Table 3.

Excerpts from the interviews with fathers (N = 20).

THEME	ILLUSTRATIVE QUOTES (and father’s ID number)
Support for mother
Putting infant’s and mother’s needs first	“I haven’t worried much about myself over the last period, I mean, if I am not at work I am here to be close to my children, and even when I am home, where there are two small empty beds, my first preoccupation is to try and support my wife” (ID 5).
	“I was afraid of losing both my little baby and my wife because she too had had some [health] problems. I spent those days going to see my wife on the lower floor and my child upstairs” (ID 16).
	“Initially, the first two days, the attention was all on them, on their health, on their progress… I mean, I was focused on them” (ID 11).
	“Most of all because the father, in the children’s birth is basically not considered by anyone as a person taking part in the trauma of birth, at least for what I have observed, in the sense that everyone you meet asks how the baby is doing, how the mother is doing, but no one ever asks how the father is doing. The dad needs to be supported, needs to unload, otherwise he experiences some difficulties… There is a psychological trauma for the father too, I feel it and I have felt it directly… Indeed, I can even tell everyone that it is the father who holds the psychological load, who [takes on] everything” (ID 3).
	“Then I talked to my wife about this. After a month things had got better, the three of them were fine, and I told her that it seemed to me she did not think I might have my needs too, and I told her ‘look, if you don’t understand this the risk is that I can’t take it anymore’” (ID 7).
	“I have supported and still support my wife because we are still not completely back to normal. Our permanence in the neonatal intensive care unit is not over yet and I have to say that my wife starts feeling the weight of these days which seem endless. We are near the end and so it is important for me to be close to her, help her, support her, encourage her. I keep my needs to myself, we could say that in this period my priorities are the three people I love the most: my children and my wife” (ID 20).
Suppression or hiding of worries, negative emotions and needs	“I had my crises too, I had moments of discouragement or moments when I felt powerless, but I tried to react, mostly for my wife’s sake, I absolutely could not show myself weak or discouraged to her, I have always hidden my moments of weakness from her to encourage her, to support her, to let her regain her good mood, her hopes, to reassure her that everything would be fine, that our children would be normal and healthy like all the others” (ID 20).
	“I was always telling my wife I was calm, that everything would be fine, I would not show my anxieties and fears that [child’s name] would die. Only once did I burst out: we were home, when I entered the bedroom she was watching a video of [child’s name] and when I saw his little face covered in tubes I burst out crying. I later regretted it because I am afraid I charged her with yet another load rather than support her” (ID 5).
	“I think it is right to share everything about the little girl, starting from our emotions, both positive and negative. If we are disheartened, we are disheartened together, and equally, we rejoice together” (ID 17).
Counteracting the sense of guilt	“My girlfriend kept saying ‘I made him come to life too soon’ but I kept telling her ‘it wasn’t you, nature wanted it to be like this, you did everything you could to prevent this from happening’” (ID 8).
	“I had thoughts and feelings of guilt, I asked myself if I could do more or something different. Very simply, I thought that instead of going to the amusement park with my son and pregnant wife I could have stayed home… I still haven’t thought whether this would have changed anything, perhaps I am afraid of thinking too much about it, because one blames oneself too much, even for something one is not responsible for. I have been reassured by doctors and friends, and rationally I agree with them, but a background noise still tells me that either I or my wife are responsible for this” (ID 15).
Fear that mother will reject the child	“When she saw him, however, her reaction was positive, I was afraid it would be negative because of what she had told me (the fear she would not feel him as her son) and because of the little tubes and everything else, but I saw her smile instead. Not the first ten minutes, but then she reacted really well, and this was a good thing, a very positive thing, I was very relieved” (ID 13).
	“My wife has suffered and is still suffering very much, for several days she spent more time in the corridor rather than in the [neonatal room] because she suffered too much when she saw him like that, sedated, intubated… she couldn’t bear it. I told her that not feeling like seeing him was normal, that it was because she loved him very much and seeing him like that was hard, but that little by little she would be able to spend more time with him. But underneath I was afraid she couldn’t manage to be there. Luckily, after a few days she slowly became able to spend more time with him, and I felt relieved, at least about this” (ID 5).
	“In the initial phase, when the mother rejected the baby and she was saying ‘take me away, I don’t want to see him’ I was quite frightened because… my fear was that in the course of time she would reject him, and I asked myself: ‘gosh, what will I do? What will happen to me?’. But then, seeing that she slowly loosened up as days went by, I too regained more confidence and I became calmer” (ID 6).
Mother’s care for the infant
Observing mother engageed in caregiving	“I am proud and happy to have a wife who knows how to be a mother, this makes me calm” (ID 1).
	“When I saw her change the nappy I felt extremely happy, because I saw my wife’s glistening eyes while she was changing her own girls, who were born after endless sacrifices. I always have to go back to the fact that it was a difficult pregnancy, there is happiness now, knowing what has happened before. This could seem banal or stupid, but having had a difficult pregnancy, seeing my wife changing the nappies of babies who, according to some doctors, mightn’t even have been born, there is always joy. Joy for everything, from breastfeeding to bottle-feeding” (ID 9).
	“I was pleased because I saw that, after all, even if she had same difficulties that I had when it was the first time for me to do several things, ‘she could finally take care of our children’” (ID 3).
	“It was almost normal to see my wife take care of [child’s name] but not a banal normality, a normality that relieved me in the sense that ‘she was changing our girl’s nappy, after all that we have been through, we are feeding her’” (ID 15).
Mother has “something extra”	“Mums are a different thing, you must be a bit blind not to see it, and I think you can see it here. It is not only the man’s awkwardness compared to their almost natural spontaneity; I say almost because this is not a natural context for the ladies, but these babies are part of them, and you can see it… it is more beautiful to see your wife holding your baby than to think of yourself holding this bundle” (ID 7).
	“We are a team, so one can do something and at the same time the other does something else. If she needed to take her coffee I would stay and do what was needed, and vice versa. She comes here more often, meaning every day, because I need to work, but we see ourselves as a team, so either one or the other does it” (ID 16).
Couple relationship
Collaboration	“My wife is excellent with the girl, so we preferred to maintain this balance, and not to interrupt something that was working well. So, in this period I took care of the family, in the sense that I kept the group together, because we have another girl and I went to take her from school, I cooked for her, I did the shopping etc. My wife took more care of [child’s name] instead, because she showed to be more able than me from this point of view. In my opinion, if we both concentrated on the same aspect we would risk losing our family balance, this is how we felt like doing” (ID 15).
Bond	“If I have to think today of how we were before, we are certainly closer one to the other, you can see now that we are a family, while before everyone could go and mind his or her own business, but now we are a family. But for me nothing would have changed even if they were born exactly on the ninth month” (ID 14).
	“We have always been united, we are as close as we used to be, no more no less” (ID 2).
	“The situation as a couple is very difficult, you have to handle it in a certain way… paying attention to everything, to how you speak, because of this particular period and because it is very critical. Tension is extremely high, and consequently you can have a bit of confrontation, to put it like this. We also need to carry on with our relationship as a couple and everything else, but it is very difficult, extremely difficult to manage all the other nuances of a normal life when you have a situation of this kind, and so it is not easy” (ID 18).