Let your imagination flow for a few seconds with this narrative – it’s 3am and you are about to enter your 4^th sleep cycle. Right then, you are roused by loud screechy noises made by your baby. You wake up just to discover that your baby is throwing up in the middle of night and even before you realize anything, your baby vomits on you. Just when you clean your baby’s body with water and assures him/her to sleep, your baby starts vomiting again requiring you to repeat the whole decontamination task at a time when you can think of nothing else other than a pleasant sleep.

After cleaning your baby with lukewarm water, this time you decide to stay half-awake so that you can help your baby if he/she feels nauseous again. In the one hand, you are feeling extremely drowsy; on the other hand, a feeling of nervous anticipation will produce butterflies in your stomach. To cap it all, you will have to attend the office in the morning wearing a confident smile on your face as if nothing happened last night.

This is just one of those innumerable instances when new parents feel so much on edge and find themselves in a quandary. The intention behind creating this imagery is to help the aspiring parents comprehend a bit of all those unpredictable situations and emotions that constitute the experience of becoming and growing as parents.

The fact is that we are too eager to see life through rose-tinted glasses, that’s why we always reflect on one side of the coin and don’t flip the side to consider every nook and cranny. As we see everyone posting beautiful family pictures on social networking sites, we feel convinced that this is the perfect time to have a child. Of course, a baby is probably the biggest blessing one can have.

But, if I transmute my parenting experiences into words, I can affirm that this is a different kind of responsibility that requires ‘sound planning’ and ‘mental preparation’ to deal with situations just like the one delineated above without any feeling of trepidation. Well, as I am putting my two cents in, let me clarify that the purpose behind writing this piece is not to knock the wind out of the to-be fathers and mothers’ sails, rather to help them with those preparations and psychological planning that you must take before embracing parenthood so that you suddenly don’t get the blues (when the baby is born).

(The writer is a columnist.)