Keeping your lives after the baby arrives: how and why
Do I just give up my climbing gear?
As a Coach with Boot Camp for New Dads (BCND.org), I guide 3-hour conversations between guys expecting their first baby and dads who return with their 4-month-olds. A typical BCND workshop brings together 12 expectant, or Pending or Rookie dads with three “Vet Dads” and their babies. In these hands-on, high-dialog, “hold my daughter” sessions, Vet Dads answer questions, tell stories, and demonstrate fatherhood.
A frequent question I hear, in various practical forms, is What do I have to give up when the baby comes?
Ways I hear this question include:
I need my sleep or I’m a jerk, and my wife is worse.
Should I just sell my motorcycle…snowboard…fly-rod?
My wife believes her daily yoga routine is over.
My golfing buddies are sure they’ll never see me again.
These concerns are valid and demonstrate a desire to do what is necessary to be a good dad, especially the one concerned with mom’s yoga routine. Also, these often specific concerns—We both like to go to breweries.— differ from other more general questions I hear often:
How will my life change?
How do I maintain work/life balance?
How will my relationship with my wife change?
While concerns about specific things like golf and running may not sound as important as work/life balance, they are. They just are.
How to keep your lives
The best way to keep playing golf, and going fly fishing, and sleeping, is to make sure mom gets to keep doing all the things she likes to do too. And this requires just a moderate level of proactive mutual examination and collaborative communication. In short, you gotta talk, in advance, about yourselves.
You want to keep your lives because you want to bring your baby up into an interesting world, with hobbies and passions and difficult dreams.
This simple PDF Keeping Your Lives After the Baby Arrives, can help this conversation. All it does is help you write down your interests—hobbies, passions, basic pleasures—according to the time required to pursue them. Going for a run, for example, would go under Less than one hour for some people, and 2 – 6 hours for others.
What you write down becomes:
gifts you can give one another. You are kind of responsible for each other’s sanity after the baby comes. “You haven’t seen your sisters in a month. I texted Michelle to call you and set something up.”
currency. If you want round of golf on Sunday afternoon then help her schedule four hours worth of “her-time” around that. If mom wants to maintain a regimen of running for an hour three times a week, how can you both make that even?
a means to help you understand each other better. And when the baby comes you will both need a great deal of understanding.
a study in what you’ll enjoy doing as a family. Do you both love to snowboard? Plan on that being something your family loves. Do you both like board games? That will likely be a family tradition.
Why to keep your lives
Of course you want to keep your interests, hobbies and passions for your own sake. You don’t want to get to the end of your life knowing you did not run that marathon, or complete your bachelor’s degree. Newborns then infants then toddlers then preschoolers then…can be not just demanding but absorbing. Dads and moms meeting their own needs and interests takes resolve, teamwork and planning.
But there’s another why
You want to keep your lives because you want to bring your baby up in an interesting world, with hobbies and passions and difficult dreams.
They they won’t immerse themselves in those things if you merely want or demand they do. You must show them what a life well-lived looks like: the joys, the rewards, the sacrifices, the perspective, the discipline, the setbacks, the fulfillment, the meaning. You want to keep your lives because that’s what you’ll give your baby.
Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.
Carl Jung