Man vs. Baby Read online

  But then something remarkable happened. That same suit turned to the woman and said: “You’re the one who’s disgusting, where do you want them to go?” Before she could respond, a woman sitting next to her turned to us and said: “It’s fine, don’t worry, he’s not bothering me.” And then another woman in the seats behind us: “Me neither, he’s a very well behaved little man.”

  It was as if the woman across the aisle wanted us crucified and the whole carriage stood up to declare: “I’m Spartacus.” (Well, maybe not the entire carriage, but at least three people Spartacussed to our aid.)

  The tables were turned, and the woman went back to listening to James Blunt, seething.

  After a tough couple of months adjusting to our new world, this incident restored something of our faith in people. Me and Lyns talk about it between ourselves, and it has attained mythic status in our minds. It’s as if we slayed a dragon. And, in a way, we did. But it wasn’t the woman across the aisle who was slayed; it was our fear that we would always be made to feel like we were intruding, always made to feel uncomfortable just because we were in the company of a baby. If we could find that support in the quiet carriage of a train, we could find it anywhere. The people who are dicks about babies are a minority.

  So if you are one of the people who stood up to defend a couple of newbie parents on the 16:20 Doncaster to London on December 3 and by some miracle you’re reading this, I want to say thank you.

  And if you are the stocky woman who was in seat 16A: I want you to know that your taste in music is shit, and that big red blouse you were wearing made you look like a fucking pirate.

  GOOD PEOPLE/BAD PEOPLE

  In truth, some people just don’t like babies. They find them annoying. And I get it. They are annoying. But you know what? There are a thousand things about the outside and my fellow humans that I find annoying. (Not least the sound of James Blunt being piped through tinny headphones.) Isn’t it true that we have to express tolerance for our fellow man every day? Otherwise, we would all just be wandering around looking to be pissed off at something all the time, and that would make us no better than the people who haunt the comments section of Breitbart News.

  So, if you are one of those people unable to express tolerance for a mom or dad struggling with their child and you are accidentally reading this book, you should understand something: restaurants, airplanes, buses, shopping centers—these are all public places, they are not your fucking bedroom. We are not hanging out in your house. And if you can’t express tolerance for a baby, then you don’t have the tolerance to be outdoors. If you’re really allergic, then there are a thousand places you can go where you can avoid them: casinos, strip joints, pretty much anywhere after 9 p.m. All the really fun places. Or why not just stay at home so that you don’t have to roll your eyes and sigh and make parents feel like shit because their day is not going quite according to plan?

  Here is the fundamental truth: no one arrived into the world as a fully formed adult. Not one person. We were all these dribbling, snot-covered, screeching, feral beasties once. And although we can’t remember that stage of our lives, I guarantee that every single one of us was disruptive and noisy and really fucking annoying. So, when it comes down to it, to be bent out of shape because you find yourself in the presence of a baby is hypocritical, and you may need to consider the possibility that you’re being a dick.

  OLD LADIES

  At the opposite end of the scale from the eye-rolling baby-haters is a group of people who really like babies. A group of people who can be a great antidote to the negativity of the anti-baby lot: old ladies. Although I joked in the introductory post about avoiding them, to be honest, for the most part it’s actually quite pleasant to be stopped by a lovely old lady for a chat and for her to admire your offspring. It’s a great way to try out your new role as mommy or daddy and get used to the idea that that’s what you now are.

  It’s also a great way of easing your way back into conversation with adults, since you only need three pieces of information:

  1. What is the baby’s name?

  2. How old is he/she now?

  3. What was his/her birth weight?

  It’s less a conversation and more like they’re carrying out a census.

  The old lady asking the questions will respond to each answer you give with cooing noises like “awwww” and “ooooh,” as if she’s recovering from a recent head injury.

  In fact, even if you can’t remember the answers to these three questions, it doesn’t matter—they’re not listening anyway. After about the twentieth time of being stopped, I just started making stuff up to see if they were actually paying attention or were just baby-drunk:

  “Aaah, what’s his name?”

  “Wilberforce Fuckleberry.”

  “Aaah, how old is he?”

  “He’ll be sixty-two next Michaelmas Day.”

  “Aaah, how much did he weigh?”

  “The same as a large bat.”

  “Aaaah,” they still respond with the glazed eyes and face of a recently satiated paint huffer.

  Even though no one’s actually listening to me during these conversations, on the whole I enjoy them. These women love Charlie. They really do. They love your baby too. They love all babies, and that’s just a really sweet and beautiful thing.

  But sometimes you really don’t feel like telling the twentieth person that day how much your baby weighed at birth (incidentally, it’s always a “good weight”), and other times you just really need to get something done. And on these occasions, lovely old ladies can present a real time hazard. They will happily spend hours just trying to raise a smile from your baby, and generally speaking, let’s face it: unlike you, they’ve got fuck-all else to do.

  If you don’t want to be rude, avoidance is the best strategy. I mentioned in the introduction that avoiding elderly ladies can be like playing the old arcade classic Frogger (an eighties video game in which you have to dodge hazards to reach your destination). In fact, as the old women in your area get to know you, they begin to be able to spot you from a distance. So around our local streets it has become a lot more like playing Pac-Man.

  In our village I now know exactly where the old women live and congregate, and, as there are quite a few of them, I have had to match their cunning and devise a circuitous route to get to and from the shops without being accosted:

  This might seem overly complicated, but you underestimate these old women at your peril. The native English old lady is a natural herder, and they tend to hunt in packs. If you don’t head for the shops with a solid plan and a route, you can easily find yourself ambushed. Or, much worse, herded into an area heavily populated with other old ladies: hot zones like the post office or the library or, God forbid, the sinkhole of time: the doctor’s office, where there’s an ever-replenishing army of old ladies. . . . If you get encircled there, you might as well crack open your ration packs and call your partner to request extraction.

  So old ladies are a great antidote to the pitchforks and torches of the anti-baby mob, and I think, on the whole, they are more representative of society’s attitude toward babies, which is generally positive. Evidence of this positivity can be found in the everyday concessions that society makes to parents, things like drop curbs and parent and baby parking spaces.

  CONCESSIONS

  The baby-changing room

  Baby-changing rooms are one of these concessions. It is amazing how much a baby-changing room sign can mean to parents when their infant has just detonated a level nine in a packed shopping mall. This symbol is a beacon, a light guiding us to a place of refuge. A panic room. Baby-changing rooms can be more than places to change a diaper: they can be rooms to retreat to and regroup. The great ones are pristine, hygienic, comfortable even. These oases of calm have everything on hand, from hands-free antibacterial soap to changing-mat covers. They are illuminated with soft lighting, and calming music plays to soothe the frazzled nerves of the parent. Those are the good ones. />
  Unfortunately, the good baby-changing rooms are few and far between, and the bad ones are about as welcoming as Death’s asshole.

  You can normally tell, before you even open the door, by its grim handle and the crooked sign above the entrance: ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE. And, as you open the door, there is a rumble of thunder and a dog howls plaintively in the distance. Welcome to a cubicle of doom.

  A flickering strip-light overhead illuminates what appears to be a disused crack house. If you are lucky, there isn’t the chalk line of a recent murder victim still visible on the stained floor. You notice one of those “This facility was last checked by” sheets on the wall, but it’s just a stone tablet hanging from an ancient cobweb (“This facility was last checked by Pliny the Elder in AD 74”).

  And, cold, shivering, and wary, you approach the fold-down shelf.

  . . . A shelf that appears to have been used by a tramp hosing off his balls. It’s fucking filthy. You wouldn’t euthanize a dying beaver on this thing, let alone change your baby. (Also, there always seem to be food crumbs in the hinges, like you’d find in an oven door. Who the fuck is feeding their baby on this??)

  Who hasn’t taken one look into a place like this and opted to change their baby somewhere more appropriate, like the car, or a bench, or a derelict pig-shed?

  But sometimes you’re desperate. Sometimes there is no choice. So you place the most precious thing in your life onto a surface that has enough bacteria to wipe out France. And demand that your clueless infant not touch anything. As your baby, instead, decides that this is the appropriate time to start pawing everything in sight and licking the walls.

  The worst thing about the bad baby-changing rooms isn’t even the hygiene level, or the fact that they look like Jeffrey Dahmer’s abandoned cellar. It is the fact that nothing is ever replenished. The box of changing-mat covers is empty, the soap dispenser just spits out dust, and you are lucky to find water that’s running, let alone hot.

  And the design of these places is clearly the job of an idiot. Why is everything out of reach? What is the point of having a big sign saying DON’T LEAVE YOUR BABY ON THIS SURFACE UNATTENDED if you are then going to place the soap, the trash can, the sink, and everything else precisely twelve inches beyond arm’s length? The average arm-span of a human is five feet seven inches. Just put everything within that fucking range!!! Jesus.

  Even if you and your baby survive the ordeal of changing, there is still the specter of the industrial diaper bin: the throbbing, glowing, radioactive container in the corner of the room, slowly cultivating the virus that fucked everyone over in the film Outbreak. Obviously, the foot pedal doesn’t work, so you have to use your hands to pry open the lid and close it quickly, before the gas that is released has the same face-melting effect as opening the Ark of the Covenant had on the Gestapo dude in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  Baby-changing rooms are supposed to make life easier, and on the whole they do. It reflects well on a society that it wants to soften a new parent’s day with this sort of provision. There is no legal obligation to provide these rooms, so clearly businesses believe that they are a good way of encouraging young families with cash to spend to come on in. It seems strange, then, that they go to the trouble of creating such a room and then make it the kind of space that a baddie from Scooby-Doo wouldn’t take a dump in.

  The parking space

  Another concession to the struggling parent is the parent and child parking space which can be found outside almost all stores and malls in the UK. They are wider spaces than usual, which means you can get your stroller and baby out of the car without reducing the car parked next to you to scrap, as you repeatedly smash your own car door against it. They are also usefully closer to the entrance if your kids are a bit older and you don’t want them wildly running around the parking lot like it’s Six Flags. These spaces make sense. At my local mini-supermarket, there are just three parent and baby spaces, placed a few feet from the entrance. And, on the whole, people don’t abuse the system. But one persistent offender is always parking his crappy car in one of these slots. Usually the one nearest the door. Almost every other night he’s parked in it, so that he can save his legs the thirteen feet extra walking distance to the door. The really infuriating thing is that, judging by his clothes, he’s clearly on his way to or from the gym. He’s not incapacitated, he doesn’t have kids, he’s just a dickhead.

  On one occasion, I thought about confronting this guy as he went into the shop. But in the end I decided to take the moral high ground . . . on account of him being extremely aggressive-looking and built like a wardrobe. Instead, I did what any right-minded English coward would do and left him a note that I stuck to his windshield:

  It’s amazing how becoming a parent shifts your perspective and makes you observe your environment and the behavior of others differently. I never really noticed before we had Charlie when someone was parked in a parent and baby space illegally. If I did, I probably thought: Well, that’s a bit unreasonable, I wish that person would show a little more consideration for others. Now when I see someone without kids parking in one of these spaces, I think: I hope you die in a Dumpster fire.

  It’s a sign of a civilized society that allowances are made for our newest generation; it is an indication of the value that we place on them and their parents. The problem is that this relies on the participation of others: the implicit agreement of the rest of society that there is a decent way of behaving, an understanding that you don’t use these spaces if you don’t need to.

  And, on a serious point, these are the same people who park in disabled spots. Which is a far shittier thing to do than occupying a space for young families. So, if you are one of these people, I ask, on behalf of the rest of civilization, that you take a long hard look in the mirror—and then bash your head against it until you stop being such a massive penis.

  EMBRACING THE OUTSIDE

  So, for the new parent, the main issue with the outside is the same problem that has always existed with the outside: other people. But not all people, just the usuals: the antisocial, the selfish, the assholes.

  Outside is a tricky place, and to begin with it is a place to be feared. And it doesn’t help that, in the wild, there are those who will make your excursion harder. Those who will be unhelpful or make you feel inadequate or uncomfortable, as if you are intruding on a space that in truth isn’t theirs. But the one thing that all new parents learn quickly is that you have to develop a skin thick enough to deflect the pointy sticks and daggers of other people, and to ignore the minority who would rather you weren’t there. Or, better still, embrace all that: the way that people respond to you as a parent, good or bad, helps to make you feel like one.

  One thing is certain: you cannot allow inconvenience or the ignorance of others to force you and your baby to stay at home. You invited this incredible creature into the world, so you might as well let that creature see it. And not just for his or her benefit, but for yours. Letting your baby see the wider world can be rejuvenating. Babies watch everything from a sunset to a car wash with wonder. The mundane is transformed into the extraordinary by the way they look at things as brand-new. Hand a baby a blade of grass and watch him turn it over and over in his hand. It’s remarkable.

  So, for what it’s worth, my advice to any new parent? Head out into the world. Experience what it’s like to be stopped by lovely old ladies, to be glared at by miserable diners, and to be many, many miles from home with only one wet wipe left and a baby about to enter beast mode.

  And when you’re ready . . .

  Take them farther. . . .

  Man vs. Baby, Blog Post: April 20

  So, we’ve just come back from Charlie’s first holiday . . . abroad.

  One or two people were a bit judgy about the idea of taking a six-month-old away. “So, you’re taking him on holiday?” Yeah. “Abroad?” Yeah. “Somewhere hot??” Yeah. “On an airplane???” . . . By which point I was tempted to answer: “No, me
and Lyns will be going on the plane, but we thought we’d get Charlie there by driving him to Dover and firing him out of a fucking cannon.”

  What I actually said was: “It’ll be fine.” And you know what? It was.

  Here’s some other stuff I learned holidaying with our tiny human.

  We had a checklist for what to pack; it had just one item on it: “Everything.”

  • Don’t take an expensive stroller on a flight. The moment you check in and it disappears behind that rubber curtain, it is collected by two WWF wrestlers who smash it against a wall for half an hour before it is transferred to the runway, where they reverse the plane over it a couple of times before placing it in the hold.

  • At your destination, for some bizarre reason you have to collect whatever is left of your stroller (a wheel) from a baggage carousel that’s fucking miles away (I’m sure our stroller ended up closer to the airport we’d just left).

  • When airlines say they have “baby-changing facilities,” what they actually mean is: “a shelf.”

  • Changing a baby in a plane bathroom is a bit like trying to carve a turkey in a phone box, but half the size of the fucking phone box, having arranged for an incontinent dickhead to bang on the door every five seconds.

  • If your baby will sit quietly during the flight, that’s great; if your baby will sleep, even better. If, like Charlie, your little one likes to “stand” up all the time, you can look forward to what feels like a midget river-dancing on your bollocks for the next four hours.