Will I Be Good Enough?

Something that I expect a lot of expectant fathers go through is the worry that they may not be a good enough dad. This is foremost on my mind at the moment. I know I won't be the perfect parent, but I want to try and be the best I can for baby.

I want to be good enough. A good dad.

Something that has been playing on my mind of late is that I want my baby to be proud of me. I want it to look back in later life with fondness. I know that by the time my child is capable of reminiscing it will have completely forgotten about its early life, but I want to do the best I possibly can from day one.

People are telling me, endlessly, about sleepless nights to come. About the tiredness and the stress and everything else that goes hand in hand with raising a baby, and I am trying to prepare myself for it. I want to face these challenges head-on and do my very best for this brand new person.

But the question remains – Will I be good enough? Will I be able to be the father that I want to be? I hope I'm not alone in these concerns, and if you're going through something similar, I can relate. Sadly, until the actual event and the subsequent years of fatherhood, I doubt there'll be a proper answer for anyone.

Friends are telling me, because I am concerned about being a good enough daddy right now, then in all likelihood I'll do well once baby is here. I am not convinced, but not because I don't respect the opinions of my friends and loved ones. Not at all.

I am not convinced because this is a whole new world for me, uncharted territory, an all-new experience. I have no experience that compares to this, and as such I can't help but be concerned. Will I be a good enough daddy? I don't know, but I'm going to try. I promise.

The Night I Heard My Baby's Heart

Hmm, that sounds like an old blues song, but it's true. The night before last I heard our child's heartbeat, thanks to using a gadget a close friend of ours has passed onto us. It's called a Doppler (or a Fetal Heart Detector), and to be honest I had never heard of the thing before yesterday. It looks like a toy, but when pressed against my lady's belly it allowed us to hear what's going on inside her.

I listen to a lot of stuff with headphones, but when I plugged mine into the Doppler and heard my baby's heart for the first time, I swear I've never heard anything quite so beautiful. It was a little difficult finding baby at first, but it was worth the effort.

First we found my lady's heartbeat, which is a beautiful sound in itself, but I wasn't quite prepared for hearing baby's heart beating deep inside her. It brought to mind our first scan, when we saw our baby for the first time as the Ultrasound image formed on a crystal clear LCD screen.

We didn't say a word as we saw our child for the first time. We didn't cry, didn't move, didn't exclaim at all. We were holding hands, and as that image became real in front of us we clutched each other tighter. This was repeated when we heard baby's heart the other night. It felt like magic was real.

I guess Arthur C. Clarke was right all along - “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

On the strength of hearing our unborn baby's heart beating, and baby moving around inside its mummy, I would have to agree. I love technology, I follow science and advanced in modern thinking, but that sound could only be described as magic.

The Bump Is Growing

We're at seventeen weeks now, so I have some catching up to do in terms of going through all of the many emotional states that have passed through me in recent months, but something very tangible is happening that I must tell you about. The bump is growing, and it is already starting to pick up pace in its expansion.

Now, while I was fully aware of the physical chaos going on inside my girlfriend's middle, but it was when the bump started to show that everything started to crash into place in my mind and become a bit more real. We're having a baby. It's in there. It's growing. Soon we will be able to feel it moving around and kick.

My lady just went away for the weekend with a group of friends, and a friend of ours who is mother to a beautiful little boy helped my girl try to find our baby's heartbeat. She managed it, and I was so moved to hear about it.

We're going to see if I can find it for myself tonight. It is moments like these that are starting to make me feel like my fatherly tendencies are kicking in. You see, it's all too easy to say 'yeah, we're expecting. It's amazing', but until there is some kind of physical manifestation of this equally exciting and terrifying process, it doesn't quite feel real.

But there it is. A bump. A bump with our baby inside it. It's coming, and I'll never get any sleep again. I can't complain though, as I will still be able to see my feet in the coming months.

"We're having a baby!"

Those were the words my girlfriend said to me the moment we found out we were going to be parents, sat on the floor of our bathroom waiting to see if two lines would appear in the window of the pregnancy test.

We tried not to think about how the test had been done (it's hardly all that appealing, is it?) and concentrated on the two little windows. The test window filled with a line, swiftly followed by a line in the 'Pregnant' window.

"You're... pregnant!" I exclaimed, and we threw our arms around each other. To be sure we'd not got a duff test, we did the other one in the box. Lo and behold, that too was positive. We're pregnant. Well, my girlfriend is, but you get the idea.

We were ecstatic, and rang our mothers in order to tell them the good news. We held off telling anyone else until we'd spoken to a doctor and got everything checked out by a qualified person and not a little plastic tube covered in wee. It seemed the polite thing to do.

That's how it began, and that's how I'll start here.

If you're in a similar situation, I hope you find some use here. If not advice, then at least the knowledge that you're not alone in your fears and your excitement.

Hello. I'm going to be a daddy.