It’s funny, you think ‘morning sickness’ and automatically you picture some abstract lady all exhausted, feverish, moody and ready to hurl at the whiff of anything she doesn’t want to inhale at any particular moment in time. The lady is usually wearing pajamas with dirt all over it, her hair is greasy and the bags under her eyes could feed a family of six with their contents.
All of that is pretty specific, except wherever there’s a miserable wife, there is usually a miserable husband cleaning up after her, around her and sometimes, her.
Of course I can’t vouch for the part of the population who doesn’t care for their families when they are incapacitated, but in my family, you just do it. When my appendix almost burst on Easter in 2009, my wife didn’t ask me if I was going to make myself dinner, fold my own laundry, clean up after myself, or anything else. Rather than waiting for a bell to ring, she just stepped up and did those things for me and didn’t make me feel guilty for being delicate, unable to walk or stand up, in massive amounts of pain and generally a large bald lump on the end of the couch in front of the TV. I wasn’t even allowed to pick up my toddler son for an entire month; she did ev-er-y-thing.
Perhaps the most irritating part about having a wife with morning sickness is that you can’t reach in and make it all go away. You can’t stop the nausea, you can’t build her an appetite, you can’t force her to drink water, hell, most of the time you can’t even get her to smile or give you a positive answer to the question “How you feelin’ hon?”
So once you stop trying to heal her, all you can really do is continue to support her by doing all of the household activities around her, taking care of the other kid(s), and being her sounding board. When she tells you she’s going to throw up or that she just did, the standard sad face with the subtle head tilt is completely tolerable. When she tells you she can’t stand the smell of the garage and that it makes her gag, you stop opening the door to the garage when she’s home and you make her lil’ preggo-quirks seem completely normal by not laughing or commenting on them.
You usually hear about pregnant women and their odd cravings, but what about BEFORE those cravings hit? My wife couldn’t stand the smell of the food I would cook, so I had to resort to bringing home food for me and my son to eat, but then THAT scent started to make her sick. Do we leave her alone in the house while we go out to eat? No. We just find something else to eat. Special K worked for about 11 days in a row, and so what? It has essential vitamins and nutrients and isn’t half bad 21 meals in a row. At least my wife wasn’t made nauseous by the smell of my food.
Not only have I stepped in and taken over on household chores, all the shopping and carting around of the little one, but I’ve earned a brand new respect for my wife and her role in our growing family. (We have one toddler son and twins on the way.)
I’ve accepted that many of the duties that I’ve taken on as a support for her will now be consistently mine as we add two more lil’uns to the fray, but I don’t care to criticize or worry, if my wife and I can survive these 10 weeks, we can pretty much do anything together.
Joel Frieders is a father of one with twins on the way. He started http://www.havingtwinsnow.com as a way to plot his family’s excitement, fears, ideas, education and progression through pregnancy and life as a father of multiples. As of July 16th, 2009, Joel’s wife, Julie, is 8.5 weeks along and in the middle of terrible all day morning sickness. Find out more at his blog: http://www.havingtwinsNOW.com.
Tags: appetite, dad, daddy, father, having twins, male, morning sickness, pregnancy, sickness, vomiting