The rise of fatherhood

Having a child is probably one of the most incredible things that can happen to a person. It is a moment unlike any other, especially when it is about the first child. There are myriad emotions overwhelming a person simultaneously and it is probably difficult for anyone to decipher what exactly are these emotions wreaking havoc inside. And I am just referring to the days leading up to and right after the birth; there are a million other things one might feel in the time from conception to the time of the birth and a million more will follow while raising the child, but the moment one sees one's child for the very first time is an exquisite cocktail of head spinning emotions. Sufficient content has been written and consumed repeatedly over centuries on how it feels to become a mother, right from excruciating anatomical details to tiniest of emotional details. Males, generally, are more immune to emotions, yet the advent of fatherhood does invoke quite an emotional response even from the most frosty ones (even if they deny it and don't have any visual indications of it). Most of it is probably plain old biological programming hard - wired to ensure the propagation of the species, yet, it is crafted so exquisitely that one can't help but wonder if it is the same for everyone or unique to one.

So, what does it feel like for a make to have a child? Like being hit by a freight train and still delightful? Here are the top ingredients I could pick out of the heady emotional cocktail of new-found fatherhood:

1. Helplessness / powerlessness

Yes, that is correct, the most conspicuous emotion a soon-to-be father experiences is helplessness / powerlessness. It doesn't matter where you are from and how wonderful and state-of-the-art the medical facilities are, the period of time when your partner is undergoing contractions and labor pain, or the period of time when your partner is in the OT for a c-section, you will feel the stark antonym of omnipotence - sheer powerlessness; you want everything to be alright, you want your child to be born healthy, you want your partner to make it out of it unscathed (relatively speaking). But, you realize that despite your best efforts, as a mere mortal, all you have control and sway over is just your own anatomy (that too, barely). It is at this moment you understand the need of relinquishing control, essentially and precisely because you have none.

2. Belief in higher powers

No matter your religious outlooks, when you sit and wait for your child to arrive, when you have acknowledged your own helplessness, the next step along the journey is to question the cosmos - if not me, then who? That question inevitably leads to an answer not everyone ascribes to but gleefully or resentfully agrees to - that there is something beyond our knowledge and comprehension that now controls the outcome of this episode. People ascribe a multitude of names to it - god, destiny, fate, karma, the universe, the cosmos. That is when the ones with a sense of religion start to pray, and the ones who believe in the laws of attraction and the universe probably send out vibes and thoughts into the universe. Either way, you beg whoever is in control of the outcome to flip the coin in your favour, because you cannot, no matter how hard you try.

3. Joy

The most-associated emotion with child birth is probably joy and it is so because of valid reasons. The moment you see your child for the first time, you experience pure, unadulterated, cosmic joy. If you want to draw figurative parallels of it, do not even try. There is no other feeling and not enough adjectives to describe it. Perhaps the word “joy” itself is an underwhelming image of it. It is probably akin to being touched by angels or blessed by god , but who knows? It is boundless, it is transformative, it is the extent of emotional cognition. No matter what words are used, you would only know it if you have experienced it.

4. Anxiety

From the moment you first hold your child, with the slew of all the love and care that wakes up in the deepest, darkest crevices of your soul, there is also a dark passenger - anxiety. There is a constant state of anxiousness that persists and heightens every time someone checks on your child, everytime your child makes a sound, everytime the breeze touches your child gently, everytime the clock ticks. And it is not just anxiety; there is a mix of fear and worry alongside it. This concoction makes you wish that somebody had invented time travel prior to this moment so that you can look into the future just to make sure that everything turns out just right for your little thing. There is no alleviating this constant state of anxiousness; there is no remedy, just the sense of perplexing fear lurking consistently.

5. Protectiveness

With the constant worry comes the antithesis of it as well - constant protectiveness . As a father, you feel responsible for keeping your child safe constantly. You monitor every aspect of the environ to assess potential threats, you scan every individual approaching your child, you put an extra pillow around to ensure they are well cushioned, you pull your child closer to your chest when a chilly gust of wind threatens a sneeze and you innately are ready to do everything in your power to make sure no harm comes to your child on your watch, even though nobody told you to do so.

Conclusion

That said, these are not the only emotions you would feel and, depending on you, you may or may not feel all of these. And if this sounds discouraging or it appears to highlight negative emotions over the positive ones, just remember that this is about a very small , albeit important , chapter of a much larger tale that is yet to be written. Nobody said raising another human being would be easy , and well, it apparently isn't.

Are we losing our EQ?

Have you ever experienced a truly marvelous moment in your life and found that your own reaction was not what you had expected? Did you not smile as much as expected when you got you first salary? Did your fiance not cry while saying that life-altering "yes" to you? Did your eyes not tear up when you saw your baby for the first time on the sonograph? And there would be a million other events, though not as significant, where you might have found yourself lacking in emotions.

The cyclic downfall hypothesis

Though you might feel a tinge (or more) of guilt for this, you can find solace in the fact that you are not alone. The reason that we, as a society, consistently fail to meet emotional outbursts and reactions is something that warrants a bit of attention. One of the plausible, yet horrifying, reasons could be that we are producing emotionally moribund pyschopaths by the dozen, leading to a reduction in the overall emotional quotient of the society. It implies that individuals are losing their "emotionality" if you will, due to the way our lives and social interactions are structured. As a people, we are slowing regressing into the nuclear family hunter-gatherer phase prevalent before community living became a thing and farming started in the days of our Neanderthal-esque forefathers. If that is true, it does present a very strong argument in favour of the cyclic nature of civilization - how things usually come full circle, how civilizations rise and subsequently fall, how societies flourish and then die off, how communities prosper and then fade into oblivion. In the mindless race for better futures, lesser dependencies, more independence and simpler lives, the connections we sever may not seem costly, yet they do cost us in terms of soul nourishment and social interactivity. There is a profound loneliness that is evident in most of the people of the younger generations especially in larger cities, where people tend to live away from their families. Loneliness is a precursor to a host of mental health issues, and could possibly impact the way we respond to emotions and react in times of emotionally charged situations. That can explain our under performance on emotional big stages.

The media-dosed baseline hypothesis

The second possible reason that we feel inadequate emotionally is that our reactivity baseline is probably not correct. Most of us experience life-changing moments, well, only a few times in our lives. We don't get first salaries every day, or fall in love frequently (except some lucky people do). How do we know, then, what is the appropriate reaction to these events? As human beings, we have the power to learn from others. That forms the baseline of comparison we create consciously and unconsciously. The older generations formed this baseline looking at the community around them. However, our generation has grown up in an age of excessive media exposure. We had access to media content from across the world during our formative years and we have seen some great performers react to similar life events on screen. That, consciously or unconsciously, becomes a part of our training model for appropriate reactions, which is unfortunate because the actors who we see on screen are paid to react excessively, their bodily and facial expressions, tonality, and every other verbal and nonverbal cue, is exaggerated to ensure their reactions are not subtle. They work hard to make sure that what they are expressing is communicated across media without even an iota of doubt. There is always an element of extraneous effort in reactions when we look at "good" actors - that extra flair of expressions is what makes them good. Though a boon for actors, it creates a false baseline for people in the real world. We start expecting ourselves to react overly to similar situations drawing from our media content viewership experiences, and then feel emotionally short when we do not match up to what we have seen so many times before. As regular humans, we all have different emotional ranges and expressive capabilities, which might not match up to the extraneous baseline established in our minds except for the few who are truly extra expressive. This is starkly in contrast to previous generations, where this baseline was more realistic due to the sample set being the community around, whose range of expressions was of the same magnitude even if not similar. We can probably blame our type 1 brain for this, which introduces biases in our routine thought processes, creating learning models and retrieving information subconsciously without our type 2 brain even being aware of it.

It is okay to be subtle

Though we cannot truly establish which of these is truly the reason for what happens to us, we can say with certainty that it is probably okay to be subtle about the way we feel. The shouting from the rooftops, the boombox driven confessions of love, the passionate bouts of love conjured up at the slightest hints of attraction, the profuse ophthalmic waterworks on every sentimental moment...it might not be your thing and that is absolutely okay. Establish your own baseline of emotional expression and surely there will be people who would appreciate you for being real about it rather than overly dramatic and fake. That is what is essential for a meaningful relationship after all - the honesty of it.