I can’t decide if my response to my wife’s pregnancy are within the standards of my normal personality or heavily influenced by my profession. It’s a somewhat strange position to be a Family Physician and deliver a few babies per month and have your wife be pregnant. I’ve made a very strong effort to avoid the temptation to be her doctor, which is good. My dilemma lies in the fact that I think I’m probably less “excited” then I should be. I felt our baby move the other day and I was sort of….underwhelmed. I’m obviously very excited about having a baby and looking forward to it, but when I start thinking about it to much I start worrying about all the things that could go wrong. So my response is to not think about it too much.
It could just be a personality defect that causes my lack of excitement. The trouble is that while I can be quite excitable about things I also tend to just roll with the punches. Bad things happen: move on. Good things happen: move on. Wife’s pregnant: move on. My issue is that I don’t intellectually feel like it should be like that for something like a pregnancy. Alternativly my non-chalance could be from my over-exposure from doing this as my job. It could be the “mystery” is gone to a degree. How many times have a felt a baby kick? 100? 1000? How many times have a heard a heartbeat on a doppler? Somewhere around infinity. So I feel somewhat conflicted. I don’t want to be Joshy Downer on my wife’s pregnancy, but I can’t really feign excitement.
Now with all of that said: I guess I do get pretty amazed at my wifes ever growing belly. It’s pretty amazing to see my rather thin framed wife with a prominent “baby bump”. She’s now well over halfway (over 5 months in lay-person terms) and showing quite obviously no matter what she’s wearing. This wonder however stems more for the ongoing wonder of marriage, not as much about the wonder of pregnancy. I’ve got an upcoming post on that topic, the wonder of marriage.
No answers today. My favorite quote of the pregnancy: “Gosh the baby is really kicking, it’s kind of bugging me.” That’s just a few week after pure excitement and facebook status posts about feeling the baby kick. Maybe I’m not the only one for whom the magic fades?
Mortal's Coil 