Fatherhood

I wrote down some thoughts about two months ago, the first week we discovered my wife was pregnant:

"My wife and I learned this week that we currently have a baby on the way.  The initial reaction was a strong feeling of the enormity of that responsibility.  And while that is true, it ceased feeling overwhelming after about 30 seconds, and the feeling has not returned.  We are as prepared as anyone without kids can really be, and it was assumed this is the direction we would eventually be going.  It will shift the focus of our marriage a bit, no longer fixated on each other, but towards the rest of our family.

It is crazy to think about the world that we are bringing a child into, and what it will be like as they grow up.  I see more negative changes than positive ones at the moment, but it is difficult to tell how much of that is perspective as opposed to objective reality."

It is interesting to look back on that and see how much my perspective has shifted with my experience the last two months.  My wife has been very sick most of that time, which has been quite challenging and stressful to deal with.  While I still believe that my original assessment was correct, and that we are as prepared as we could be as individuals, I don't think that our relationship was as prepared as it could be.  We have not been married for very long, and this happened sooner than we expected.  Not counting time spent on the road, we have hardly had 6 weeks of married life to establish "normal routines."  And nine months of pregnancy is a much longer time to get through, which has its own (hopefully temporary) "normal routines."  Those are not things that I want to continue to see happening after that process is over, but we don't exactly have strongly established patterns to return to.

So while I am excited to be having children, and believe this is the path God intended for us, I can't help but feel that I somehow missed out on most of what should be "newlywed bliss," or something like that.  I assume that after the baby is born there will be a whole new set of challenges and stresses that will tax our relationship in different ways.  Right up until they leave for college, right?  Now maybe this whole train of thought is just my reflexive response to the weight of the responsibility of having a child, and I would feel like I am losing my freedom, regardless of how long we had been married.  I don't know if it is, and either way, I don't know anything I can do to remedy the issue, besides just continuing to press onward.