I was almost eight months pregnant with our second child. We already had a 19-month-old little boy. My belly was huge. It was hard to bend over to tie my son’s shoes. To say that I was exhausted was an understatement. Then one day, my husband announced that he was going hunting for the day.
I thought that I heard him wrong. “What?” I asked, listening even closer this time.
“I’m going hunting tomorrow. It’s just a day trip. I applied for a license and I am going with another guy from work.”
I just stood there with a blank look on my face. He is hunting? He had never been hunting in the six years that I had lived with him, but has decided that since I am eight months pregnant and taking care of a toddler, now is the perfect time to go?
“WHERE are you going?” I asked with an angry voice, aware that the “mad woman” was about to arrive. He told me that there was a place about three hours away. He would bring his phone but wasn’t sure that he would have a signal. If I wasn’t so mad, then I would have been dumbfounded. Again, why now? He had to wait until I was so pregnant that I longed for the weekends, just to have him home so I could nap. He wanted to go three hours away? If I needed to reach him, I may not be able to and even if I could, it could take him three hours to get home?
“WHY NOW?” My voice grew louder with each question. He was way more rational than me and simply explained that he didn’t think that it would be a big deal. He never meant to make me angry. He had applied for the license at the beginning of the year and just wanted to get a trip in before the baby was born.
Then it hit me. He was just as worried as I was that he would lose freedom to do things when the baby was here. I was not the only one panicking. He didn’t think of it like that, but it made sense to me. We were on the same side. We feared the same thing.
Yes, it all made sense. I suddenly remembered my other friends and fights that they had with their husbands when they were pregnant. How they called me and cried about golf outings and fishing trips. We thought it was insensitive. We didn’t recognize that the men were probably fearful of the same thing that we were.