Babies Tale

In the early weeks of the new baby’s life especially, a father can share household responsibilities, being sufficiently supportive and perceptive to see what needs to be done and pitching in to do it. By exercising some control over the number of visitors and the time they are allowed to stay, taking over household errands and performing routine tasks, such as getting some meals and cleaning up after them, doing the laundry, and running the vacuum cleaner, he can help provide the serenity and order that will give the family’s home life a semblance of normality in a time of stress. However inexperienced he is at child care, he can learn within a very short time to be skilled at and to enjoy changing, bathing, and comforting the baby, and if not feeding her, performing the important after feeding task of burping.

Though you will find your child reacting to her father differently as the child grows-your eighteen month old, for example, will enjoy roughhousing with Daddy, but when in trouble will very likely turn only to Mommy-the effect of a close, nurturing relationship with a male figure is good for both boys and girls. The popularity of Fred Rogers for nearly twenty years on public television’s Mister Roger’s Neighborhood indicates how enthusiastically children react to caring presence of men in their lives.

Besides lending a hand around the house and accepting some of the responsibility for the care of his child, the new father often takes the traditionally male responsibilities very seriously. He may feel the financial burden of a third member of the family very strongly, especially if the mother’s income has been important and she does not plan to return to work in the near future. And he may envy his wife her opportunity to stay home with the baby as much as she envies his being able to get out every day.

Men who participate as fully as they can in the birth of their babies and who continue to share the responsibilities of home and children, find the rewards great. Their lives take on a new dimension; their marriages are strengthened and become more meaningful. Fathers can “mother” too, and those who choose to accept that responsibility, are today the norm, not the exception. Reports of surveys bulge with statistics. Here are just a few: Eighty-five percent of fathers are present during their wife’s labor; fifty percent during delivery. Ninety-six percent help with baby and child care; eighty percent do not refuse to change diapers.

Family life has undergone many changes in the recent decades, and the responsibilities assigned specifically to one or the other to a pair of parents have shifted and become somewhat blurred. There are more single parents today and more never married parents. Many of them shoulder total responsibility for their families. When both parents work outside the home, they learn to share responsibilities for housework and child care as they share the responsibilities of breadwinning. Nearly one million men in the United States are raising their alone. It is no longer cause for eyebrows to be raised and gossips to gather when a divorced father is awarded sole custody of his children. And joint-custody provisions in divorce-described as “equal opportunity in parenting”-have now been adopted by a majority of states. Some men take on the role of househusband, assuming the major part of the nurturing of the children, while their wife’s careers provide financial support.

Still, the traditional nuclear family survives, and in many homes the familiar structure of mother as full-time homemaker and the father as financial provider continues. It used to be customary for the at-home mother to be almost entirely in charge of the house and the children. Today, however, we find fathers taking more interest, helping more often with household chores, and involving themselves more fully in the lives of their children than their father did. They are no longer strict and unapproachable beings who are seen by the children only foe a few minutes a day and demand peace and quiet when they are home. Their relationship with their children is personal and openly loving; they talk about feelings, they show that they care.

There are also more public indications today that men no longer measure their worth only by their achievements outside their homes, as their fathers did before them. Both child care literature and advertising now direct information to “parents” instead of only to mothers; childbirth education classes require the participation of fathers. Parental leave of absence, extended to males in Sweden in 1979, is becoming more common among companies in this country, and federal legislation may soon guarantee men as well as women eighteen weeks of unpaid parental leave from their jobs in any two year period, offering protection for both the employees’ jobs and their benefits during their absences.

Men usually are not able to choose between their children and their work, as some women can, and many have not had the role model of a nurturing father to emulate. However, a father today is apt to involve himself as much as he possibly can from the very beginning of his wife’s pregnancy, sharing the important decisions about the doctor she will see, the birthing environment, and the hospital of which the baby will be born. He may accompany his wife on some of her visits to obstetrician. He participates in childbirth classes, in which he learns to coach his wife during the birth of their child, and then supports and aids her throughout her labor and delivery. Various studies have indicated that delivery times are shorter, anesthetics are used less frequently, mothers and babies are calmer, and infant’s feeding problems are less likely when fathers are present in delivery rooms. After their babies are born, fathers often accompany their wives on visits to the pediatrician, if their work hours allow, and some take their babies for checkups alone.

Men’s fertility also falls with age, but more slowly and later than it does in women. Since most older mothers have partners the same age or older, male infertility can exert its own effect. A combination of slightly lowered fertility in both partners can combine to make pregnancy less likely.

Male infertility can be caused by blocked tubes. These tubes, called the vasa deferentia, carry sperm from the testes, where they are made, to the penis. Tubes can be blocked from birth because of a congenital defect, through scarring caused by sexually transmitted diseases, and through surgery, as in a vasectomy. An increasing number of men choose vasectomy once their families are complete, but if the marriage breaks up and they remarry, vasectomy can be the cause of infertility in the second marriage.

Male infertility can also be caused by:

• Undescended testicles. If these are not diagnosed early in a boy’s life, permanent infertility will result.
• Infections involving the testicles. Orchitis, inflammation of the testicles following mumps, can result in infertility rarely.
• Varicocele. A “varicose vein” of the testicle; it may be a cause of male infertility.
• Disorders of ejaculation. Sometimes, as a result of illness, such as diabetes, or surgery, such as a prostatectomy, sperm is ejaculated backwards into the bladder at orgasm.
• Low sperm count, or a large proportion of the man’s sperm being abnormal. Although research is being done, no one really understands what causes low sperm counts. However, their origin is believed to be hormonal.

Treatments

Because so little is understood about the causes of much male infertility, only limited help is available for the majority of men with a low or absent sperm count. Some causes are known (see above) but there is little that can be done about them.

One form of male infertility can be caused by a varicocele, or varicose vein, around the testicle. This can be treated, although its link with infertility has been questioned. A simple operation to tie off the vein may improve sperm quantity and quality in about two-thirds of cases, thus increasing the chances of conception.

Blocked or scarred vasa deferentia, especially after vasectomy, may be restored surgically but there is only a 50% success rate. A man with blocked tubes often produces antibodies to the sperm because they cannot be ejaculated and have to be reabsorbed by the body. A procedure called percutaneous epididymal sperm aspiration can now remove sperm from the testes, and they are used to fertilize an egg.

Other causes of a low sperm count are resistant to treatment.

Various hormone treatments have been tried, with a low success rate. Some studies have shown the success rate is actually lower among treated men than among those who have not received any partner to conceive and bear a child. In 0I, semen is donated by an anonymous donor. The semen has been screened to verify it does not contain any infectious diseases. Then it is introduced through a tube into the woman’s vagina, close to the cervix, by a doctor or nurse. Donors are screened carefully. There is usually an attempt to match the donor’s physical characteristics with that of the woman’s partner.

The woman goes to the clinic once a month at the most fertile time in her cycle (this is usually worked out with temperature charts). If

her periods are irregular, she may be given ovulation-inducing drugs so the doctors will be able to predict the best time for insemination. The woman is usually advised to lie on her back for about half an hour to enable the sperm to swim into the uterus. Rates of conception with 0I seem to be about the same as with ordinary sexual intercourse.

Going through the tests and treatments already described is in itself a remarkable testament to most couple’s desire for a child. By the time these couples consider the new assisted-reproduction techniques, they have probably been through months or years of tests and the more orthodox fertility treatments. At the same time, it can be difficult to decide when to stop. “You feel you’ve already invested so many years and so much pain in all this, you just have to follow through to the end,” said one woman undergoing fertility treatment.

All of the moms I know, work-at-office or work-at-home, suffer from the same lack of status. At the end of the day, no matter how present or absent Mom has been, it’s Daddy’s homecoming that gets the fireworks.

I figure it’s a timeless dilemma, dating back way past the ‘Father Knows Best’ era, when Kitten and Bud would jump for joy as Mother, freshly coiffed and smiling, handed Father his martini. Maybe back to cave days, when Girl and Boy would grunt for joy as Woman stoked the fire and Man dragged home the mastodon. So it’s a little ingrained, by now.

That doesn’t make it right, though. The cost to replace a full-time, home-bound mom is hovering around $140K now. And to replace an office-working mom would cost over $100K, plus her salary. The bottom line is, moms aren’t exactly cheap. So why do we still get treated like what’s scraped off the bottom of a shoe?

I love that my kids love their dad. I love him, too. I love watching them run up to him, jumping and antic with hugs. I love the easy way he scoops them up and they swing, the way my son’s eyes close in satisfaction and my daughter’s little body folds against him, tight. It’s a beautiful thing to watch, when Daddy comes home.

In our house, all of this homecoming drama is compounded by Daddy’s travel. Our Daddy can be gone for a week or more each month, off to far away places with weird names, funny money, and strange foods. We get phone calls and emails and computer calls, but none of that can satisfy the true Daddy jones of his most adoring fans. Every morning and every night we have the same discussion: how many more weeks, days, hours, minutes?

So I can’t really begrudge our Daddy his moments of glory. I have to admit he earns them. Even if he earns them in exotic locales and pricey hotel rooms, he earns them alone. And that’s what I don’t have to be.

Sure, I’d like, every once in a while, to be the celebrated one. I’d love to have some jumping and spinning upon my arrival now and then. I could scoop them up, too, and I’m pretty cushy in a hug-probably softer than him by far. I go out now and then and do some cool stuff… well, okay, maybe I don’t do any cool stuff, but I go out. I mean, I’m actually gone sometimes, just like him. I deserve a little fanfare.

I deserve it, but don’t expect it. My kids take me for granted, just like the kids of every other mom. Dad is the different one, the one left out, the one alone. But moms and kids are so connected, they’re more like one entity; after all, they were one entity for a while. So in a way, celebrating mom is too much like patting themselves on the back-which, of course, we wouldn’t want them to do. At least that’s what I’m going to tell myself the next time I hear, “Daddy’s home!” right after I hear, “Mom! What took you so long?”