Welcome to LuvUrWife.com, a website designed to gather reader comments and ideas about the book I’m writing for new fathers: How to Love Your Wife When She’s Having a Baby.
Men face a long learning curve when it comes to understanding and meeting the needs of an expectant or new mom. Most men have only one or a few children and retire from the new dad business without ever knowing what was expected of them or how they fell short. Women should not have to suffer at the hands of such amateurism.
Unfortunately, there isn’t anything out there to help men understand the varied physical, emotional, and social needs mothers have during pregnancy, labor and delivery, and the first few weeks post partum.
In fact, most new dad books on the market make it less likely that men will figure things out because the books are all about the dad: his anxieties, his journey of self discovery, his convenience, his amusement. They ignore the mother or treat her with gross disrespect, the person responsible for his comfortable routines being disrupted.
These books totally miss the point. New fatherhood is not about dad. It’s about mom, or at least, it should be. Nothing the dad goes through compares to anything the mom endures. Mom will be focused on the baby, often to her own detriment or exhaustion. Someone needs to be focused on looking out for mom. That someone is dad, and this book lays out his job description.
Sit-coms, commercials, and movies abound with examples of spastic, squeamish, selfish dads, but popular culture offers almost no positive examples of men who make the effort to understand and meet the needs of the women they love during these vital months of their lives together.
How to Love Your Wife When She’s Having A Baby aspires to fill that void by re-directing dad’s focus away from himself and toward the woman he loves.
I had more chances than most men, and I want to share what I learned. A week after we brought our youngest child home from the hospital, my wife came to me and said, “Sweetheart, it took you seven tries, but you finally figured out how to do everything right when I have a baby. You need to write down what you did so other husbands can take good care of their wives.”
I’m starting this site because I want to hear from as many mothers as I can about what else belongs in the book before I publish it. During the winter of 2017, I will post excerpts from the book and other content to gain exposure to a wider range of experiences than my own and the mothers and fathers I interviewed in person.
Please email me with any comments or suggestions that will help men show their love more effectively.
