Dear bean (that’s what mummy and daddy called you when you were in your mummy’s tummy),

Right now you’ve been growing in your mummy’s tummy for six weeks, you’re only 1.2 cm and weigh just 0.5 grams but you already have a heartbeat and you’re already the most important part of mummy and daddy’s life.

You can’t hear me or feel me yet but I like to rub mummy’s tummy with you inside and I like to talk to you. Mummy is very tired right now because she is working very hard growing you and your daddy is doing lots of reading about you so that he can help you and mummy grow.

Today we booked a scan so that we can see you inside mummy in two weeks time. We hope to see that your heart is beating and that you’re safe and snug inside mummy’s womb where you should be for the next 8 months, we can’t wait to see your scan even though you’ll still be very small.

We have told the doctors all about you so hopefully we will get an appointment to see a midwife in a couple of weeks to make sure mummy and daddy are doing all the right things, as this is all very new and scary for us.

I’ve been told you don’t come with an instruction manual, which is good for daddy as he never bothers to read instructions anyway so you can look forward to back to front nappies and upside down baby grows in the future but I’m sure we’ll work it out together.

You just concentrate on growing for now and we will do the rest.

We already love you very much

Love

Daddy (your favourite parent)

A couple of months earlier it felt like this moment would never come. I didn’t want to let my wife down and leave her disappointed about what might have been. We did a home Male Fertility Test whereby I had to produce a sample, funnelled into a test tube with a few drops of solution that turned the sample a different colour. If the colour was a shade of pink, it indicated enough motile sperm to make pregnancy likely but if it was a shade of purple, it meant that you were less likely to conceive. We tried the test twice and in each case the sample was purple. The process was very undignified and I couldn’t imagine having to do that at some fertility clinic, the thought of the nurses timing how long it took you to produce a sample or whether you could produce enough on demand like that was something that would have filled me the dread. It was bad enough in my own home.

It wasn’t a nice feeling, it felt emasculating. I didn’t realise it then, but the SSRI antidepressants I was on can have a negative impact on fertility. I happened to stumble across a documentary presented by Welsh comedian Rhod Gilbert on the subject of male infertility and it only made me feel worse.

My wife and I agreed when we first decided to try for a child that it was either going to be a natural conception or nothing at all. I’ve never been a big fan of the idea of IVF, I’d rather people adopt if they can’t conceive naturally as there are already too many children in the world that need the love of good parents. I feel that having a child is a gift not a right, you’re talking about bringing another human being onto this planet after all.

Even without my low fertility score, the odds were against us. My wife is 42 years of age and it really is last chance saloon time for conception at that stage. I knew it was possible as I have an aunty that had her last child at a similar age, but it wasn’t her first.

My wife had irregular periods in her 20s and then went on the pill. During her time on the pill she lost a significant amount of weight. She came off the pill because it became a hassle to get doctors appointments to have her blood pressure checked in order to get a new prescription and at the time, we weren’t having regular sex anyway so there seemed no point in staying on it.

After coming off the pill, her cycle was much more regular, in fact, it a shorter three and a half week cycle so it wasn’t too long to wait before we would find out if we had been successful.

Having said we wouldn’t get too involved in the process, the geeky side of me couldn’t help but order an ovulation test kit, male fertility test kit, and special supplements that were supposed to maximise our chances of conception.

My wife had already been using a couple of apps to track her cycle so she already knew roughly when she would be at her peak fertility but because her cycle was short, her fertile period actually overlapped with her period.

We started using the ovulation test kit, which would indicate her low fertility days, high fertility days then the peak two days before ovulation.

The first month (January 2021), we tried to have sex every couple of days when her fertility was high. We hadn’t really had sex that frequently since our mid twenties. My wife doesn’t have a very high sex drive and to be honest, I’ve always preferred both giving and receiving oral sex to intercouse itself but I was really looking forward to trying.

It was the one time in my life where my wife actually wanted sex as much as I did, if not more so it was a novel experience.

In the months before hand, I’d actually completely lost my sex drive. I was really struggling to stimulate myself, my body seemed to be a lot less sensitive and I would go weeks without stimulation and that was very abnormal for me. I was struggling to sleep too without the regular oxytocin floods, even kalms and drowsy antihistamines had little affect. My mind would just be racing all through the night and I wouldn’t fall asleep until my wife was about to get up at 05:30.

If nothing else, I was quite looking forward to being tired out enough to fall asleep afterwards and the first time we made love, being inside my wife, knowing that there was no form of contraception at all and feeling how aroused she was after a long kissing session felt really good. It felt different for me psychologically and I slept really well and felt really close to her.

It wasn’t easy every time however, trying to make love either the next day or day after, I found that I just wasn’t ready for it and I could feel myself losing my erection. It was a really frustrating feeling, like I’d once again failed as a man to do the one thing that’s supposed to be easy for me.

She never made me feel like a failure, she was always very reassuring and we decided to have sex less often than every other day to take a bit of pressure off. She didn’t know it but I was also taking Viagra, I honestly don’t think it made a difference, my problem was never with getting an erection in the first place, it was more psychological but if nothing else it had a placebo effect.

The last cycle, which actually resulted in conception we only had sex twice and the second time, on her first peak day, I faked climax so I know that date of the baby making session that resulted in conception is almost certainly, Wednesday 17 March.

When you talk about faking orgasm, it’s normally from the context of a woman and I wonder whether it’s more common than we think for men to fake it too? Sometimes I just get to the point where it feels the moment has past and I just know it’s not going to happen. Sometimes I’m tired or sometimes I start to feel twinges of cramp or if I feel she’s not enjoying it because I always want her to feel good too so I just use my muscles to make it feel for her like I’ve climaxed and she can’t tell the difference.

It was the only time I faked it whilst we were trying for a baby, the rest of the time I was honest with her about it but when it’s your wife’s most fertile period, sometimes you just don’t want to feel like you’ve let her down.

Part of the excitement of finding out she is pregnant was a sense of relief. From what we had read, most couples take up to a year to get pregnant and we’d managed it in three months even with age being against us on her side and my issues with low sperm motility, according to the home test, and making love sparingly.

Now I’ve got my fingers crossed that we get through the next eight weeks where miscarriage is more common and hope that we have an intrauterine pregnancy with a single healthy child, then we can finally let the cat out of the bag and start telling friends and family!

So, you can see, I had lots of reasons not to take the risk of fatherhood yet now, at the age of 38 years old, I find myself expecting a child for the first time ever and I haven’t run away…yet.

Well, over the years, there have been the occasional wobble where after copious amounts of alcohol on work nights out, I’ve come home and asked my wife if she wanted to have a baby, which she found very amusing. I love my wife very much and on occasion I have worried that one day she would grow to resent me for taking away her opportunity of motherhood.

However, when I woke up sober the next afternoon, normal service had resumed and she would laugh it off and I’m glad she did because both partners need to want a child. It’s not an easy ride or something to be taken lightly and it’s vitally important for a child’s development that they have both parents around. I know that this isn’t a popular opinion in today’s society where the role of the father is deemed optional and completely unimportant but I think fathers matter to their children and can make a big impact on preparing a child for the outside world.

Many young men are completely turning their backs on the prospect of parenthood given the amount of demonisation of fathers in society and I honestly don’t blame these men at all. The anti-male rhetoric in society is truly toxic, it’s everywhere but like boiling a frog, it’s been going on for so long that most people are completely oblivious to it.

For me, the thoughts of introducing new life into this world started as a parting gift for my wife when I was at the brink of suicide with a very severe depression. I wanted her to be happy and I wanted to leave something behind to bring her comfort after my death, one tiny, perfect piece of me that hadn’t been destroyed by my mind turning in on itself.

That started the thoughts but something else was happening at the same time. In November 2020, my wife’s sister and her three children came to live with us. Unfortunately, they lost their nursery business in March 2020, just as the COVID-19 crisis started to grip. Without the business, they had to sell up their dream home and the relationship between my brother in law and sister in law had broken down so when the house was in the process of being sold, they separated.

Our household went from two humans plus four cats to three adults, four cats, an eight year old girl, a twelve year old boy and a fifteen year old girl over night. We knew this was coming so over the summer months we did our best to transform our three bedroom house to maximise the space and storage for our additional household.

It’s not ideal having three kids share one room and there have been the odd tantrums over who gets to play where but we all gelled straight away and it just felt like we were one big family and that they’d always lived here.

Having those kids around really brought out a protective side of me, I did my best to make Christmas as fun for them as possible with fun games and presents. Having three kids come and give you a big hug before they each went to bed, having the family film nights, the in jokes, the feeling of being wanted and comforting them when they were sad made me feel like maybe I could actually be a good father after all.

As I slowly started to have more days where my mood was improving and it was no longer about a parting gift, those feelings of wanting to have a child of my own didn’t go away.

I felt closer to my wife than ever before and our levels of intimacy just increased. One night as we were kissing and holding each other I felt a desperate urge to make love to my wife without protection, in the end we didn’t but we talked about it again and about how we both felt and then we decided that we would just start making love naturally and just let nature take its course. We wouldn’t put any pressure on each other, we would just go with the flow and if it happened, it happened, if it didn’t, it was no big deal.

You may be wondering why a couple would suddenly start trying for a baby when the woman was in her early forties, more so if you knew that we had been in a relationship since she was twenty-three years old.

We started dating on 21 September 2002, then we got engaged on 23 September 2006, just a month before moving in together the following month. We were engaged for 5 years before finally getting married on 6 August 2011. As you can see, we’ve never really been in a rush to do anything, it’s always been nice and slow, giving us time to save up money and to allow me to finish my studies before we were married.

But why wait another ten years between getting married and trying for a child? The truth is, I felt very strongly about not wanting to have children for most of my adult life and we had discussed this early on in our relationship. She understood that if she committed to me she would be committing to a childless marriage.

That wasn’t a deal breaker for my wife. As a primary school teacher, she worked with kids day in, day out and as an aunty to our beautiful nieces and nephews, she got the fun bits, treating the kids without the responsibilities and at the end of the day we could return them to their parents.

I’m a caring person but I’m not the most naturally paternal, a baby seemed like a lot of responsibility and it frightened me. I wanted to have adventures with my wife and do things that are not really that easy with kids, like spontaneity, long distance driving holidays and we’ve had some great adventures together as a result, trips to New York and Los Angeles, touring 17 European countries in just over a week, we’ve had a great life together with lots of special memories.

When you have a child, suddenly your own needs are not that important anymore. All the things that made your relationship good in the first place are suddenly replaced with sleep deprivation, dirty nappies and lots of tears and tantrums, and that’s just from me. I didn’t want to feel pushed out. I don’t want to go from being the most important person in my wife’s life to being just a carer. Nothing about that was appealing to me.

I was scared of being a bad dad and not being very good at it. I’ve had a difficult time with mental health issues and weight issues since childhood and I worry about what traits a child would inherit from me and grow to hate me for. Am I the right person to be doing such an important role? It’s not a decision you can reverse if you suddenly realise you suck at fatherhood, once you’re a dad, you’re a dad for life and you know that this means always playing second fiddle to the mother in your child’s eyes.

You will rarely be appreciated as the child gets older and if your relationship falls apart, which is more likely with the extra strain and worries, then you’re likely to have your heart broken into pieces, having to settle for the odd weekend with your kids at best and I don’t think I could handle that.