Man vs. Baby Page 5
NO GOING HOME
Here’s the truth:
There is no going home. The home you left behind just a few hours/days before? It’s gone.
What we left behind, when we raced to the hospital, was a home in which we could casually decide to watch a film, open a bottle of wine, nip to the pub for a quick pint, have a conversation, a shower, a piss . . . think.
Our home was designed to be a place of solace, a place of escape. But now it turned out that the thing we had spent so long trying to escape had followed us home and we had invited it in. And everyone knows that with soul-sucking monsters, the worst thing you can do is invite them in.
It just makes them all the more powerful.
But here’s the thing: it turns out that monsters, for all their soul-sucking, can be a beautiful transforming power, and inviting ours in was the single greatest thing we ever did. Yes, our environment was changed. We had a great life before Charlie’s arrival, and I’m not going to say anything as sentimental as it took him to make our house a home. Our home was already a home. It took Charlie to make it a bomb site, a wreck, a place where time is chewed up and we are spat out, a place of anarchy, chaos, and madness.
And who could possibly have thought that all this was exactly what our home had been lacking?
* * *
I. The country code is a set of rules that you are expected to abide by when walking in the British countryside. The main one being to close gates behind you . . . so cows and sheep don’t go wandering off.
3
* * *
SLEEP
I fear sleep may not be on the agenda tonight.
It is bedtime, but Charlie’s just given me that look that says:
“Well, Father, I have very much enjoyed my bathtime, I am more than pleased with the book you’ve just read (as you know, Zog is a personal favorite). And I am, as ever, enjoying the $27.99 Rainforest Friends lullaby lamp you purchased from Amazon. The soothing tunes are most enjoyable, and the combination of classical and jazz I’ve always found a great pacifier.
“That said, I think it’s only fair to let you know that, despite your admirable efforts, should you try to place me in my crib this evening, I fully intend to melt the fuck down as if I’m being water-boarded by Iraqi police.
“I will thrash, kick, arch my back with spine-defying gymnastics, and generally behave as though I am being lowered into an active volcano rather than my bed.
“I don’t give a shit that I’m tired: by the time either of us gets to sleep tonight, the neighbors will think that you’re slaughtering livestock. So strap in, dickhead, for tonight we find out what you’re made of.”
. . . I’ll pop some coffee on.
SLEEP
* * *
I remember the exact moment I realized that sleep deprivation was beginning to have an impact on me. It was after about three months and I’d just been caught staring at a woman’s breasts in Pret A Manger.
Actually, I wasn’t staring at her breasts, I was staring at the croissant on the cafeteria table in front of her. I’d noticed the croissant. Then I thought about how hungry I was. I then wondered how you make croissants, and then I began to think about what a funny-sounding word that was . . . croissant, croissant, croissss- . . .
I’d entered into what sleep scientists call a hypnagogic state. It’s perfectly common when suffering from sleep deprivation, a state of mind in which you stare off into space and enter a dreamlike haze of consciousness. At least, that’s what I would have told the court, had the woman at Pret called the police to complain that a pasty-looking man had just spent fifteen minutes staring at her boobs, drooling and mouthing the word croissant.
I must have looked insane. And in a way I was. Sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture for a reason. It breaks the spirit by assaulting the mind. It leaves you physically and emotionally wrecked and incapable of sound judgment and, ironically, everything else you need to be the functioning guardian of a small infant. (It also turns you into a baked-goods-obsessed pervert.)
SLEEP DEPRIVATION
Strangely, sleep deprivation is not specifically banned by the Geneva Convention. It should be. But even those backward societies that still use torture techniques think twice about using it as a means of interrogation. Not because it isn’t cruel and unusual enough, but because it turns the subject into a useless gibbering fuckwit from whom nothing useful can be obtained.
Amen.
Have you ever tried to hold a conversation with the parent of a newborn? It is like debating chess strategy with a potted plant. It is impossible to obtain anything approaching information. They are incoherent. Their mind wanders like a child’s. They respond to questions inappropriately and answer yes or no to questions that don’t have yes-or-no answers.
If the effects of sleep withdrawal on a captured prisoner are the same as on a new parent, then any interrogation would go something like this:
“Where are the stolen nuclear warheads?”
“What? Oh the . . . [yawn], erm . . .”
“What is your mission?”
“No . . . I don’t, erm . . . er, what?”
“Are you part of the Janus program?”
“. . . er, huh-huh . . . [snigger] you said ‘anus.’ ”
“For fuck’s sake, let this dickhead sleep. When he wakes up we’ll try hooking his nuts up to a car battery.”
SLEEP, PREBIRTH
For years I have listened to and participated in those nonconversations that we tend to have when someone has a baby. The standard ribbing about the lack of sleep: “Are you getting any sleep yet?” “Is she keeping you up?” etc. I didn’t realize how unfunny all that shit was. I mean, I knew these sorts of comments were never funny. But, now that I’m on the receiving end of them, I would place them on the funny scale somewhere between ball surgery and the CBS series Two Broke Girls.
I now want to go back to each of those people I flippantly joked with and apologize. Like most nonparents, I assumed that parents who complained about lack of sleep were talking about something simple: that when a baby is in the house, they wake you up during the night and therefore your sleep is broken and ineffective. But, in truth, it’s not the night-waking that kills you. It’s the month-on-month, cumulative effect of lack of sleep.
And the really shocking thing? You’re already screwed before the little blighter has made its brutal, nightmarish, kick-the-fucking-doors-in entrance. By the time the birth comes, you are already sleep-deprived.
Maybe you are one of the lucky ones, or you’re a sociopath—the kind of nonworrier able to get a reasonable amount of sleep in the nine-month countdown to birth—but it’s doubtful. For most parents-to-be, the stress and fear of what is coming kill sleep like amphetamines. For the three months before Charlie’s birth, I was way too wired to sleep; every time I tried to close my eyes I felt jacked up, as if I’d been mainlining cocaine or drinking Lance Armstrong’s piss.
Practically, for the pregnant mother, just before the birth is about as uncomfortable as pregnancy gets. As Lyns describes it, “You’re the size of a bungalow, your feet are swollen like clown shoes, and your bladder is the baby’s hugging pillow.” The nonpregnant one has a far lesser burden, but he is still responsible for getting his bungalow in and out of bed to go to the bathroom, massaging away cramps, and lying to his partner and telling her everything’s going to be fine, when he himself feels as out of depth as an astronaut in a submarine.
This is all before the contractions start.
Prebirth is a sleep-free zone.
Then (as I may have already mentioned) the birth itself takes ages. And you’d be surprised how little napping occurs in a room in which someone is ejecting a mewling bowling ball through a vagina.
So, yeah, by the time the baby arrives you are already wiped out, already suffering from an extreme form of jet lag. But this is a jet lag where you never actually get off the plane. And the baby’s here now. So, that jet you’re on? . . . It just crashed
into the side of a mountain.
SLEEP, POSTBIRTH
The NHS advice on arrival is to nap when the baby naps:
Try to sleep when your child sleeps. It might be tempting to use this time to catch up with housework or other chores but sometimes getting rest is more important. Set an alarm if you’re worried about sleeping too long.
So there you go: Ignore those “tempting” chores. And take care not to sleep too long.
. . . ?
What. The. Fuck!?
What parallel universe exists in which this advice applies? To anyone? The National Health Service is the finest and most noble of all great British institutions. But this particular bit of wisdom must have been written by a high-school intern, or someone who had randomly wandered in from the emergency room after a bang on the head.
If you were to ask a new parent if one of their concerns was sleeping too long, they would rank that concern right up there with fear of being abducted by time-traveling fruit. Sleeping too long? Not a big worry.
That said, part of this advice is repeated everywhere. Sleep when the baby sleeps. And, in fairness, on the face of it, it makes sense.
After all, apparently a newborn baby sleeps on average sixteen hours a day. (When I first read that stat, I assumed it was a typo, but it’s true). So, if the baby sleeps for sixteen hours a day, and you are encouraged to sleep at the same time, you nonparents might be forgiven for thinking: What’s the problem? You lazy bastard.
Well, the problem is that babies sleep in fifteen-minute bursts. The rest of the time they’re feeding, or crapping, or throwing up, or needing changing. So by the time you’ve sorted out the devastation they have created in the previous fifteen minutes, they’re awake again. And the longest spell of sleep you’ve managed since the day before was at about 2 a.m. when you remembered to blink.
This is what expectant parents don’t realize. It’s what I didn’t realize. And it’s because there is nothing to prepare you. I read a parenting magazine recently that had a long, center-page article entitled “Enjoying Your Newborn” that shared expert tips for expectant parents. Stuff like this:
Take the time to enjoy this period, it is a time you’ll never get back.
And:
The joy of your first few weeks with your newborn are special. Pure treasure.
Mm. Before we had Charlie, I would have said that these tips were touching and sweet. But now I realize that this sort of “expert advice” is a denial of reality and offers nothing in preparedness.
Now when I think of that magazine, I consider it negligent. The author of “Enjoying Your Newborn” should be ashamed. Writers of this dangerous nonsense are Romans, their readers are Christians, and parenthood is a pack of hungry lions.
It all seems harmless, but at best, it is the pointless philosophy you find on Internet memes with a sunset in the background. At worst, it contributes to the feelings of inadequacy and guilt that all new parents feel. A sense of failure, just because they are not able to wander around as new parents with big dumb grins on their faces all the time, enjoying every minute.
You can’t enjoy every minute. It’s too hard. And, besides, enjoyment isn’t a measure of love. Sometimes it’s enough to be awake.
When, a couple of months ago, the same parenting magazine asked me for a tip for expectant parents, I sent them this:
I’ll be honest. I haven’t heard back.
COMPETITIVE TIREDNESS
Inevitably, in the stress cauldron of parenthood, new parents bicker and argue, and the subject of sleep becomes the most bitterly fought of battlegrounds. Competitive tiredness is the sport of choice for the exhausted couple. You argue about who has had the least sleep, about who slept last and longest, and eye each other enviously if one suspects the other of having closed their eyes.
I’m not a great arguer but, when it came to sleep, I argued my case with what I thought was conviction, logic, and coherence. I could demonstrate with pie charts and spreadsheets where I had managed to have less sleep than Lyns. After all, I was doing my bit at night, I was changing diapers and helping with feedings, and I was still working nine to five.
But Lyns was working at home, twelve till twelve, twenty-four hours a day. She had also spent the last nine months pregnant, had gone through labor, and was responsible for feeding, all day, every day.
Of course Lyns was more tired. Of course our competition for who was more exhausted was a noncontest. In the Olympics of our sleep deprivation, Lyns was Usain Bolt and I was some fat pole-vaulter from Kazakhstan demanding a medal for turning up.
But argue I did. A new baby is a live hand grenade, and a good man would throw himself on it to save the mother of his child . . . but I’m not a good man, I’m a coward. Not only did I not throw myself on it, I would sometimes kick it toward Lyns and take cover. In my pitiful defense, I was exhausted; my mind was mush, and it was defending itself with spurious logic. My advice to any men going through this stage who are thinking that they are more tired than their partner: you’re not. I look back now and realize that my arguments were the ravings of a lunatic, expressed with the conviction of a madman shouting at pigeons. I was tired. But not as tired as Lyns. I was wrong. This now hangs in our bathroom.
. . . Lyns helped with the wording.
(Incidentally, not all couples have this battle. Just as I have met men who have never changed a diaper, I’ve also met men who have somehow avoided getting up in the night, or indeed avoided losing any sleep at all. I watched an interesting discussion “develop” between a couple at a wedding recently. The dad pointed to his twin girls: “No trouble with these two,” he said with a glow of smugness. “They slept through pretty much from birth.” To which his wife contributed: “Are you fucking kidding me!? They were a nightmare. You slept through from their birth. You lazy tosser.” She then thrust the stroller at him and stormed off to the bar to get shit-faced. Leaving me and “lazy tosser” to shuffle our feet uncomfortably and talk about cars or something. So, as much as I was wrong to think I could compete in the arena of competitive tiredness, at least I’m not that guy.)
SURVIVAL
Just when we thought we couldn’t be any more tired, Charlie developed jaundice. Which is apparently extremely common. (For those interested in the medical specifics, it’s something to do with vitamins, and it makes you look like a character in The Simpsons.) Usually, this is nothing serious, but we were scared witless by the very remote possibility that it could be. So just when we thought that we couldn’t survive with any less sleep, we did. For three days, we didn’t close our eyes as we watched Charlie undergo blood tests and spend hours under sunbed lights in an incubator, as the doctors tried to increase his vitamin D and return him to the pink kid we started out with. We lived on adrenaline, stress, and fear, and our limits became new limits as we discovered what it is to worry, and worry hard.
He was fine. But, when pushed to these new limits, it was a revelation to discover how little sleep you actually need to remain upright and alive.
When people quote that often-used fact about Margaret Thatcher, that she only needed four hours of sleep a night, I used to think, Wow, that’s impressive. I now think: Thatcher was a wimp. Four uninterrupted hours of sleep? Iron Lady, my ass.
New parents will survive on a fraction of that. Yes, they will wander around with the vacant expressions of people who have been taken over by an alien parasite that’s drilled into their brains. But they function. They carry out the basic tasks required with the determination of exhausted explorers, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. It’s not ideal. All new parents share stories about how they find their car keys in the freezer, or wander to the shops with one shoe on, forgetting why they went.
And, as I’ve already mentioned, having so little sleep encourages bad judgment, arguments, and general assiness. Thatcher might have survived on four hours for many years, but that may well have informed some of her decision-making. Historians trumpet her ability to need so
little sleep, but historians should take another look. There’s every chance that she stopped school milk, introduced the poll tax, and crushed the miners just because she was tired and a bit grumpy.
So sleep is important. And after the initial chaotic few weeks, there needs to be a plan. The key to ever catching up on the pre- and postbirth lack of sleep, to beating back the baby jet lag (and returning your fragile mind to a state of sanity), is first to get your baby to sleep through the night. Simple.
ROUTINE
Get the baby into a routine. It is the number one piece of advice that you receive as a new parent. It comes from books, from relatives, from friends. It’s a catchphrase really, and it is always said as though the person is imparting the wisdom of the ages. Oh, really? A routine, you say? I’ve never heard that before. We were just planning on feeding him and putting him to bed at random times based on fucking rune stones or phrenology. We were going to let him have his breakfast at teatime, and his bedtime story at lunch, and wake him up to go fucking kayaking at midnight. So thank you. Now that we know to feed, bathe, and put him to bed at the same time every night, we should be golden.
Don’t get me wrong if you’re reading this and you are one of the 43,619 people who gave me this advice: I did appreciate the sentiment. I’m sure that it makes sense and everything, but there is one fundamental problem with the whole routine idea: the baby. Babies don’t care about routine any more than they give a shit about “quantitative easing” or Brexit. Routine is for people who have existed for more than six months. Routine is for those creatures who aren’t frustratingly and fascinatingly different every single day. Sometimes Charlie enjoys his bath, sometimes it’s like we’re bathing him in liquid nitrogen. Sometimes he enjoys his book, sometimes he wants to tear it into shreds and force-feed it to himself. And sometimes he wants to sleep, and sometimes he wants to keep you awake for days on end, until you are hallucinating that your long-dead great-grandma Rose is taking a shit in your downstairs bathroom.