Description:
From the moment Churchwell and his wife watch their home pregnancy test turn positive, Expecting : One Man's Uncensored Memoir of Pregnancy launches a rollicking journey into expectant fatherhood. "Well, what do you think? Aren't you happy?" his wife asks when she sees the test results. Churchwell responds, "I'm thinking: 'Isn't that what Marie Curie said to her husband when she discovered radioactivity?'" Expecting combines the scientific and the personal into a dead-on funny and often provocative narrative. Once the reader is welcomed into the intimate circle, a miscarriage occurs, opening the door to all the typical doubts and fears of a mid-life crisis, compounded by the insecurities of novice parenthood. While his wife is suffering her final excruciating labor pushes at the "ring of fire," Churchwell muses on the historical clash between doctors and midwives over the birth process, men's thoughts about sex, and the absence of ritual narratives for men--while livening things up with such descriptions as his wife's efforts at birth class "to build up her abdominals into a baby howitzer." As much as anything, Churchwell's story is one of change, of the bonding between parents. He asks the questions that count and then responds with his own theories about how men and women transform into parents and learn, from society and biology, the art of nurturing. --Byron Ricks
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