enormous load of his newborn responsibility, but having no apparent support or acknowledgment from the outside and no ready avenue to relieve his burden.
It was really frightening. My wife was so wrapped up in the baby that it never occurred to her that we were going to have a very difficult time making it on my salary. My daughter was so beautiful, I used to stand at her crib late at night, watching her. Half the time my heart was full to bursting with love and the other half I was fighting down bile at the sheer terror of the responsibility I had taken on.
This terror of the burden we have assumed is often just the first subtle push of what, all too easily, can propel the new father into a trajectory that takes him away from his child. By shutting down instead of opening up, by pulling away toward the seductive safety of isolation instead of stepping forward into the frightening no-man's-land of an infant's very raw needs, a new father can unintentionally establish an emotional distance between himself and his child that will be difficult to bridge.
As I watched my wife breast-feeding our son, they seemed to be surrounded by some kind of beautiful, glowing light. It took my breath away, but it also made me feel so inadequate and so much like an outsider. I just thought the best thing I could do was to avoid disturbing them.
To some new fathers, witnessing the power of the mother/ child connection can be so dramatic that they retreat out of respect rather than fear. Add to that the return these days to breast-feeding rather than bottle feeding, and men can find themselves in the very uncomfortable position of not being able to satisfy their crying baby's very real need. Whether out of respect, fear, or circumstance, the result is the same—the entrenchment of distance between father and child.
It was like there was some kind of unspoken language that no one ever taught me. She was such a tiny thing, and her very survival depended on someone understanding what she needed and providing it. At the time, I thought it must have been some magical genetic thing, because my wife—who frankly was never the most practical person in the world—suddenly seemed to understand exactly what this little creature needed. It wasn't until many years later that she told me how scared and inept she had felt.
Ironically, our collective mythology about women being intuitive and “natural born” mothers often contributes to nudging new fathers away from forming a strong emotional bond with their newborn children early on. Many new mothers express their own insecurities about mothering by being overly attentive and focused on their infant. This can come across to an often nervous and baffled father as a possessive and near exclusive takeover of all the nurturing and comforting roles. We men frequently contribute to this unconscious takeover because, after all, we are already feeling inept, and it suits our need for security to imagine that our wives really are “naturally” good at this sort of thing.
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