Sucks to be Dad

The Wife is blatantly pregnant. Anybody who happens upon her and her protruding belly will instantly know that there is a child in there (though that still wouldn't get me, if I were a stranger, to ask if she were pregnant).

The result is this: people hold the door open for her. They give her the only seat on the bus. They routinely ask questions like, "How are you feeling?" They refuse to allow her to lift things as heavy as the fork she uses to eat hot dish at lunch, and she is given full license to sit around giving out directions on moving day. She also gets to eat whatever she wants, how much she wants of it and in combinations most of us would consider poisonous. People also move out of the way whenever she's walking down the hall, probably in desperate fear of some painful collision that will result in hospital visits, lawsuits and criminal charges.

(Frankly, I think they also ought to allow her at the front of the line at the restroom, lest there be a mess, and at the buffet, lest there be violence, but that's just me.)

The fact is that, in many respects, it's good to be pregnant. Everybody is really nice to pregnant women. They get treated with tender loving care and are constantly reminded of the "valuable cargo" being stored in their uterus.

On the other hand, it is not so good being Dad.

(OK, before you get all huffy and note that things like "for most of history a third of pregnant women didn't even survive the birthing process" and "I'd like to see you push a watermelon through your rectum one day," I'll note that it is without question better to be the guy come labor day. And, after much consideration, I've decided that I'm glad overall to have a baseball bat between my legs and not a catcher's mitt.)

Yet during the nine-month run-up until that day, it is almost invariably better to be Mom than to be Dad.

Case in point: I'm a total afterthought. Whenever the two of us enter a room -- never mind if we actually know anybody in that room -- everybody gravitates toward my wife and her plus-sized mid-section, leaving me hemming and hawing until some sympathetic father comes up to me and talks about sports or the messy diapers in my near future.

Once the baby arrives, of course, then we'll both be an afterthought, like the one day when some old heavy-set woman in heavy makeup and jewelry and a cloud of perfume kept walking past and tickling our baby without so much as a glance in our direction. But in the meantime, it is I who is usually greeted with short glances that usually shout, "Well, what are YOU doing here?"

Here's another case in point: This pregnancy is reminding me that I'm a complete, absent-minded doofus.

The Wife has been annoyed with herself this week, because one day she forgot to have me sign my check before she could cash it at the bank during her lunch hour, and the next day, after I signed said check, she just forgot it, period.

This, it seems, was unusual for her. So she was distressed, but she had a ready-made excuse. It's the pregnancy, she said.

Oh, really?

What's my excuse, then? In the mornings I will place something on the kitchen counter and tell myself, over and over, to bring it to work, only to forget to take that something two minutes later -- only to remember it two hours later, when I need it at work. I'll forget to run an errand for two straight days unless I tattoo a reminder backwards on my forehead so I always see it whenever I go to the restroom.

In other words, what The Wife is calling a distressing, pregnancy-related problem of absent-mindedness, I call "normal." She has an excuse, I have nothing.

Bleah.

But at least I can say this: I no longer have the biggest stomach in the house.

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See, now don't you feel sorry for me? Don't you feel so sorry for me that you're going to click on this link now?