperature regulation and adaptation to the outside environment; for you — the first minutes of tactile contact, which later lay down in the body's memory, not the head's. ### 5.3. What to do if something goes off plan The scariest subsection. It can be written only with a cool head; writing it otherwise is to deceive the reader. This subsection isn't to scare you, but so that in the moment when something goes off plan, you already have a version of action and you're not standing in the hallway in shock. Emergency C-section. There's no failure of birth in this, and no "wife couldn't cope" either. The decision is made by the doctor under conditions in which the doctor decides, not you. If it's been announced, you have five minutes to reorient: you won't see the child right away, your wife will be under anesthesia, you're alone in the hallway or in the room. Supporting her right now looks like this: you tell her before the operation that you're together and everything is okay, then you sit and wait, then you're the first to hold the child. Don't try to explain to her in these minutes that a C-section is normal. You'll explain later, when she can hear. Between the announcement of the C-section and the start of the operation there are usually ten to twenty minutes. During this time you may be asked to change into sterile gear (if you're going into the operating room — which depends on the maternity hospital) or, on the contrary, to stay in the hallway. Ask directly: "where do I go now, to her or to the child". No independent hypotheses; do what they tell you. Resuscitation of the child or transfer to neonatology. If the child has been taken away, your task is to find out where exactly and go there. Don't sit in the room with your wife "because she's feeling bad": she's alone now with a hormonal hit and without the child next to her; she needs information, not presence. Bring information — sit with her. Go again. Shuttling between two points is your real work in these hours, and it's more tiring than any office week. Information for your wife is delivered briefly and factually: "he's in neonatology, breathing on his own, doctors are nearby, in two hours I can bring a photo". Without evaluations, without "everything's fine", without "I'm sure". If you don't have information — say so: "I don't know yet, going to find out". This works better than invented reassurance, which later turns out to be a lie. Complications for your wife: bleeding, tears, reaction to anesthesia. What to say: "I'm here, you're okay, the doctors know what they're doing". What not to say: "everything's fine" (if you don't know what's fine) and "well, how did you let this happen" (you didn't). No interpretations of your own of medical data. No calls to "your friend, the doctor, for a second opinion" in this moment. Second opinions come later, after discharge, if you still need them. When to speak, when to be silent, when to insist. Simple rule: if you don't understand what's happening, you're silent and listen. If you understand and see that they're ignoring or rushing her, you insist — calmly, by the doctor's name, without a scandal. If you have nothing to insist on — silent. To insist without grounds is to create extra work for the staff in a moment when they already have more of it than you do. Silence in the delivery room is an active act. It doesn't mean you're passive. It means you've chosen not to spend her attention on your words. In most moments of birth, this is the most valuable form of support you can give. ### 5.4. What *not* to do in the delivery room Don't film on your phone without her direct permission. Consent given a week before the birth in a café doesn't count; you reask in the moment. And if she refused, she refused. No "just one frame"; that frame will then live in her memory as a boundary violation. Don't ask the doctors "is this normal?" every two minutes; better not to make yourself noticeable at all, you'll feel it intuitively. They have a monitor and experience; if something is abnormal, they'll say so before you. If you have a concrete question about a concrete indicator — ask it between contractions, not during. A general "is this normal?" doesn't count. Don't compare what's happening with YouTube videos from your viewing history. Videos are filmed in an edited form, and in reality birth goes on for hours and without editing. Comparison makes her birth "not right enough" in your head, and that comes through. Don't faint. Eat in advance. Bring water. If your vision blurs — sit on a chair, lower your head between your knees, find the strength to crawl into a corner so as not to interfere; the main one here right now isn't you. If the state doesn't let go — go out into the hallway, ask the nurse for water, not "I'll go breathe" with a heavy face but specifically "I need five minutes". Don't call relatives until the child is born, the placenta is out, and the first examination has passed. Relatives waited nine months, they'll wait another hour, not scary. A call "we've started" at eight in the morning, and then many hours of silence, turns relatives into an extra source of anxiety — yours and hers. Best format: you stay silent until the announcement "the child is born, both are okay", after which you write one shared message to everyone at once. Don't interfere. ### 5.5. After: the first hours After birth you'll have two tasks, and they're not what you expected. The first is administrative. Registering the child, documents, calling those close. The list of calls is better made in advance: who's first, who's next, who gets only a text. A simple table on the phone does more than any supportive words on the first day. Registering at the civil registry takes time; if you've studied in advance what and where to bring, you can do it in the first seven days without an assault. If you haven't studied — it'll become one of the first unpleasant tasks of a tired father. Spending an hour on this before birth is a normal investment. First feeding, first diaper change, first bath — yes, yours too, you're needed here. And it's better that all this "first" in life happens here, under the nurse's watch. The nurse is the only person in your life who'll show you, without judgment, how to hold the child over the changing table and how to fasten a diaper. Make use of this while she's nearby and while you're not alone with this in your own bathroom. The second task is presence. If your wife is in intensive care or the child in neonatology — this is your shift. Not the time to "make sense of what's happening", not the time to write a post, not even the time to eat properly. You shuttle between two points and carry information. It's tiring and seems useless; in fact it's the most important thing you've done in this whole year. And there's one more thing they don't warn you about. In the first hours you most likely won't feel the promised "flash of love". You'll feel fatigue, mild dulling, and a strange quiet inside. There's nothing "wrong" with you, and such quiet doesn't make anyone a bad father. The flash just comes later — through ten minutes alone with him on the third day, through the first smile in six weeks, through the fact that for the first time you hear "papa" in a year. The feeling grows slowly. Give it time. ### Tricky questions for chapter 5 1. Do you really want to be in the delivery room? Or does it just feel like you "should"? Those are different things. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > I thought I wanted to. In the seventh hour I realized I just hadn't given myself permission to think that I might not want to. I thought it through, stayed — but for the first time without a sense of duty. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, three children. > > I was very interested; partner birth was even discussed. But my wife was against it. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > I wasn't there. They didn't ask me. If needed, I'd have gone. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, one child 7–12. > > Yes, I was. I really wanted to be together the whole time, couldn't leave my wife without support. It was scary, didn't know what to expect, but it turned out fine in the end. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > Yes, I was. It was my decision. We even paid extra so I could be present. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, two children. > > Not there. The decision was joint. I don't quite understand how to keep viewing a woman as a sexual object if you've watched her being dissected — that matters. Then empathy: you (not being a log) will absolutely feel how much it hurts her and how scared she is. At the same time you're completely helpless; you can only get in the way. How are you supposed not to interfere with the doctors, when she's your only one, and they have ten today. Most likely no father there has ever helped anyone. If my wife had asked, I'd have gone. But the doctor himself talked us out of it — I suspect by the same logic. 2. If the doctor says "there's a risk, we need a C-section, decide in a minute" — who in your couple makes the decision? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > We had it talked through in advance: she decides if conscious; otherwise me, by the list from the birth plan we drew up together. In reality that minute didn't come; but exactly because we'd talked it through, I was calm. --- ## Chapter 6. The first year The year that will change you more than you're now able to imagine. And not always in the direction you're now counting on. Most men, telling about this year in hindsight, describe it as "the hardest and most important at the same time". This pair is experienced from inside as a contradiction, and from outside as a very ordinary thing: millions of people go through it, and nothing special. In this chapter the year is broken down into five stages plus crosscutting themes that run through the whole year regardless of the month. ### 6.1. Months 0–1: shock The first week at home is bare survival and a test of all your preparations for strength. There's no routine in it yet. Your ideas and readiness will collapse. Be ready that you aren't ready, improvise, don't get angry at yourself when something goes off plan. A plan in this week is a fiction; the real picture is a day in which you don't remember what you ate, when you went to bed, or what today's date is. Sleep in 90-minute segments, feedings every two or three hours, a flow of guests that has to be fended off. And at the same time both of you are stars right now, and accepting help is normal. Ask for it from friends. No one will give you an achievement for pulling it all by yourself. Help that works: bringing prepared food, walking the dog, picking up an order, sitting with the child for an hour while you both nap. Help that doesn't work: "we came to look at the little one", "we brought gifts", "let us tell you how it was for us". And about duration. None of these states stays forever — not the lack of sleep, not the apathy, not the feeling "I'm service personnel here". From inside what's happening it seems this is now how it'll be; that's a normal optical error of a tired head. In the other direction the same error works: the first smile, the quiet hour with the child on your chest, the evening you and your wife first sit together without discussing the child — will stay exactly as long as anything bad. Some of this you notice in the moment, some you don't; you can't make up for either after the fact. Colic, jaundice, weight loss while breastfeeding. What counts as expected and what counts as grounds for not waiting until morning isn't worth detailing here: that's the pediatrician's work. Your work is to have their number on speed dial and to know five to ten symptoms at which you call not in the morning but now. The list was discussed in 2.2; to repeat — printed, on the fridge. Minimum set of red flags: temperature above 38 in a child under three months, no urine for eight hours, refusal to eat for more than five hours, color change (blueness, marble, marked yellowness), doesn't wake up to feed, constant piercing cry that nothing calms. Postpartum depression in your wife. Symptoms easy to take for fatigue: prolonged joylessness, thoughts of her own inadequacy, loss of appetite, intrusive thoughts about the child. Fatigue goes away after sleep; depression — no. If two weeks after birth nothing has let go — that's no longer "she's adjusting", that's already a task for a specialist. Asking her "how are you" isn't enough; she'll answer "fine", because otherwise she'll draw attention to herself for which she has no resource. You have to ask differently: "can you take joy in anything right now besides the child", "do you remember what you wanted before birth, or has it all left for you now". These questions catch what "how are you" doesn't. Your own shock — "I'm not a father, I'm service personnel". This is a normal thought, caught regularly in the first two or three months. Usually it passes on its own by the third or fourth. If you get stuck on this thought and start discussing it with yourself as a fact — call a peer father who's already been through this. It'll help. The thought itself isn't harmless: it tends to grow into resentment toward your wife ("I serve, you don't thank"), and resentment in the first months is a short path to a scene you'll later be ashamed to recall. ### 6.2. Months 1–3: "the fourth trimester" The first conscious smile and the focus of gaze — the moment, as it turns out, all this was started for. Usually it comes between the sixth and ninth week, most often at the most inconvenient time — early morning, when you're dragging to the kitchen for water, or late evening, when you've stopped expecting anything. Many fathers admit they cried in this moment, and say so without shame. This is the first moment in the whole history in which the child responds to you as a personality, and it's stronger than you prepare for. Colic with a possible peak at week 6. In reality almost none of the "techniques" works predictably: one time a change of position helps, another time a car ride, a third — nothing helps and you have to wait it out. The main thing — don't look for a single trick, but cycle through options without despair. And don't consider that "ours is especially bad"; statistically colic is in 20–30% of children, in most it passes by 3–4 months on its own, without treatment. Listening is still painful, but losing your mind over it isn't worth it. Return to work. Come back after two weeks — too early. Come back after three months — most companies won't put up with that. There's no optimum; there's only a conversation with yourself about how to organize it so that the office doesn't become your main escape from home. If you catch yourself staying late at work with relief — that's a symptom, not "lots to do". The symptom is simple: your resource is profitable to work, and at home it's spent on the same load without visible output. You don't have to quit work over this; you have to see the mechanism and make a decision consciously. The first argument with your wife about "who's more tired". Better to set the rules of the game before it, not after. Simple working rule: whoever slept less today wins. Not ideal, but it removes most of the grounds for bargaining. A second rule, no less important: fatigue doesn't work as a currency, and winning an argument about "who's more tired" is pointless, because the "prize" is the same fatigue plus resentment. Better to win this argument once and forget than to win every week. ### 6.3. Months 3–6: the first plateau Sleep regression at four months. You're not doing anything wrong — the child's cycle is simply rebuilding, and for two to three weeks you'll sleep even worse than in the first weeks. Knowing in advance is important: otherwise comes panic and a search for "what we broke". Regression is, in essence, a sign of development: a transition from infant sleep to a more "adult" cycle with phases. After two or three weeks the cycle settles, and sleep becomes better than before regression. Complementary feeding starting at 4–6 months — your chance for the first time to take feeding entirely onto yourself. As a zone per 3.5, fully, not as helping out. For many fathers this becomes the first truly "closed" time with the child — the one where he does something himself, from start to finish. In hindsight, this time will feel scarce. There are two schemes of complementary feeding — pediatric (with purees) and pedagogical (with micro-doses from the shared table); both work, both have supporters and detractors, and both require the same thing from the father: the patience to watch the child smear food on his face. The first laugh, the first "conversations". An exchange of sounds in which for the first time you realize you're communicating with a person. Often this happens around the fifth month, and the feeling stays as if the child had been swapped. Before it was an infant; after — a person who's starting to have a relationship to you. This is an illusion, of course — he had a relationship before, you just didn't see it. The psychological peak of paternal depression is at month 3–6. In men it more often looks like anger and withdrawal rather than the usual "sadness". Constant irritation at everything, the wish to leave the house on an invented pretext, loss of interest in what used to be enjoyable — character doesn't produce such signs on its own; this is a symptom. To a specialist, don't wait. And don't wait for "when it gets really bad": "really bad" is already a crisis, not paternal depression, and climbing out of a crisis is much more expensive than out of an early stage. This depression has several quiet physical markers easy to miss for "just tired". One — weight gain: food becomes a quiet form of consolation, and sport leaves the schedule first. Second — inner flatness: suddenly it's equally indifferent at work, with friends, with yourself, and what used to pull you into the day stops pulling. Third — alcohol more often and in larger doses: the evening glass goes from "relaxing" to "shutting down". If you recognize yourself in two of three points, the matter is more likely a symptom than fatigue. There's also a link with her postpartum depression that few people warn you about. When your wife is having a hard time, expectations of you multiply; any attempt of yours to say "I'm not doing well either" reads as dishonest — she's hurting now, and on that background being unwell is, in a sense, forbidden to you. In such a couple her state works as a multiplier of yours: you quickly find yourself inside her depression, without properly dealing with your own. There's nothing to blame yourself for here; it's a recognizable trap. You have to move in both directions at once: drag your wife to a specialist (see 6.1), and yourself too, not waiting for "her to get better first". Invisible labor. By this moment you both understand who's pulling what. Don't bargain over it: "I'm doing A, so you do B" is a path to a long war. Take zones off whole, see 3.5. And one more thing: by this moment it's useful to sit down and put together a shared list of mental load — literally on paper write out what each of you carries in their head. The very fact that the list appeared on paper unloads: what's written down stops taking up working memory. ### 6.4. Months 6–9: the child becomes a person Sitting, crawling, learning to stand. Time to seriously reconsider safety at home: outlets, furniture corners, everything on lower shelves. Typical scene of the first week of crawling: a book is taken off the lower shelf and checked by taste. Next — wires, plants, the trash can. Better to reconsider the lower level with margin: the child will start crawling sooner than you'll get used to it. Household minimum: outlet plugs, corner protectors on the dresser and table, latches on lower drawers, nothing glass or small below a meter from the floor. Stranger anxiety. The child starts distinguishing "ours" from "strangers" and crying at strangers. For development this is a normal stage — he's learning to differentiate. For relationships with relatives it's inconvenient for now: grandma's visit now begins with five minutes of crying. Don't interpret this as "doesn't love grandma". This is about eight months, not about grandma. Handing the child to unfamiliar adults abruptly during this period is a bad idea; better to let him watch for fifteen minutes before someone picks him up. First words, in which you can even claim "pa-pa" a little. In fact at this age "pa-pa" is just a sound that's easiest for the child to produce, and it isn't addressed to you. But you can pretend it is to you, and that's normal. Real addressing of "papa" appears closer to a year and after, and it's usually clearly clear that it's addressed exactly to you. The first separation. Leaving with grandma for a couple of hours and going out together with your wife for the first time as a couple, not as parents. Often the first such outing is awkward — the couple goes to a café, doesn't know what to talk about, and comes back quickly. After a few attempts it works. This is a skill, like any other; not working the first time is normal. Useful rule: on the first date-night after birth, agree not to talk about the child for at least half an hour. Half an hour is a lot for a start; later it can stretch. ### 6.5. Months 9–12: a little person First steps. And the new dose of your anxiety for every corner in the apartment that comes with them. The first two weeks you want to keep your eyes glued to him; this tires you more than all the previous months put together. Then it lets go: children fall, and mostly that's safe. Their bodies are built to withstand falls from their own height; real injuries happen rarely and usually not from walking, but from places the child climbs above his height. The first conscious "no". In this moment you meet for the first time not an infant, but a person with will. React to this as news, not as a violation of order: your child has become a separate being. From this moment, parenting stops being care and becomes communication. And from this same moment a new job appears for you — holding the frames, not persuading. The boundary "can — can't" works only if it's constant. If today not, and tomorrow yes, the child will test it every day. If it's constant, testing quickly fades. Teeth, illnesses, the first high fever. That for which a pediatrician found in advance is needed. A high fever in a child under a year isn't necessarily a catastrophe, but always grounds to call, not to google. The first temperature of 39 and above in a child under a year is a hard night even for prepared parents. Four calls to the doctor over eight hours is normal statistics, not panic. To have in advance the number of a pediatrician you both agree on is half the solution; the other half is don't play hero, don't "let's wait until morning" when the child's state is unclear. Planning the first birthday. An event that you and your wife need more than the birthday boy himself. The birthday boy himself will remember exactly zero of it. Do it for yourselves; for the child a piece of cake is enough. Useful reframing: instead of "how to make a holiday for the child" — "how to mark for ourselves that we made it to this date". This removes the anxiety about the "correctness" of the holiday and returns the focus to the fact that a year has passed and you've gotten through it. ### 6.6. Crosscutting themes of the first year **Sleep.** Yours and his. Most couples don't get a single week of full sleep in the first year, and you end up getting used to it. No universal strategies; what works for the neighbors won't work for you. What works for everyone — agreements on shifts with your wife and mutual defense against parental advice on this topic. The concrete format of shifts is different for each couple; the general principle: whoever isn't on shift sleeps in another room and doesn't react to crying. If both react to every cry, both don't sleep, and in three weeks both psyches will fall apart. **Money.** A budget on one salary is a different structure of spending, not "as before, but more modest". Restaurants and spontaneous purchases leave; diapers, doctors, taxis "to the maternity hospital at three in the morning" come in. Where it usually leaks — on everyday small things that are "a hundred rubles each", but they happen a hundred times. It's useful to sit down once a month and look at where money went: half will have gone on what you didn't expect. A shared budget in this period works better than a separate one: visibility is shared, and one side doesn't end up in the position "I don't know what we're spending on". **Work.** Negotiations on flexibility, defense of boundaries. "I'll take time off when I need to" works where you have a direct boss with children; doesn't work where there are two more people between you. Better to agree formally once (in writing, in the schedule) than to take time off verbally thirty times. A formal agreement doesn't "burden the relationship", as it seems; it removes tension because it becomes clear what you have the right to without explanations. **Time.** Time management in the first year works as a survival tool. A calendar with shifts, weekly to-do lists, separate slots for the doctor and the bank. The more seriously you take this, the less of a "I didn't live this year, I functioned" feeling there will be. Without structure, time dissolves into a stream of small tasks, and at the end of the day there's nothing to remember. The required level of organization rises stepwise. Usual actions that used to be done without thinking — leave the house, pick up groceries on the way home, agree on an evening with a friend — now require preparation and coordination with your wife. Treat this regime as permanent; for at least a year that's how it'll be. The sooner you build the calendar and explicit agreements into it, the fewer conflicts out of nowhere. **Your own time.** Book silence for yourself like any other meeting: sit, walk, listen to music, answer no one. Working format — a fixed slot once a week, two hours, at the same time, defended against any other matters. If this isn't in the calendar — it won't be. And don't try to "fit between things"; "between things" is eaten up by the child faster than you'll notice. **Relationship.** Date night as a commitment in the calendar, not a luxury you'll get around to one day. At least once every two weeks. Can be at home, can be without budget, but without the child and without discussing the child. The rule "without discussing the child" matters more than it seems: if you stay alone together and the whole conversation circles around the child, you stay not as a couple but as managers of one project. **Friends.** Who from the old ones stayed, who dropped off, and what new fathers appeared in their place. Usual picture: one or two new fathers appear from the same maternity ward or the neighboring yard; with the old crowds you see each other several times less often, but don't lose them completely. Actively maintaining both circles at the same pace won't work; it's useful to consciously decide who from the old ones is a "load-bearing" friendship for you, and keep at least one contact a month with them, not leaving it to chance. **Your body.** Weight gain, back, vanished sport. What to do about it, without waiting for things to get really bad: come back to the gym or to running shoes no later than the fourth month of the child, otherwise getting back in becomes many times harder. The minimum volume that maintains shape is two to three times a week for forty minutes; a month and a half without load leads to those forty minutes starting from zero and taking real effort over two to three workouts. **You as a son.** A new optic on your own parents. Sometimes they become closer and more understandable; sometimes — the opposite, because you now see what they underdid or did wrong with you. Both are normal. The main thing — don't use the child as a place where you settle scores with them. That's a bad strategy on both sides: you draw the child into someone else's conflict, and you don't close anything with your parents — they don't suspect what it's about and can't respond. **Horizon.** What's happening now isn't forever. The densest regime of first fatherhood in most couples passes in the first two or three years: after that the child gradually pulls into his own social life, the load comes off being round-the-clock, air starts getting into the day. Holding this in your head from inside the first year is hard: inside it, it's easy to believe the new regime is what's forever. From inside it really does feel that way, and no statistics will drive you out of that feeling. Holding on to the edge of it is a separate skill, quiet and without applause. In the same direction one unpleasant number. The first three years are statistically the most fragile phase for a couple; in them it most often falls apart. It's worth keeping the number in mind as a reminder to yourself: a couple in these years won't survive "by itself" — you defend it with your hands. ### Tricky questions for chapter 6 1. How many times in the first three months did you stay alone with the child for more than four hours? If zero — why? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > More than 4 hours? Seriously? He eats every hour, what four hours… Mom is needed constantly; in the first three months there's no point even talking about this. And you're needed by mom. 2. If you notice anger in yourself that wasn't there before — what do you do with it? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > A couple of times I was furious at the child, when it was probably three or four sleepless nights in a row. I thought this situation was testing me, making me stronger. It was a brief flash, like a temporary blackout, with a bunch of thoughts in my head. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, one child 7–12. > > Absolutely. Smothered it, when I should have been venting it on everyone. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, three children. > > Anger has always been there; I'm learning to negotiate with it. Suppressing didn't work before, doesn't work now. The strongest blow-up — the little one's belly aching, when he cried without stopping for hours. I had to control myself very hard, didn't always manage. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, two children. > > Sometimes happens. Or rather — started to happen. But in my defense: I already have an 11-year-old who's beginning to wind his parents around his finger. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > Anger — no. I was in a (pre)depressive state and felt few emotions besides bleak sadness. Irritation also rarely, which I think even helped. Mood was "there's a strap, you just pull the barge". P.S. According to my wife, I felt constant irritation at her requests. For example, when she got the idea I should be bathing the child because trendy books said it's a good way to make contact. It was hard for me to come home at the same time. Conflicts arose. I don't remember strong irritation myself (doesn't mean it wasn't there). I remember something else: no one wants to understand that work and other tasks weren't cancelled — replacing them with the "sacred" ritual of bathing. 3. If you were offered to return to life before the child today — for an hour, without consequences — would you agree? What does that say about you? > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, one child 7–12. > > I'd agree for an hour. For a day — no. An hour alone with myself I just never have, and that silence is still worth more than many things. I don't see this as a problem. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > For an hour, no point. For a year or two — then I'd realize what I didn't have time for. What holds me back now is having children. I don't know what that says about it. I try not to engage in self-criticism, leave that to outside observers. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > For an hour, sure, just as a vacation. But overall, no, I don't want to. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > No. I no longer remember moments without him; I don't know what to do with myself. It's like two separate roads, and the second one I can't even picture. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, two children. > > An hour I definitely don't need — I can find an hour without the child even now. 4. Who do you call when you're not doing well? If no one — is that a plan or a failure? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > Sometimes I called my mom, asked her advice. Not for advice, but just to talk, hear her voice. It was calming during the conversation. I listened to her stories of how she coped with me. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, two children. > > No one. For that, there's a wife. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, one child 7–12. > > No one, I'd go out to breathe on the street. There weren't many options. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > A plan. But my wife and I somehow manage together on our own. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, three children. > > Everything: I shared with male friends, went to a psychologist. 5. If your child read about your year, what would you want him to understand? > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > I'd want him to understand two things. First — that I didn't do a single minute of it for him, and he doesn't owe me. Second — that I did what I could, and where I couldn't, I regret it, but I don't blame myself. > **From the interviews.** Father, 41–45, one child 7–12. > > I'd want them to understand: life is a very interesting thing, and one has to value every moment. And the fact that there aren't ready answers and solutions to questions, and sometimes you have to look for compromises. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, one child 7–12. > > That I'm a person and can make mistakes. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, child under one. > > I think it's still too early for him. Let's wait until his twenties, thirties, forties. Then he'll figure out for himself how it was and how to be. He's bright and concerned, more than average. > **From the interviews.** Father, 36–40, two children. > > Just pass on the experience — so he's ready when his turn comes. Mom told me that "the first year and a half is grim", dad — about plowing. It's important to explain: this is a finite story of two or three years, not eternal torment. --- ## Conclusion The book is winding down. Nine months and the child's first year is a lot, but it ends just when it feels you've only just gotten used to it. A few thoughts at the end — the ones that recurred from the first chapter to this one. Readiness for fatherhood doesn't arrive. If you're asking yourself the question about readiness, your self-reflection is already at the right level — consider the moral part closed. The rest is specifics, and it turns out lighter than it looks from "someday". Don't expect gratitude. Not from the child, not from your wife, not from the world. If you catch yourself waiting — come back to your own "why". Without that "why", resentment takes you by the throat at the worst moment. Closing tasks is a skill that later changes everything. A closed task isn't a task you did. And not one you do regularly. A closed task is one your wife no longer thinks about. Take zones off whole; "help sometimes" is another profession. Anxiety is treatable. Before birth it's noticeably easier than after. If the same thing keeps spinning in your head for weeks — overplaying it safe and going to a psychologist costs less than spending the whole first year in "I'm just tired" mode. Life is unfair, and comparing with other families works against you. Everyone has their own. Someone else's façade is misleading; solve the tasks that yield to solution, and don't get distracted by the rest. The hard phase is finite. The first two or three years feel like the new permanent norm, and that's how they should feel. From outside this isn't the norm. Holding in your head that the phase will end is hard — no one will hold it for you, but sometimes exactly this knowledge drags you back into a day where it isn't clear why to drag on at all. Constant engagement is its own kind of heaviness, and you aren't warned about it in advance. Physically you can step away; mentally you can't. Even when the child isn't on you and isn't calling you, your head is still somewhere near him. There's more of this background tension in the first year than of one-off hard nights, and it tires you more. Your own fear has no place next to your wife. She's many times more scared during this time, and any "I'm also not doing great" of yours she'll read as a demand on her resource, which she doesn't have. Putting your fear somewhere is a separate task. Find where. In advance. Whether to go into the delivery room is your decision with your wife, not the voices on the side. There are many around this topic, and from both sides they sound confident: "you must be nearby" and "this is no place for you". Your own voice is easy to lose among them, and an hour later end up inside or outside the delivery room not by your own choice. Make this decision in advance, calmly; from inside the delivery room these considerations can no longer be retrieved. In the first year keep in mind that the physical markers of male depression are boring, and easy not to notice: weight gain, loss of motivation in all spheres, alcohol more often. If you recognize yourself in two of three — the matter is more likely a symptom than fatigue. To a specialist, don't wait. This book is one father's attempt to put on paper, in front of you, thoughts he himself would have wanted to hear a year ago. It didn't turn out to be a reference manual and shouldn't have: there are reference manuals without it. Some of it won't be useful to you. Some will be useful not the way it's written here. That's normal. There's no such thing as a perfect first year; let yours come out — with a couple that held, with a child you've managed to put a little of yourself into, and with a self you've yet to come to know. Good luck. Until we meet. --- ## Support the book The book is free and will stay that way. If it was useful and you'd like to thank the author — you can do it in one tap: [buymeacoffee.com/alexaprm](https://buymeacoffee.com/alexaprm) Any amount is accepted with gratitude; no obligation. Support helps me keep writing — gathering more interviews, refining chapters, and keeping the book openly available. And one more thing. If the book resonated and you think it would help someone you know — pass it on. Only under that condition: if it actually resonated. Hand to hand, a book reaches the right reader better than any other way.