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Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate the narratives and agencies men constructed in telling about their becoming a father for the first time. In addition I examined the emotions produced in these new fathers' narratives, with special focus on the way fathers talked about their feelings and expressed their emotional agency. The data consisted of interviews with 27 men (age 20 to 42 years). I applied narrative analysis to identify different story types and utilized modality and focality to determine the agency represented in the men's speech. On the basis of the interviews, I extracted three main paths to father-hood: 'normative', 'desire', and 'recovery. These types involved narratives about when and why to have children. Men also included an element of agency - either strong or weak - in their narratives. Normative narratives represent a culturally typical life-course model which most of the men in the data recognized and against which they reflected on their own paths. Fathers in the normative narratives emphasized a) their youngness and their age of becoming a father, b) that life should be settled (have a spouse, job, own home) c) their own desire and mental readiness to be a father, and d) their awareness of infertility. The recovery narratives in turn included a tragic event that a man had confronted along the pathway to becoming a father, and survived or learned to live with this trauma. The desire narratives were constructed by men who had earlier postponed their fatherhood, but were at the present moment enthusiastic about starting a family. The man in this narrative saw himself as capable of making his own choices with the eventual goal of becoming a father. In the fathers delivery-speech I discovered four emotional agency types: empathizers, hesitators, reporters and humorists. Every father in the data talked about the beginning of fatherhood in his own unique way, while at the same time representing the culture of becoming a father in Finland today.

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