Rule #3

We’ve been attending newborn classes in anticipation of our little bundle of -sleeplessness- joy. I think I’ve said it before here, but if you’re having a baby in the NYC area and need classes, definitely check out “realbirth”:http://realbirth.com. Sharp, witty New Yorkers delivering the straight dope on pain management, breastfeeding, and swaddling: there are few better ways to spend an evening in the city.

Last Tuesday’s class revealed that a father’s testosterone levels drop sharply after childbirth. Our instructor Erica explained that this was an evolutionary feature — so fathers don’t eat the baby. I wrote down dutifully, “Rule #3: do not eat the baby.”

Google never fails to impress when you’re looking for a topic that you’ve never in your life thought of before. I just stumbled over “this Guardian article”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/woman/story/0,,1792138,00.html about fatherhood and the demands of the global marketplace. Money quote (of which there are _many_):

That is another thing no one told me before my daughter was born – looking after a baby is stress-relief. The mythology of fatherhood says that responsibility for a fragile young life will grey your hair overnight. But the urgent simplicity of a child’s needs insulates you from the complex demands of the outside world. When I first went back to work I felt agoraphobia for the first time. My reassuringly narrowed horizons were forced back open. The idea that you are expected, after a few hearty pats on the back, to get on with business as usual struck me as grotesque. I sat in meetings struggling to care. I now live in fear of missing some minuscule step my daughter might have taken down the road of infant development, a newly articulate gurgle or a very prolific poo. Fathering is addictive like that.

Rule #3 (which really was another version of Rule #1, anyway) has now been replaced: “Don’t work too much.”