Hormonal Fathers

About ten days after my third son Gabriel was born, something happened that likely has impacted the way I think about myself and others as fathers. It certainly has had lasting ramifications for my marriage.

Gabriel was born by Caesarean Section. Ten days after his birth means, in other words, about five days after my wife and Gabriel had come home from the hospital. It was the middle of the night. Gabriel had already begun to sleep through long periods of every night, but he didn't quite yet make it through the whole night. My wife had nursed him just a little while ago and he had fallen asleep fast. Just about forty-five minutes later he woke up again. I picked him up and started walking with him, humming quietly. Just as I was leaving the bed-room, my wife said "give him to me." I responded saying he was fine and that I would just rock him a while. "Give him to me," she insisted. I said "No, I want to hold him. He is fine,and besides, you need your sleep" and walked out of the room. What ensued was an almost unreal seeming pursuit. My wife got out of bed and slowly, because of her incision from the c-section followed me through the house first saying I should give him to her, then screaming, then wailing. I finally surrendered him. I was sobbing. He was crying again (he had immediately calmed down when I first picked him up). My wife turned her back to me and started comforting him. I stayed back, attempted to calm myself, trying to understand what had happened.

The most poignant part of what I realized was, perhaps, this: the whole time through this incident I heard two voices. One kept saying "give him to her, she is the mother, he should be with her." The other kept asking "But why? He is fine! I just can't give him up right now. I want to hold him!" I also felt a tremendous amount of shame, feeling that I had broken an unspoken contract that supposedly exists between every woman and her non-pregnant partner. Essentially this contract says

"I am the birth mother. This child was with me for nine months. Therefore I'm closer with him/her and should always be the first to have him, when he is in distress."

My wife has recently retold this story emphasizing those aspects that give the impression that I acted like some kind of a baby-thief. Someone who carelessly and selfishly took the baby and, not paying attention to the mother (who was in pain and far from being completely recovered), refused to surrender the baby to the person who should rightfully have him. I feel the sting of humiliation and embarrassment in this description because it so accurately matches what one of the voices I heard at the time seemed to say to me. That voice also says "Fathers should never be so arrogant to think that they can do what a mother can do."

But the problem is, aside from my wife being so very upset about this and me second-guessing myself as she was following me throughout the house, nothing felt wrong about the situation. In fact everything felt as it should. I was rocking Gabriel, he was falling asleep in my arms. I felt a seemingly un-ending rush of love for him. I felt connected and inseparable. After nine months of waiting for him, he was finally here. He had been born into the emptiness I had been feeling throughout the pregnancy and he was beginning to fill it.

This doesn't mean that I would, at all cost, want to do and be everything for him. If my wife had picked him up first, I would not for a second have argued about it with her. But this time I had picked him up, had begun to soothe him; and the small bond of 'parent-comforting-fussy-baby' that forms and increases in strength every time we pick up our babies and children to comfort them, this small bond had already begun to develop in those first minutes. It is, in a way, no different from the first few moments when a mother has her baby latch onto her breast. The connection is beginning to form. It would simply be cruel, if someone tried to take the baby away at that very moment. And so, every time I sit down with Gabriel to eat, read, sing or just diaper him, this bond is there immediately. I don't like for it to be disrupted. Disruptions range from being told he shouldn't eat what I'm feeding him to having his brothers interrupt the reading with questions about something unrelated. Disruptions also include another person talking to him, while I put a new diaper on him. Diapering makes for an intense connection with our babies and toddlers, as does all physical contact with them.

This episode also makes me think of hormones again. The research is still small that supports the possibility of hormonal changes in men who care for their babies and children. It is clear that it happens in certain mammals. To my knowledge there are two studies that have, with a very small sample size, researched this phenomenon in human males. But if I had to choose a label for my feelings, their intensity and their absoluteness, then I would choose the label "hormonal." I felt hormonal in a way that seemed to successfully short-circuit my frontal cortex and lead me directly down into a primal region of fathering and caring that had, up to this point, perhaps served as a source of my fathering, but that I had never encountered this directly before.

Further evidence that hormones might play a role in this is beginning with puberty I felt strongly also that I could be, would be and wanted to be a father. I have certainly not ever heard another man talk about this as something that they experienced as well. It might very well be that in my case becoming a man and becoming a father were synonymous because of the role my father has played in my life. The upshot of all this is that men can be affected by their future or present babies in ways that might make them seem irrational and, to some, perhaps even dangerous. We have yet to understand this phenomenon in men, not to speak of the fact that we have to find out how to respond to it. The article that can be accessed at this link might enhance our understanding somewhat. http://www.slate.com/id/2168389/