Man vs. Baby Read online

  If you’re a parent, and you’re reading this with a hot beverage in your hands, it’s probably best that you put it to one side, as you’re about to read a sentence that can only be described as “piss-funny.” It was something that Lyns said as she contemplated being off work on maternity leave when the baby was born. She said, and I quote:

  “It will be nice to have time to bake.”

  Yeah. That’s how utterly blind we were to the realities of home life with a baby. And so, prior to the birth, when Lyns was planning to while away her time making brownies and cake pops, I was deciding which TV box sets to catch up on and what books I might read. We would both be off work for the first few weeks, so why wouldn’t we take advantage of that paid leave? Why wouldn’t we lead a brief life of domestic bliss while the baby slept a quiet, murmuring sleep, waking only occasionally to be contentedly fed?

  Fast-forward two weeks, and we were shuffling around our home like gibbering shit-wrecks: Lyns trying to find the time to make a slice of toast, as I chose to forgo the reading of novels to read online advice about cracked nipples, and forgot about box sets to watch YouTube videos about the optimum color of milk shit. We didn’t have time to make cake or watch Breaking Bad, any more than we had time to wipe away the stress-spit gathering at the corners of our foaming mouths.

  By the time we’d left the hospital, we had read about the practicalities of going home and all the advice about what to expect. But what the advice had failed to convey is this: it’s hard.

  Really hard.

  TIME AND SPACE

  You cannot fail to be awed by the strength and stamina of a woman in labor, but her capacity for strength following birth is a thing to behold. Recovering from the physical and mental strain of childbirth requires sleep, care, and attention. But, in coming home, women find themselves in a place in which all attention (including their own) is undividedly on the new arrival, and sleep is just a grand idea. They carry the burden of feeding, the burden of comfort, and, in Lyndsay’s case, the burden of my ignorance and stupidity. For new moms, the transition between giving birth and looking after a baby is seamless in time, but jarring in reality, like walking out of a car crash and being made to spin plates. For women who give birth, there is no recovery time because there is no time.

  So it seems glib to say that it’s tough for both parents. But it is. With a newborn in residence, your home instantly becomes a workplace. A workplace with the most intense pressure, brutal working hours and conditions, where you don’t get breaks or vacations and no one wanders up to your desk, slaps you on the back, and says: “Hey, Bob! Great job today, take the rest of the week off.”

  When we returned home from the hospital, it was to exactly the same pile of bricks that we had left just a few days before, but we were now mommy and daddy, and consequently this was a strange place, a singularity where time was swallowed up in a daily gulp.

  Time has no meaning here. You look at the clock and it’s 7:30 a.m., then the next time you look it’s Thursday. There is no day, there is no night. Just the distance between coffees and those blissful moments on the toilet when you get a breather.

  For two weeks I didn’t shower, didn’t shave, and barely ate, and neither of us escaped from bathrobes and sweatpants. We looked like the forgotten patients in the basement of a Victorian asylum. And I smelled like a hobo had taken a shit in a shopping bag.

  We certainly didn’t have time to wash and iron our own clothes. Most of us have experienced what it is like to return home from a vacation and find that you have nothing clean to wear. For a few days you are forced to dig in the back of the closet among the dregs of your sartorial history. New parents face the same problem, taken to the extreme. During this period, I once answered the door to a woman collecting for Guide Dogs for the Blind. I had a thousand-yard stare and a beard you could bury a burrito in, and was wearing a Star Wars bathrobe, boxer shorts, rubber boots, and a T-shirt I got free with a Kiss album, with the words Pull the trigger on my love gun printed on it. The woman took a step back as I opened the front door, looking as though she wasn’t sure if she should ask for a donation or start fishing for her pepper spray.

  She knew what I knew when I looked in the mirror: I was a man on the edge. And Lyns stood next to me staring into the same abyss.

  Within the first few days of Charlie’s arrival, we were wrecked. In the UK, when you leave the hospital with your baby, a health visitor regularly visits you at home for the first couple of months to check how you’re coping. When the health visitor came for our first appointment, she asked us how we felt, and I replied for both of us: “Happy, but completely fucked.” Lyndsay was so tired she didn’t even apologize for my language. Our health visitor smiled politely and said we were doing fine and tried to reassure us that it would get easier and that having a baby was a “steep learning curve.” Which is true, in the same way that Everest is a bit hilly.

  First-Time Parents’ Learning Curve:

  The good news is that this period is as hard as it gets. After the first few weeks, it does get a bit easier. Coming home is a baptism by fire (and there is no doubt it burns), but you learn quickly and feverishly. And, as you develop your own system for dealing with the daily challenges, it becomes possible to carve out small fragments of time, to take stock and evaluate your progress. To put your arms around your partner and enjoy the tiny fingers and toes of your brand-new person and a life less ordinary.

  The bad news is that your learning curve now starts to look like this:

  And I’m not sure it ever stops looking like this. It’s just a case of adjusting.

  THE NEST

  We thought we had prepared for this “adjustment.” Or at least prepared our home. The experts call it “nesting,” the compulsion to make sure that everything is perfect before the baby arrives. For most animals and birds, nesting means making the environment safe and comfortable. For humans, it involves turning that room where you normally dump all the crap into a nursery.

  For most parents-to-be, the “baby’s room” becomes a focus of this nesting impulse. Understandably so. Up until now the baby’s home has been the womb, the most comfortable environment a human will ever experience. For your new arrival, the womb was warm and safe, and everything needed was provided on tap. The baby was then pulled, kicking and screaming, backward through a hole one-tenth the size of its own head, into a room in which everyone was crying and losing their shit.

  The least we can do is make their new bedroom nice.

  (The most obvious way to make the baby feel welcome would be to decorate the room as the insides of a person. In fact, I’ve thought about crowdfunding a range of interior wall coverings called the Living Womb line. Parents could decorate their nurseries in our “amniotic sac eggshell purple,” with such features as “uterine lining” wallpaper. I suggested the idea to Lyns, but she didn’t seem that convinced as she just mouthed the word “idiot” under her breath and carried on with what she was doing.)

  Most parents decorate the baby’s room in the most unthreatening ways they can imagine. With wall-stenciled alphabets and stars, fluffy toys, bright furniture, and welcoming gender-specific colors. We go to great lengths to make the nursery a cheery and colorful environment, excitedly adding more and more cutesy, adorable stuff. Until it looks like a suicide Care Bear has detonated its vest in the center of the room and its insides of clouds and stars and wishes and rainbows have been splattered all over the walls.

  Whatever your taste, it has to be perfect; it’s not until later that we discover that the baby probably won’t sleep in this room until it is old enough to request that it be redecorated. And while this room is held like a shrine, the rest of the house begins to resemble an abject, cluttered hovel.

  Babies just aren’t compatible with modern living: it’s all the stuff.

  STUFF

  Babies were fine in days gone by when trends in home furnishing tended toward filling your house with knickknacks, when a home was defined by its sideb
oards cluttered with photographs and ornaments. But modern living aspires to minimalism and simplicity. We read magazines and watch TV programs that talk about “clean lines” and “feng shui,” but when a baby is brought into that environment, the closest you can get to feng shui is to put the diaper pail somewhere you can’t smell it while you’re eating.

  Bizarrely, from my observations, it seems it doesn’t matter how big your home is: the main issue will always be a lack of space. We live in a pretty average-size house. But, whether you live in a studio apartment or a mansion, whatever space you have will be filled.

  Prince William and Kate’s Kensington Palace home has fifty-seven rooms, but I bet when the Queen pops round for a visit, she’s still tripping over a VTech walker on her way to the lav.

  It’s some sort of law of physics or mathematics that only applies to a house with a baby in it: (As+Bs) Vh. Or, Acquired Shit plus Bought Shit is directly proportional to the Volume of your home. Nature abhors a vacuum, and never more so than in a house with a new baby in it.

  To illustrate the impact of all this on a home in the weeks following birth, let’s take a quick tour around the average three-bedroom home with a small baby in it.

  In fact, my average three-bedroom home with a small baby in it.

  . . . Watch your step.

  OUR HOUSE

  The Hallway

  As we enter through the front door, you will notice the massive accumulation of stuff in this small passageway. One of the reasons we haven’t been out much since Charlie was born is because we can’t get past all this shit to reach the front door and the outside. This small thoroughfare is permanently full of the gear you need to be battle-ready to go out into the world: stroller, waterproof covers, changing bag, toys, car seat. When I used to come home from work, I would fling open the front door, casually toss aside my coat and keys, and stroll to the fridge for a beer. Now it’s no small achievement if I can muster enough shoulder strength to force the front door open against the crap on the other side before clambering over it all in search of the living room.

  The Living Room

  Having fought through the hallway, we arrive, on our tour, in the living room. (Please ignore the people drinking tea: they are straggling visitors who refuse to fuck off. I’m looking at you, Aunt Pat.)

  We spent the previous nine months emptying the local Buy Buy Baby store into this living space. And so bassinets, bouncers, baby walkers, and changing stations all jostle for space alongside the more traditional living room furniture of sofa and TV. We bought too much. I’ve cried three times this year: once when I first saw Charlie on a scan, once when he was born, and once when our Visa card statement arrived. We definitely bought too much. But then the relatives arrived with more. And as the first-week visitors trooped in with gifts and toys, and the offloading parents arrived with boxes of stuff they no longer needed, we squeezed it all in, and stacked it against the stuff we already had. Filling the space like we were playing Tetris.

  The Kitchen

  The kitchen isn’t much better. Nobody has too much space in their kitchen cupboards. You fill the gaps over the years with novelty mugs and pint glasses you stumbled home from the local bar with. So when you suddenly require the room for sterilizers and stuff, you soon realize that your kitchen is tiny, and has all the storage space of a hobbit’s ass. As you can see, every cupboard overflows and every work surface is covered with spoons, teethers, and bottles. And, because each bottle disassembles into sixty-seven working parts, you have to move thousands of pieces of plastic and rubber nipples from one surface to another, just to find the kettle.

  You will notice the impressive Jenga stack of washing-up that reaches from sink to ceiling—no one’s doing that anytime soon. Neither is anyone mopping the kitchen floor, the stickiness of which can be attributed to carrying a baby and food, tea, or coffee at the same time. The kitchen floor is a fine example of how we are discovering new depths of hygiene. It used to be that if the kitchen floor was shiny, then it was adequately clean. Now we accept it as clean if it isn’t sticky enough to suck your shoes off as you walk to the dishwasher.

  The Stairs

  Careful as we head up the stairs. Even this area is not immune to the effects of nesting. Because, like a moron, the one thing I did find time to do before the birth was fit a stair-gate. You now have to open and close this bloody thing every time you walk through it, as if we’re observing the fucking country codeI in our own house. Obviously, this was fitted two years too early, and is just an additional obstacle in a house that now seems to have been designed by an idiot.

  The Bathroom

  More clutter. Plastic baby bath, baby toiletries, and a menagerie of plastic floaty dolphins, ducks, and penguins. SAFETY ANNOUNCEMENT: Please try not to touch anything in this room. On the surface it may appear to be fine, but, in my attempts not to disturb the baby, I have avoided turning the light on in this room when I go to the toilet at night. Consequently, I have been urinating in almost complete darkness in here since he was born. As I say, it appears clean, but I suspect that if you could get one of those forensic UV luminol lamps that show up urine, you could turn out the lights and this room would light up like a Jackson Pollock piss-party.

  Bedroom One

  As we take a look in bedroom one, please try to stay together. Bedroom one is now The Dump or The Overflow. The room where we put all the junk displaced when we created the nursery. It also houses anything else that won’t fit in our other rooms, all the stuff we may need later, and also the gear we wishfully think we might list on eBay one day. This room is basically wall-to-wall shit. We used to have a drawer like this; now it’s a room, floor to ceiling packed with Jesus only knows what. (When we first started putting stuff in this room, we did attempt some sort of order by packing everything into cardboard boxes. But, because this bedroom overlooks the driveway, this pile of boxes around the window just makes the room look unnervingly like the “crow’s nest” from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK.)

  Bedroom Two

  Bedroom two is our room. Mine and Lyndsay’s. The two main purposes of this room have for many years been sleep and sex. Both of which have been suspended indefinitely. Not least because this is where the baby sleeps. It is recommended that your baby sleep in your room for the first six months, so that is the arrangement we have. An arrangement that makes the pristine nursery across the landing seem all the more absurd.

  This is where we spend most of our time, so the room is best appreciated as a kind of Tracey Emin art installation of half-finished mugs of coffee, plates, discarded clothing, and general disarray. Half-open drawers spill their contents into an already chaotic scene, giving the impression that a yard sale has just been abandoned after coming under mortar attack. There used to be a children’s TV show in the nineties called Finders Keepers in which kids were given helmets and fanny packs and invited to “raid the room,” which basically meant finding prizes by ransacking the living fuck out of a fake house. Our bedroom looks like the closing credits of Finders Keepers if the kids had been allowed to prepare for the show by snorting bath salts.

  The Nursery

  And the final stop on our visit is the nursery.

  An oasis of calm. A pristine monument to babyhood.

  Which no one ever goes in.

  (Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our tour. Don’t forget to tip your guides and leave through the gift shop, collecting your complimentary wet wipe to remove any stains you may have accrued on today’s visit.)

  So, apart from the nursery, in these early days every room in the house is a disaster zone. We lived in such order before. But now the whole place is crammed with crap and in such a state that it always looks as though we’ve just been burgled by bastards. For the first time in all the years we have lived in this house, there is a sense that the walls are closing in. And what was once a light and perfect home is now just a couple of trips to Babies“R”Us away from being as functional as one of those hoarders’ homes where
the occupants are found dead. Buried under an avalanche of unnecessary and useless shit.

  THE PROPS OF PARENTING

  And this was how our home was destroyed. Or became a “family home.” And, sure enough, the house, congested as it was with cribs and toys and clothes and all the trappings of a young family, did suddenly look like a place where a young family lived. But, in a strange way, this made it all the more difficult to think of myself as a parent. It felt uncomfortably like we were surrounded by props and were in an amateur dramatic production of a family rather than a real one.

  As I looked around at all our baby paraphernalia, I felt like we had amassed all this stuff in our home, re-creating the conditions of being a parent, in the hope that we would begin to feel like one.

  But something strange happens while you’re pretending to be a parent: imperceptibly, you realize that you are becoming one. And it’s not the accumulated stuff that now fills your house that makes that happen. (You can’t make a parent out of books, furniture, and toys.) In some ways, it’s not even love or affection that begins the transformation into mom or dad. In those early days it is something much more scary. It is a dawning realization that you are utterly responsible for this infant’s survival. He won’t live without you getting your shit together. You quite literally hold his life in your hands, and it’s okay to be scared because good parents are born and made in the fear of fucking that up.