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  For Steve

  Just kidding . . .

  For Charlie and his mom

  DISCLAIMER

  This book was written by me, an English fella. We are two nations divided by a common language, so I’ve Americanized some of the words and references in the hope that they will make sense to an American audience. Should you wish to read the text authentically, please feel free to change asshole back to arsehole and imagine that the whole thing is being read aloud by someone who is pale and has dodgy teeth.

  Cheers,

  Matt

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Introduction

  1. Arrivals

  2. Home

  3. Sleep

  4. Waste

  5. Feeding

  6. Outside

  7. Maintenance

  8. Entertainment

  9. Milestones

  10. Judgments and Revelations

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PREFACE

  When we first discovered that we were “expecting,” someone bought us a fridge magnet. It read: “To have a baby is to invite an angel into your home.”

  That may be true.

  But sometimes, just sometimes, it’s like you have invited a lodger into your home. A furious, sleep-murdering, unstable and incontinent, breasts-obsessed midget lodger. Who wants nothing more or less than your undivided attention, from now until the day you fucking die.

  . . . But that probably wouldn’t fit on a fridge magnet.

  INTRODUCTION

  So, three months after the birth of our son, Charlie, I wrote a post on Facebook.

  This is it.

  Matt Coyne, December 7, 2015, 7:38 p.m.

  I was congratulating myself today on how I’ve got diaper-changing down to a precision art. I’m basically like a Formula One pit crew . . . in fact, in many ways, I’m better, because when you’re speed-changing the tires on Lewis Hamilton’s car, he’s probably less likely to piss in your eyes and projectile-shit up your arms.

  This is what else I’ve learned so far.

  The birth

  • I used to think that the theory that the moon landing was a hoax was total bollocks, just because it required a huge amount of people to share a secret. I now think it’s a distinct possibility, given the conspiracy of silence about how horrendous labor is. The labor suite is like being in ’Nam. It is nothing like you see in sitcoms or films, unless that film is Saw IV, or it’s the chest-bursting scene from Alien. So, to those who told me that the birth would be a magical experience . . . you’re a bunch of fucking liars. Labor is like magic . . . but only in that it’s best when you don’t know how it’s done.

  (In truth, the hardest thing about labor is seeing someone you love in such excruciating pain. But then Lyns did once make me sit through an episode of Downton Abbey, so . . . six of one, half a doz . . . )

  The first week

  • I never knew this, but babies breathe in a jazz-syncopated rhythm. There is no set pattern to it and they stop breathing roughly every forty seconds, just long enough for you to think they’ve died. Of all the dick moves babies can pull, pretending that they’ve died is by far the most dickish, and they do it all the time.

  • A baby crying is a weird thing. During the daytime you can listen to it and think that it’s endearing and cute. . . . At 3 a.m. it’s like having the inside of your skull sandpapered by an angry Viking.

  • Baby piss in the eye really is only funny the first time and every single shit really is comically timed. The worst thing is when they do a “lure-shit,” then wait till you’ve got the diaper off mid-change to bring the real thunder. It’s the same thing terrorists do when they time bombs to go off just as the emergency services arrive.

  • Every item of clothing is held together with fucking snaps. There are three or four more snaps than necessary just to make you look like a moron in front of your child, who shows his disapproval by endlessly windmilling. Dressing a windmilling baby is like trying to put a rabbit in a fucking balloon. When you tell them to stay still, they ignore you or scratch their own face. They’re mental.

  (I’m thinking of launching a range of baby clothing that is all Velcro, based on strippers’ trousers. You should be able to hold a baby in one hand, the clothes it’s wearing in the other, and just separate the two with a satisfying rip.)

  • Babies at this age don’t look like anyone. But everyone sits around drinking a fuckload of tea and saying he looks like you, or he looks like his granddad or whatever. . . . In truth, they all look like Ross Kemp. (Well, they look like one of the Mitchell brothers anyway—if you’ve got an ugly baby, it’s Phil.)I

  The first month

  • Throughout my adult life I’ve tried to read a book a week or so. I’m not naïve, I knew that I’d have less time, so I thought I’d promise myself that I’d try to read a book a month. It’s now been a couple of months and the only thing I’ve read is a pamphlet on breast pumps. (And I’ve still not gotten to the end of that; I keep falling asleep during the paragraph on “nipple confusion.”)

  • It is possible to have so little sleep that your balls hurt.

  • Does anyone remember the show Touch the Truck with Dale Winton (before he had his face retrofitted)? It was on Channel 5 and basically eight contestants put their hands on a truck and the last one to keep their hands on it and stay awake won the thing. Having a baby is like being on Touch the Truck. The only difference is that on Touch the Truck you were allowed to have a piss and something to eat every three hours . . . and you won a truck.

  • Whether Lyns likes it or not, holding the baby above your head when it’s naked, and singing “Circle of Life,” is funny.

  • It’s only when you’ve just gotten a baby to sleep that you realize how loud your house is. I thought our home was pretty quiet and sedate but it turns out we have a bathroom tap that sounds like Godzilla fucking a tank.

  • Trying to walk around a supermarket takes ages because old women reeeally like babies and lock onto a pram with the dead-eyed tenacity of a predator drone. Dodging them is like playing Frogger. They’re wily: if there’s more than one of them you’re screwed; they’ll split up and hunt in packs like raptors.

  After 3 months . . . now

  The most important thing I’ve learned so far is that Charlie is supremely lucky to have Lyns as his mum. She’s tough, smart, funny, and in love . . . and she will make sure I don’t fuck up too much. Hopefully, her DNA will also batter my genetic predisposition toward big nostrils and man-tits.

  He is without reservation the greatest thing that has ever happened to us both. (Better than completing the Panini World Cup sticker album, which I did in both ’86 and ’90.) He has already removed enough of my cynicism to include this paragraph, and I feel pretty sure that I’m going to be good at this. Because as shit, disorganized, and pathetically inept as I am, it is beyond important to me that Charlie comes to no harm. And that, as far as I can make out, is not a bad measure.

  I wrote this in a sleep-deprived state one Tuesday evening, when our little boy, Charlie, decided to close his eyes for a couple of hours, for what seemed like the first time since he’d opened them three months before. My balls were aching; I did have sunken eyes reddened by baby pi
ss. I sat, I typed, I felt a bit better. And, as he stirred, I hit the “post” button and sent what I’d written to get trampled underfoot in the social-media parade of shocked-looking cats, dick-pics, and photographs of what Auntie Pat had for her tea.

  The following day I logged back on to find that the post had been shared a hundred times. Later that day it was a thousand, and by the end of the week it was tens of thousands. It was shared by bloggers, vloggers, and even movie stars like Ashton Kutcher. Bizarrely, I started to get requests for interviews from newspapers, TV, and radio. And everybody asked the same question: Why did this incoherent and rambling “status update” strike a chord with parents, parents-to-be, and the long-haired one from Dude, Where’s My Car?

  I didn’t know.

  So I sat and I thought. Then I started to read through the e-mails I’d received from parents who had taken the time to get in touch. The answer was there. It was clear. There was a reason why this particular message echoed, why so many could find their own experience, in between the aching balls and nipple confusion, and that reason was as conclusive as it was striking:

  Most new parents haven’t got the faintest fucking clue what they’re doing.

  Sure, there are the superparents, the bland routiners, the perfect assholes raising their cookie-cutter children using color-coded charts and whatever the fuck the “pick-up, put-down” method is.

  But that’s not us.

  We are the screwups; the play-it-by-ear, winging-it normals; the inept, the scared, the disorganized, the immature and clueless. We have vomit on our shoulders and yellow shit under our fingernails and . . . Christ, are we tired!! . . . But we are Legion.

  And our kids will be the kids that other kids want to play with. They will become the adults that other adults want to have a beer with. They will be the smart ones, the creative ones, the ones who will change the world or just make it better in tiny slivers. Because, as useless and pathetic as we are, our children will be the best of us.

  Because we give a fuck that they can be.

  * * *

  I. Ross Kemp is an actor who first found fame on the British soap opera EastEnders. He is the better-looking half of a bald and angry pair of tough guys called the Mitchell Brothers—Grant and Phil. (Just imagine Moby and James Carville side by side and jacked up on steroids.)

  1

  * * *

  ARRIVALS

  The baby is coming. Shit.

  Leaving for the hospital and I’ve just caught sight of myself in the mirror. I’ve only seen this facial expression once before . . . it was on the face of Hans Gruber at the end of Die Hard, falling, after being dumped off the Nakatomi building by Bruce Willis.

  ARRIVALS

  * * *

  It was obvious from the moment that we set foot in the labor ward that we had been lied to. Everything we had read, every class we had attended in preparation for the birth, was no more than a Photoshopped picture. We’d been led to believe that a woman in labor would be like a delicate flower having a mild asthma attack, gently perspiring with effort as her natural pains caused her breath to catch. When we arrived, a woman down the corridor was in the later stages of birth. And she didn’t sound like a gentle flower at all. She sounded like Hulk Hogan tearing the earth in two.

  I was unprepared. We all are.

  LYING BASTARDS

  TV and film

  There are two types of parent-to-be. There are those who want to be informed, to be made fully aware of the brutal realities of labor. And then there are the rest of us, who spend nine months in denial, preferring to remain blissfully ignorant about the truth of what is to come. It’s easy to tell which sort of expectant parent you are because these two groups neatly divide, along the same lines, into those who choose to watch the TV show One Born Every Minute and those who deliberately avoid watching the TV show One Born Every Minute.I I was in the latter group. I did try to watch one episode, but twenty seconds was all I could manage. I was left with one image carved into my brain: it was of a woman who looked like she was boiling, bent double and straining so hard that her forehead resembled a Klingon’s ball-sack. I flipped the channel and watched Beachfront Bargain Hunt.

  Apart from the occasional reality TV show, the vast majority of screen depictions of childbirth are complete bullshit, and as a consequence we all wander into the labor ward with a hopelessly skewed view of what the whole thing will be like.

  Take something as simple as the position in which women give birth: every film and sitcom I have ever seen has the woman lying on her back throughout labor, legs akimbo, as if she plans to fire the baby out of her primed vagina-cannon. But, apparently, it is much more comfortable to be in different positions.

  So, labor suites aren’t how they are depicted either: they don’t just consist of a hospital bed and beeping machines. More often, they have beanbags and yoga balls, sometimes even a small pool and ropes hanging from the ceiling. They resemble less a hospital room and more an obstacle course, or one of those wacky warehouse play-areas attached to family pubs in the UK for the offspring of piss-heads.

  Far from the simple clinical environments we’re used to seeing, the modern delivery room has dimmed lighting, a CD player, colorful pictures, a shower, and a place to make tea. If you include the screaming next door and crappy Wi-Fi, it’s pretty much the same as staying in a Travelodge. The only difference is that there’s no minibar and the previous guest hasn’t wiped his ass on the towels.

  Even screen depictions of how a woman goes into labor are a continent adrift from reality: in film and TV, a woman’s waters break with no warning. A torrent is unleashed with enough ferocity to wash away bystanders and nearby cars and bridges, and babies are often born during the race to the hospital. In truth, waters don’t always break, and labor usually takes ages. You might be tempted to call for a police escort or to speed to the hospital like you’re in Cannonball Run, but unless you can see a head or a foot, the chances are you will be parked in the hospital for at least a day before anything really starts to happen. (While a second or third child tends to come quite quickly, the first feels like it’s going to take so long he’s going to come out walking and keen to crack on with his SATs.)

  Books

  Of course, it’s dopey to think that films are going to accurately depict childbirth. No one is going along to the local IMAX for a twelve-hour birthing epic, seven hours of which are a woman sucking on a gas pipe, interspersed with her and her partner discussing how much the contractions are making her piles worsen. So most of us turn to a more traditionally reliable source: books.

  There are approximately thirty thousand books on the market that deal with pregnancy and childbirth, and, speaking personally, we bought them all. As Lyndsay’s waters broke, I was beginning to wish that I’d read one of them.

  What was surprising was that Lyns had read these books, and she was similarly unprepared. None of them made much reference to the trench warfare reality of childbirth. Yes, I was in denial; but when it comes to books, from the experts to the idiots, so is everyone else.

  Take this example from The Good Housekeeping Guide to Parenting. It says that giving birth is like trying to pass a “large piece of fruit while constipated.” And that a woman in the second stages of labor will be “irritable.” Now, far be it from me to point out inconsistencies in a Good Housekeeping guide to anything, but I get irritated when I miss a bus; I can’t imagine it would be the same emotion if I had to shit a melon.

  This book also suggests that a woman should pull apart her mouth using her index fingers to get “a sense of how much it stings.” Three days of childbirth doesn’t “sting.” Nettles sting. Bees sting. Three days of labor doesn’t smart, or sting, or niggle. It fucking hurts, and any woman who endures it is a warrior. . . . Any woman who does it more than once is Genghis Khan.

  So, there are short, practical guides, with advice on how to breathe in and out. And long-winded birth preparation manuals that run to seven-hundred-page bricks that could b
etter be used to batter a person into a coma (as if reading a seven-hundred-page book about “birth preparation” couldn’t render a person unconscious enough).

  But the truth is that almost all of these books are worthless, even the thoughtful, well-researched, and smart ones. Because, aside from anything else, if you’ve got a baby on the way, what the fuck are you thinking? You don’t have time to read books. Including this one.

  Childbirth classes

  So TV is terrifying, films are bullshit, and books are confusing and too time-consuming to read. For an increasing number of people, the place to have labor demystified is at childbirth classes: a kind of remedial school for prospective parents.

  Remember that class at school? Where they sent the kids who struggled with clapping and not eating the craft glue? It’s a lot like that: a class in which they use words like poop and pee-pee, and everything is demonstrated using dolls and clip-art flashcards written in Comic Sans. The overall sense is that you’ve stumbled into a therapy class for people recovering from a recent head injury.

  Basically, childbirth classes treat you like an idiot. But that’s okay, because when it comes to looking after a baby you are an idiot, and the classes are designed, with the greatest of intentions, to teach you how not to be a total fuckup as a new parent. In some ways the classes are really good; in preparation for birth they are next to useless.

  For understandable reasons they downplay the pain and trauma of giving birth, which is fine, but they do it in a way that causes utter confusion. Part of the problem is that they tend to be taught by new-age earth-mother types (ours was called Barbara, stick-dry hair, floaty dress, a whiff of zealous recycling, and a tendency toward bullshit). Consequently, they discuss the “birthing experience” rather than labor, and describe it in weird mystical terms with an emphasis on “spirituality” and “connection,” which makes it sound like you are about to give birth to the last of the fucking unicorns.