Pregnancy Today Author's Notes

As with so many fathers, along came the pregnancy and I found myself largely unprepared. In school, when the "Health" class was to discuss pregnancy, birthing or neonatal care, the boys were shuffled out and down the hall to watch football films. I actually had the courage to ask why and was told, "Boys aren't interested in those things, and besides, you'd just make the girls nervous." I came across similar attitudes while my wife was pregnant, was giving birth and after - then came across it again in finding a publisher for my book, "The New Father's Panic Book: Everything a Dad Needs to Know to Welcome His Bundle of Joy."

I'd been a professional writer for some years when my wife became pregnant. She knew me well, looked me straight in the eye and said, "You're going to write a book about this, aren't you?" The book was already in progress.

I took as a basic theme, "For every pregnant woman there is a pregnant man." The father has been largely ignored for a very long time. My father faced those signs in the maternity ward that said that fathers weren't allowed beyond a particular spot. When I faced becoming a father, things had improved … a little.

At that time, the childbirth classes we attended concentrated on the mother and offered little or no advice for the father. While that's as it should be, perhaps, the fathers who attended were largely left out. Searching for other information, I found that with hundreds of books for mothers, there was almost nothing for fathers.