Missing What Hasn’t Happened Yet

We are poor little people, trained to be conscious parents. We read books, listen to experts, chase after the right way to parent. Then we give in to our most primitive urges and put our child at the centre of the universe.

We love having children who will glorify our feeble existence, and we love putting them before everything else.

We’re adorable. :)

Today I understood how this shows up in me: I was missing my child, who hasn’t been born yet.

Even writing it feels odd. How can a person miss someone they’ve never seen, whose voice they’ve never heard, with whom they don’t share a single memory?

Turns out they can.

For a few days I couldn’t admit this feeling to myself. Because being a father-to-be comes with unwritten rules: you’ll stay strong, you’ll support the mother, you’ll put the cot together and, if possible, you won’t get too emotional.

I fell at the last hurdle.

I started looking into this thing that was gnawing at me. Even typing “missing an unborn baby” into a search box was silly enough. But science came to the rescue again and turned the feeling I thought was deeply personal into a scale, a few tables and a term in English:

Paternal–Fetal Attachment.

Roughly, the father’s emotional bonding with the baby in the womb.

Turns out I’m not the only father-to-be who goes through this. As an older friend of mine put it, I wasn’t the first man ever to become a father.

According to the research, for some fathers-to-be the ultrasound is an important threshold. At some point the black-and-white shape on the screen becomes “a baby”. You hear the heartbeat. You see the baby move. Sometimes you put your hand on the mother’s belly and feel it.

Abstract knowledge turns concrete.

Then the mind steps in. You think about the things you’ll do together. The places you’ll go, the conversations you’ll have, the things you’ll teach…

There isn’t a single moment you’ve lived together yet, but you’ve already started producing memories.

So it turns out you can miss memories that haven’t happened yet.

There are studies showing this feeling can be stronger in first-time fathers. Not surprising. With a first child there’s no experience; so there’s no serious control mechanism standing in the imagination’s way either.

You can build a flawless child in your head.

This child sleeps at night. Has no wind. Doesn’t cry non-stop. Doesn’t poo on you. When he grows up he listens with interest to everything his father tells him and at no stage says, “Dad, you don’t know anything.”

The real child, meanwhile, knows nothing about any of this.

When he’s born he has no obligation to follow the script we wrote in our heads. He may not recognise us straight away. And we may not feel, in that first moment, the bond we thought we’d built with him. Some fathers are surprised, even disappointed, when the great burst of love they were expecting doesn’t arrive at the moment of birth.

So the problem isn’t loving too much.

It’s finishing the script before the actor has even arrived on set.

Maybe parenting is learning to put the child of our imagination to one side and meet the real person who comes into the world. Being able to see that person not as a project that will add meaning to our lives, but as a separate human being who will live a life of their own.

But that’s easy to say. Mixing up the dream and the real thing isn’t unique to parenting.

Isn’t it the same in love? Too much of anything is bad for you.

We’re adorable. :)