Man vs. Baby Page 11

  But in that same moment, unbeknownst to you, neurons are firing in your little one’s tiny brain. Neural pathways are being explored and connections being made, never to be broken. And those tiny sparks in new gray matter amount to a discovered knowledge. A knowledge that is expressed in the slightest of smiles, as your baby now sits contentedly in your arms:

  “I fucking own you.”

  CARRIER

  So the alternative to the stroller is to just carry your baby around all the time. The problem is that babies weigh anything between ten and twenty-five pounds. Which is the same as carrying around a pet bag of cement. Also, a bag of cement is a dead weight; it doesn’t move. A baby, on the other hand, likes to vogue in your arms, striking a different pose every fifteen seconds. Forcing you to constantly adjust your arms or else drop him on his ungrateful, awkward head. This is okay for a maximum of fifteen minutes, but any longer and it feels like you no longer have bones in your arms and your spine is being torn out by Predator and shown to the moonlight.

  The solution to this problem is a simple one: a carrier. Which is kind of like a big wearable holster for your baby.

  I refused to buy one of these. If I’m honest, I associated them with those really “try hard” husbands who “experienced” birth with their partners and enjoy the feel of a good corduroy. I felt like wearing one was maybe a short step away from strapping on a pair of fake lactating boobs and getting the baby to sleep by playing acoustic guitar. I also just thought that on a man they looked a bit odd. I could see that women with their newborns looked adorable in them. But for some reason, whenever I’d seen a man wearing one I just thought he looked a bit like an awkward man/kangaroo hybrid (a “mangaroo”), and that the baby hanging from his chest looked like the mutant Kuato from the original Total Recall (which is an obscure reference but dead accurate if you can be bothered to Google it).

  Lyns already had a sling that she used all the time, and if Charlie didn’t want to be in his stroller when we were all together, he was usually in that. But when it was just me and Charlie, carting him around in my arms everywhere was brutal. Eventually, after considering it for a long time, I caved and ordered a carrier. (I figured if I was ever going to try it, there was no point in continuing to put it off. Or by the time I got around to it, Charlie would be a teenager, and as he sat in it, his feet would be touching the floor. It would just look like he was carrying an old man around in a rucksack.)

  When it arrived, it was shit. It was all plastic clips and straps and had an uncomfortably rigid back support. It looked like a cross between a straitjacket and the kind of industrial, no-nonsense bra that a woman who could beat the living shit out of you would wear.

  What it looked like wasn’t the only issue. After a week or so, I reviewed it on Amazon. Without reprinting the whole thing, these were my main concerns:

  • Trying to get it on feels like you’re being sexually assaulted by a set of bagpipes.

  • It says in the instructions that it’s designed so that you feel a real bond with your baby . . . when I wear it, I feel like I’m doing a tandem skydive with Verne Troyer.

  • The baby sits at exactly the right height to reverse head-butt you in the chin, but low enough to repeatedly kick you in the testicles.

  Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking from these excerpts that this was a negative review. But in fact I still gave it four stars—for the simple reason that Charlie absolutely loves it. He was suddenly four feet taller and enjoying striding around the place like he was King Kong. (After spending his first few months on the planet as a two-foot-tall weakling, climbing into his carrier he must have felt like Sigourney Weaver at the end of Aliens when she gets into that big forklift suit thing and turns dead hard.) Seeing the look of joy on his face as we took our first walk was great. But this was tempered somewhat by the horrifying realization that there was no way this boy was going back in his stroller.

  After wearing the carrier for a matter of minutes, I did try to put him back into his stroller, and he just looked at me: “Er, Dad, I ain’t getting in that, strollers are for dicks.”

  So after I posted the carrier review I was inundated with suggestions and recommendations for other models that were less testicularly aggressive. And eventually I found one that actually works pretty well, is quite comfortable, and, when trying to get it on, feels a bit less like being molested by a sea monster. Now I wear it all the time, and not just because it spares my aching arms and back: it also feels good to share a perspective with Charlie and experience the world from the same angle for a while.

  And if I look like a mangaroo or one of those “try hard” dads I was so unfair about, then fuck it, there are worse things to be.

  BY CAR

  Visiting the outside world on foot can be complicated, so you might want to take your first excursion by car.

  One of the main problems with traveling around by car is that, to begin with, it’s pretty slow going. For the first few months I drove everywhere at walking pace. I was ludicrously cautious when Charlie was in the back. But it can’t be helped; with such a fragile creature on board, you feel like you’re hurtling along at light speed only to look down and discover that you’ve topped out at sixteen miles an hour and a line of traffic is building behind you—a line of traffic that includes tractors, trailers, and a funeral procession driving right up your ass, with the bereaved relatives hanging out of the hearse windows shouting: “Fucking today, grandma!”

  (In fact, an aggressive-looking old guy with a bushy gray beard actually had a go at me for driving too slowly, a point he made by driving within a millimeter of my back bumper and giving me the universal “wanker” gesture. I’m not a road-ragey kind of person, but when we pulled up at the lights I wound down my passenger window and calmly pointed out that I was obeying the speed limit and that he should practice more caution. I think my exact words were: “Fuck off, Dumbledore.”

  Satisfied that I’d won that particular argument, I pressed the electric button to put the window back up and pressed the wrong one. Making the back window go down. And, because that back window now had a sun blind suctioned to it, the entire blind was dragged into the door of the car with a horrific grinding noise. It’s still in there somewhere. I was alongside the same guy at the next set of lights and had to face forward for the longest forty seconds of my life, as all I could see out of the corner of my eye was Albus Dumbledore pissing his pants laughing and offering the same universal gesture he’d offered a few moments before.)

  The problem with driving is that you suddenly see danger everywhere; every roundabout and set of traffic lights has a potential for disaster, and highways become a kind of dystopian death-race. It can be terrifying. The ridiculous thing is that the real problem is inside your own car. When you’re driving along, there is no greater danger than you. Constantly checking your mirror to be sure that the baby hasn’t chewed through his harness and escaped. Or, worse, turning around persistently to comfort him as he screeches about something universe-shakingly important like a dropped raisin.

  The distraction of a baby being in the car is far greater than the use of a cell phone or fiddling with the radio. It’s a bit like being carjacked, being made to drive with a gun to your head. Or, more accurately, it’s like you’ve picked up a psychotic hitchhiker who is sitting there in the backseat behaving normally for now, but could go mental at any second.

  In fact, if they really wanted to test the skill and dexterity of the modern NASCAR driver, they should fit a backseat in every car, and put a three-month-old baby in it. Six laps round the Daytona Speedway, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. would be pulling into the pit lane, frazzled and in tears, eating snot-covered chocolate, and insisting: “I can’t do this anymore.”

  CAR SEAT

  Car seats have come a long way since they were first invented in the 1930s. If you image-search pictures of the first versions, you’ll be horrified. Modern car seats are engineered by the finest of scientific minds, whereas these early versio
ns look like they were knocked together in the shed by your dad. Made out of metal and wood, they were nailed together as though the brief was to create something that in the event of a collision would collapse like an iron maiden. The makers of these things couldn’t have been less safety-conscious if they had chosen to manufacture them out of broken bottles and bears’ teeth. Not only were they phenomenally unsafe, but they look about as comfortable a place to sit as Jimmy Savile’s lap.

  In fairness, back then these things weren’t designed for comfort or safety. They were just designed to keep the baby in place. To keep it from crawling around on the backseat as you barreled along smoking a ciggie on the way home from the local dive.

  Is anyone else starting to wonder how babies of the past ever made it to adulthood? Health and safety for babies doesn’t seem to have existed before the 1980s. Before that, safety concerns seem to have been restricted to making sure that if your baby got hold of a carving knife, he held the right end. In fact, now that I think of it, in every picture of me as a kid, I’m either playing in the road, cycling without a helmet, or hurtling toward certain death on a sled made of forklift truck pallets. I certainly didn’t have a car seat. In fact, I vaguely remember spending most of my childhood arguing with my brother and sister about who’d be allowed to travel in the trunk.

  Thankfully, safety and comfort were introduced into car seats by the 1990s, and the modern ones look as though they could survive reentry into the earth’s atmosphere. They are padded, luxurious, reclining La-Z-Boys, based on the technology found in racing cars and designed to absorb the impact of any collision. Which is a great thing, especially since there are ten times as many cars on the road as when I was a kid and most of them go a lot faster than the shitty Morris Minor that was our family car (which could just about reach thirty miles an hour before it shook itself apart and caught fire).

  As I said, the finest scientific minds were brought together to create this modern car seat. The problem was that you needed the finest scientific mind to install the thing in your car. Apparently, only a few years ago, 75 percent of all car seats were installed incorrectly, and it’s not surprising. The seat belt of your car had to be threaded and looped, under and over, through baffling plastic catches, until the belt ran out of slack and you were still three inches short of actually clipping the thing in. Parents spent half the time concentrating on installing the seat and half the time fighting the demon on their shoulder that was whispering, “Fuck it, that’ll do,” reminding themselves that this was a matter of life and death, before they resorted to just duct-taping the baby to the rear headrest.

  This is why the invention of Isofix is such a great thing. Isofix is a system of little metal bars hidden in the backseat of your car. The base of a modern car seat just clips onto these bars and you don’t have to use the seat belt at all. It’s genius. And it genuinely saves lives. Not least because after four hours of fighting to install the old seat-belt style, most parents wanted to lie down in the driveway and reverse the car over their own head.

  Incidentally, our first car seat came as a package with the stroller we bought from Janet, and even though it was an Isofix design, it was with some relief that I noticed that there was an offer to have it installed in your car by in-store staff. Thank God, I thought, I’m really shit at this sort of stuff and it’s important that it’s right.

  The problem with asking for the free installation service was that Janet kept banging on about how installing these new car seats was “idiot-proof” and that “a monkey could do it.” So, despite Lyndsay quietly suggesting that we take advantage of the offer, in the end there was no way I could actually request the service. It would have been like declaring I was half a man.

  I carted the box out to the car, concerned as to whether I was up to the job.

  But on our drive home, part of me thought, maybe, just maybe, this could be a watershed moment.

  I am not what you’d describe as a manly man. I have to get my father-in-law (a six-foot-four ex-steelworker) to come by just to put up a shelf. To make matters worse, the last time he did, when he asked me to hold the level for him, I said: “Ooh, that’s cold.” . . . He just looked at me with disgust. Like I said, I’m not a macho type.

  But with this “idiot-proof” car seat installation came an opportunity, and something primal stirred within. This was an invitation to rise to a challenge. I thought, in just a few months’ time I was going to be a father, a masculine role model, the man of the house, the head of the family, a hunting, gathering protector. It was time to step up and start doing this stuff.

  I was man.

  So I took the car seat home, unpacked it all with purpose, laid out the instructions carefully, studied them for a moment . . . and then phoned Lyndsay’s dad and put the kettle on.

  PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

  No. Just no.

  . . .

  Okay, fair enough. Not all of us have the option not to use public transportation. Some people don’t drive, some people can’t afford a car, some people live in a big city. And some people are masochists who want to fight their way onto a bus, packed with people desperate to avoid eye contact just so they don’t have to give up their seat to passengers with one leg or a baby in their arms.

  In fairness, in Britain we have a great reputation for courtesy, and on the whole I think that it’s deserved. I just don’t think that it applies on the X89 from Rotherham to Doncaster. This was the last journey I took on a bus with Charlie. It was packed with ignorant assholes and was driven by a depressive who (despite having a passenger standing up with a baby in his arms) drove his bus like a stagecoach being pursued by Apaches.

  I was only on the X89 for fifteen minutes, but my fairly negative experience failed to be elevated by a group of aggressive teenagers, a daytime-drinking loon, and the haunting smell of takeout food and urine. This was the last time I took the bus with Charlie.

  If you happen to be in London, the Tube is a better option. Generally speaking, the London Underground has always been a great way to get from A to B, have your wallet stolen, or get felt up by a stranger. But, at quieter times of day, it can also be a great way of getting around with your baby. If you can avoid the stations without elevators and with exits that are seven miles from where you get off, it is perfect. At rush hour, it’s war.

  Few allowances are made for a parent and baby during the London rush hour. Understandably so. If you’ve done a soul-shreddingly shitty job for the past ten hours, all you want to do is get home. (And I’ve done some jobs that were so shitty I would have pushed Gandhi onto the third rail if he threatened to delay my journey homeward.) So you need to be prepared to fight.

  This is where I learned to wield our stroller like a mighty weapon. You may not have a Death Stroller 1000, but if you want to board a Tube at rush hour and you have a kid chariot, you need to be prepared to run up to the closing doors and ramrod the shit out of people’s ankles to get aboard.

  Once safely aboard, though, there remains a minefield of problems. Even without a baby, a packed Tube is not a particularly pleasant environment. It’s a speeding capsule of sweat and closeness that the English ordinarily find horrifying. (If we wanted to be close to other people, we’d move to one of those touchy-feely countries like France or Italy.)

  But with a stroller, you have never been more in the way. Whichever door you position yourself against will be on the side of the Tube that will open and close at every stop, to let the whole of Greater London get on and off. And while you’re constantly trying to shift yourself to a place where you are less of an obstacle, you have to always be on the lookout for what your baby is up to. A couple of times I have looked down to discover Charlie methodically emptying the contents of some oblivious woman’s handbag onto the floor. In fact, we disembarked at Covent Garden once with him clutching an eyeliner, a train ticket, and a packet of tissues. We still have no idea where he got them, but he presumably swiped them from someone else’s unattended bag. I was a clueless
Fagin to his Artful Dodger.

  THE TRAIN

  Traveling by train is very similar to traveling by the subway, and the same guiding principle exists: when it’s quiet, it’s great; when it’s peak time, it’s horrendous.

  One of our first trips was on a train to London around Christmas, and it was completely full. The only available seats on the train were in the “quiet carriage.” So we sat in them. It wasn’t ideal. I understand that people book seats in this car in the hope of peace and quiet. But our hope was that the other passengers would recognize that on a packed train with nowhere else to go, we had two choices: sit here, or place our three-month-old baby in the overhead luggage space.

  Even before Charlie made any noise, the woman across from us was harrumphing and tutting and commenting to anyone who would listen that it was supposed to be the quiet car. After about fifteen minutes, Charlie was sweetly burbling away. By which time this woman was losing her shit. Despite the fact that she was wearing earphones playing a tinny version of James Blunt, she could see that Charlie was making some sort of noise and couldn’t take it anymore. “Fucking ridiculous,” she said to herself and the rest of the carriage. At which point, I felt the need to point out the circumstances of the packed train and that human decency should probably trump her desire to listen to “You’re Beautiful” in a sensory vacuum. She disagreed: “Disgusting,” she insisted. “Disgusting.” I have never felt so uncomfortable. Particularly because the suit across from us looked equally annoyed.