A guy's guide to pregnancy.
Your wife is going to consistently ask you if you love and care about the baby that she is carrying around in your stomach.
Answer: This strategy is designed to trap you. A similar tactic is used by blowfish, bears, and mermaids in holding on to their mates. That said, it is best to tell your wife that you love the baby as much as she does, despite the lack of a protrusion coming from your non-existent uterus. Don't mention that it actually feels slightly different for you not having the child growing inside you, and that, right now, things seem kind of the same. This is a bad strategy. After leaning down and kissing her belly, you should start carrying a sack of flour around on your stomach affixed by duct tape to indicate your solidarity with the whole child rearing thing. And, if you're ever short on flour while making cookies you can just eat your baby.
It is also important that you display your love and affection by doing things like registering at Babies R' Us and requesting that everything in the house be baby-proofed. Use the term baby proofed as often as possible. Use it both as a joke and as something serious. This will show her that you're both ready to be a father but not too stressed out about the prospect and that you'll be the same handsome and fun-loving guy she married years ago. "We better buy those "thingies" you put over the wall sockets." Use the word "thingies" to describe outlet covers because it will make you sound concerned, but not so concerned that you're going around learning the names of new things. This will reassure her that you won't steal too much of her thunder. Then say something like, "We'd better baby proof the television." This joke, babies are too dumb to understand television, will set her at ease.
During the process of registering insist that everything be Euro Style. Don't confess to not having any idea what this means. Doggedly attack various strollers that don't seem to have Euro styling. Tell her that you'd always pictured yourself, since like the age of eight, imagined yourself pushing around a certain type of stroller. This will reassure her that you've always wanted to be a father, but that you're not so much of a sissy that you won't enforce your will on something like stroller buying if you so choose. This may arouse a passion so great in her that you might even kiss, though in all likeliehood you'll just be asked to pat her belly. Take what you can get you greedy bastard.
After she's finished registering for a bunch of stuff sit down on the couch and watch her scroll through every picture. Don't just say, "Oh, that looks good." That is the sort of laziness that she doesn't want to see. Pick out something specific, say, "That vegetable stuffed animal has extremely cute eyes. Look at those eyes, hon." This will let her know that you're not just bs-ing but that you're really and truly interested in this process of making a home for the baby.
When she says that you need to move everything from the future baby room into the other bedroom jump at the chance to help. Now is not the time to whine about your torn labrum or bum knees. It is time to lift heavy things and put them down in an uncareful manner in other rooms. It is important that you do this so she will see a display of raw masculinity coupled with the sort of carelessness that will assure her that your boy, if it's a boy, won't grow up to be a sissy. On second thought, if you're having a girl, set the heavy items down carefully to show that you're not some big stupid gorilla.
Further Advice Coming.
Fiction
The apartment is typically clean and well-lit, though the lights have been dimmed to enhance her concentration. The living room window is split in the middle by a thick metal girder, twelve inches in diameter, which bisects her view into two relatively large panoramas. She typically raises the blinds between the hours of 5:40 and 8:30 P.M. to watch people on the street below. The blinds are currently listing together with the slow rhythm of the fan. In one corner of the living room is a potted plant with three foot long yellowing palm fronds, fronds that in stretching towards the light from the window have begun to overreach themselves and are now hanging at forty five degree angles too weighty for the branches and are bowing heavily. Her bookcase is made of cheap plywood and is full of books, which are primarily about literature. She has several silver rimmed picture frames. One of them has a picture of a cat.
She can also fly, in the daydream, which makes the whole process even more complex because she could just float there regardless, adjusting the rope accordingly. People had done worse things for love.
In order to breathe correctly, her guru had told her, his mole moving up towards his nostril with each syllable, this conversation taking place at some mid-point of the erasure process, she was supposed to count from one to ten. This counting was supposed to help free her from the burden of thought. A single man is walking on the street below in what appeared to be a black or navy blue blazer. His shoulders are square, and his short haircut and ramrod posture are suggestive of a military background. He fumbles with his keys before getting into his car. Perhaps he is handsome. She can’t really tell.
She finds the process of holding her thoughts still to be like asking someone to hold a Rubik’s cube without even attempting the slightest correction in favor of symmetry. In the third grade, she had been unable to pass the entrance exam into the gifted and talented class because she had no facility with shapes and congruencies. She remembers the failure well, and complexly, because it was her first brush with what she would now call despair.
The sky is beige. Most of the heavy late afternoon light is being obscured by the entwined and full branches of deciduous trees.
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