I’m not all that experienced when it comes to pregnancy. I don’t know the best way to do everything (or anything) and I’ve not got it sussed. I’m still finding my way blindly through it, relying a lot on the advice and sensible words of friends, family and forums. And of course navigating my way through the first trimester with my ordered, logical, chaos-hating software developer husband has been its own form of fun and challenging.
But I’ve done the first trimester twice now. So I’m starting to get the hang of it. I’m hoping that I won’t have to do it again until I’ve made it successfully through trimesters 2 and 3 this time, but from my (limited) experience, I thought I’d pull together some “top” tips for helping your husband through the first trimester.
I should of course caveat this with the important point that everyone has a different experience of pregnancy, and my 2 first trimesters certainly had their differences – from what I can tell I got off pretty lightly in terms of symptoms, so I won’t pretend to have answers for all the poor women out there who have seriously tough pregnancies!
Get into the tech
If you’ve read “How to live with a software developer” you’ll definitely understand that my husband thrives on technology. We’ve got an app or gadget for most things. And getting through the first trimester was of course an opportunity to use tech. I realised fairly early on that if I didn’t keep eating (little and often), I’d feel very sick. But to start with I was reluctant to eat more than I had to, so I would wait until I felt nauseous, at which point it would be too late and I’d feel too sick to eat… So I’m not sure why I was surprised one day to hear my phone alarm going off shortly before I started to feel sick, with a reminder my husband had set, telling me to eat something!
Finding the right pregnancy app was another bit of the first trimester my husband could get involved in. There are so many out there, and I didn’t really know what I was looking for, other than information about how the baby was developing each week. So of course, my husband commandeered my phone (as usual, while I was trying to use it) and found an app that did everything I needed it to do (just don’t tell him I downloaded a second one which I chose pretty much at random…).
Let him find solutions
My husband likes practical solutions (no actual problem required). I’ve experienced very few problems in our 10 years together that his brain can’t figure out. The first trimester was no different here. There were lots of little solutions that he set up. He would remind me to keep snacks in my handbag, or to take them with us on walks. He helped me run baths that weren’t too hot, downloaded a list of everything I wasn’t supposed to eat, bought meat we could slow-cook rather than meat we would usually eat pink and stocked the freezer with prawns, scampi and fish fingers when I went through a few weeks of only wanting to eat fish. In short, when I had to do something differently because of the pregnancy, he had the answer.
Plan
This was a really important one for my husband. His way of making order out of impending chaos is definitely to plan. The spreadsheets haven’t quite come together yet (although he keeps threatening a day of budgeting – I only got out of the last one by picking up a nasty stomach bug), but there are plenty of other plans in place. There is a OneNote page full of possible “travel systems” and assorted furniture for the nursery. He’s drawn up a new layout for some rooms in the house to allow him a desk set-up downstairs once we re-purpose the study as a nursery (to be done at the last possible moment, of course). And he has spent days (and I really mean days, it’s definitely his favourite (i.e. only) topic of conversation) agonising over which car we need to buy as our second car. As far as I can tell, the decision is between 2 almost identical cars, one may or may not be a bit longer than the other – I’m not really sure as I haven’t been listening properly for a while now.
Let him take care of you
I’m not great at doing nothing. And so my husband has it pretty good I think – he gets breakfast in bed most mornings, I do the washing and the washing up, most nights I’ll cook… But during my first trimester I was hit by bouts of exhaustion that left me unable to do much more than sit still and put my feet up. They came and went, but some days I was too tired even to eat a proper meal, let alone cook one. Powering through just wasn’t an option. And my husband stepped in, sort of. It’s not that he started actually doing the washing up every night or switched from me making him breakfast to him making me breakfast. But he did teach me to take it easy. And on the weekends he brought me my second breakfast in bed (one breakfast is not enough food to get you from 8am to lunch time!). He took me upstairs when we got home and I could barely stand, put me to bed and encouraged me to take a nap. But most importantly he didn’t let me feel guilty about taking time for myself. His absolute conviction that looking after the baby and therefore looking after me was our number one priority allowed me to do it without feeling bad. If you know my husband, you’ll know he has certainly got the knack of putting his needs high up the priority list without feeling guilty, and he’s been trying to teach me to do the same!
The other really important way he took care of me was to let me cry when I needed to. Most of us know the restorative powers of a really good cry, and it is no different during pregnancy. The second time round was really nerve-wracking for us, as we were so worried that we would miscarry again. My husband helped me to feel able to have a panic when I needed to, and simply sat with me until I was done.
I suppose what all of this comes down to is that as a pregnant woman, you’re automatically “doing things” about the pregnancy, because you’re experiencing it all so directly. As the partner, it’s harder to find your role. My husband played to his strengths. Tech, logic, planning, and teaching me how to see myself as he sees me (i.e. really important) were some wonderful things that he could bring to the party. And he did all that while just as worried as me that we would lose this baby too.