I am a reader. I like to read. Whenever something strikes me as potentially important or interesting, the first question I ask myself is, “where can I read about it?”
So, when Jesika announced that she was pregnant, I was immediately interested in reading up on the subject. Jesika went out herself and picked out all sorts of essential Mommy books. I looked through them quite a bit, and I was impressed with the amount of information and level of detail they contained. They are outstanding resources and should really be read by anybody and everybody.
I also wanted to try and find books that really captured the male perspective. After a couple of trips around to bookstores in the area, I ended up buying two of them. One was “The Playskool Guide for Expectant Fathers.” The other, I cannot recall. It was a rather small book by a guy who wanted to show the humorous side of being an expectant father. Neither of them was particularly helpful.
The problem with the Playskool book, was the tone for me. It had plenty of information in it, but it didn’t have anything to say that other, better books for moms didn’t say already. I also felt like the main message of the book was, “it is your job to listen to your wife (or partner), defer to them on all things, give them back-rubs and try not to be an idiot.” I don’t need a book to tell me to try not to be an idiot.
I understand the message of the book, which is to be supportive and understanding partner in all of this. That is cool and all, but what I was really looking for was actually useful information that would save me from doing stupid things. Like a page that says, “don’t set the baby on the couch and walk away, even for a second to put something in the garbage, because the baby is going to fall off the couch onto the carpet, and even though he will turn out to be perfectly fine, everybody is going to freak out and cry, including you, and you’ll end up spending all night in the emergency room watching the Lady Gaga episode of Saturday Night Live and feeling guilty, just to have the doctor come in at one or two in the morning telling you everything is fine, but you still feel like the worst parent in the universe.” (Maybe I should have paid more attention to that book.)
While it was informative, I was looking to something more akin to a list of things that people get wrong before they get it right, so I could skip ahead to the doing it wrong part and just get it right. The problem with the second book, is that it contained absolutely no useful or insightful information about anything. It was just some dude trying to tell jokes about how his wife farts more, how crazy it is putting together the baby’s crib, or the first time you get poo on your hand.
I stopped after those two. I didn’t see the point of spending more money to be disappointed. I learned that lesson with The Phantom Menace. It is very likely that there are really good books for the expectant father out there. Yet, when I go to the bookstore, I tend not to find any. When I scroll through the listings on Amazon, two types of books seem to be present. There are the helpful, well meaning, but ultimately oversensitive expectant father books that place more of an emphasis on being a supportive partner than explaining what you are actually supposed to do with baby oil. There are also the cynical, sarcastic dad-joke books where the author tries too hard to make a pun with placenta, and which contains jokes like, “is baby oil made out of babies?” (You think I am joking, but Google returns 22,000 results when you search, “Is baby oil made from babies?”)
