Daddy’s Diary: Baby Starts Kicking

Being a mother is probably the happiest experience for a woman! The fact that she is now the recipient of a new life brings her immense happiness and a bit of apprehension, because every mother wants a safe delivery so that her little one can leave the womb healthy to experience the wonderful world. Other than that, pregnancy brings its own wonders. Physical changes and emotional fluctuations are inevitable. But what acts as a silver ray of delight are moments like when a mother feels a baby kick into a womb, which most pregnant women describe as a “communication from the soul.” And even parents will have their moments of inexplicable euphoria when they feel the baby kick!

A man can never approach what a woman feels with a life inside her womb! When I heard that my wife was pregnant, I was ecstatic and set to work to organize the best environment for our little one, who is already growing inside my wife’s womb with every word that passes. Countless anecdotes shared by my friends and their wives made me curious what that feeling of a baby kick would feel like for both a man and a woman. Can that soft piece of life inside the womb feel what a mother feels when she feels the kick? If even I feel the kick, my baby will know that I am his father. My mind raced through countless thoughts and I felt bubbles of joy burst inside me.

During her pregnancy period, my wife was curious to experience the baby kick! She often said that since a life was growing within her, she needed a sign from the Universe that she was doing well. Also, as she was metaphysically inclined, she wanted to connect with our little one even before delivery. So sometimes before going to sleep at night, he would lie down and have to talk to the bulge expecting to feel the kick. We followed this before the sleep ritual for a while and stopped as nothing happened. And then one day when I was in the office, my wife called in utter glee, sharing that she felt our baby kick. He could feel her overflowing happiness and secretly wanted to experience what she did.

My wife had started to feel our baby from the eleventh week of pregnancy. First, I thought, it could be an anticipatory imagination. But as my wife tells me now, it wasn’t and that Ria, our little girl, started communicating with her. There were times when she experienced minimal fetal movement and had bouts of worry, wondering if everything was okay with our little one. And as she navigated her pregnancy I could see in her eyes how she wished our baby would feel to kick.

And one fine day on a winter night in the 20th week of her pregnancy while we were sleeping, my wife remembers that she suddenly felt like our baby kicked too often. She secretly woke up and didn’t inform me about it. She kept her hand on the baby’s bump and silently felt the baby’s kicks and responded with affection. Then one day in the 21st week, she felt a little nauseous at night.

I woke up, witnessed her physically challenging state, and when the nausea subsided, I was helping her lie back on the bed. We both exchanged a loving look and touched her uterus, and the pat came with a soft kick. She said, “Our little one is talking to us” and smiled. As she lay down, my palm was on her baby belly and there were some gentler kicks. This went on for a while and then we went back to sleep.

Now that we have our little Ria by our side, I can only go back to that winter night in December when I felt like she was communicating with me for the first time. Getting to experience your baby’s kick is a surreal experience that can only be deeply felt, never fully expressed.