the realization begins to sink in...

The euphoria of impending fatherhood is slowly giving way to a host of prenatal worries: Will our baby be healthy? Will the pregnancy be hell on Anna? On me? Assuming we survive it, what kind of parents will we be? What sort of trauma will we inflict upon our kid? No matter how well-intentioned we are, some emotional scarring is unavoidable, right?

All of these thoughts were swimming around in my head this morning, and it didn't help when Anna called from Best Buy to tell me she'd almost fainted, and that she needed me to come get her. In a panic, I rushed to her rescue. Luckily, it appears the episode was triggered by hunger - apparently the baby is draining her life juices, as Anna so elegantly put it. Still, it served as but another reminder of what's ahead of us. I feel totally unprepared, and knowing we've already missed most of the first trimester doesn't help matters any. We picked up a couple of books, the Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy and The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby From Birth to Age Two. Unfortunately, these have only reinforced the feeling that we dropped the ball by getting such a late start on prenatal care. Apparently, the first trimester is the most critical period in a baby's development. Great. We slept through the most critical period. That's reassuring. Of course, I'd be a lot more worried if the womb in question didn't belong to Anna. She exercises daily, doesn't smoke, has never consumed a drug more potent than an antibiotic, and is drunk after two beers (and those occasions happen about once every six months). Sure, it's a gross over-generalization, and probably sexist to the core, but I can't help thinking the folks in charge of human biological design knew what they were doing when they decided women should be the ones to carry the fetus. The prospects for humanity's survival would be pretty goddamn bleak if that task was left up to men - at least the men I know, including myself.

And then there's the whole issue of karma. Even if we are prepared, and our baby is a ten-fingered, ten-toed beauty, what's going to happen when he or she reaches adolescence? I think about the headaches and heartaches I caused my folks, and worry that a Just Universe will visit that misery upon me tenfold. Is it too late to pay reparations for my youthful (and not-so-youthful) indiscretions?