Man vs. Baby Page 7
So, we’ve tried “white noise,” but trying to sleep in a room with a loud untuned radio makes me want to claw my own face off. We even tried an app with the sound of falling rain, but I was up for a piss every ten minutes.
I’m thinking, to make him sleep at night, we may have to re-create the conditions of daytime, turn on all the lights, vacuum, switch the TV on, and play a loud recording of the neighbors doing the recycling and me on the phone going apeshit at “Martin” from Comcast. I bet he sleeps like a log.
So, that’s what we did. We re-created the conditions of daytime. If Charlie wouldn’t sleep, we tried turning on the vacuum cleaner, the radio or TV, the washing machine or the dryer. And, incredibly, it worked. Everyone finally got some sleep. At least, until the electricity bill arrived, when we huddled together and wept.
SLEEP WILL COME
The subject of sleep is an obsession for most young families. In one survey, it was estimated that new parents lose on average twenty-six hours of sleep a week in the first year of parenthood. So no wonder we’re all fucked, climbing the walls, and dreaming wistfully about being dead.
As we’ve seen, when it comes to encouraging your baby to sleep “through the night,” there are a million differing pieces of advice, and I’m sure each person who offers their opinion is right. Their theory works . . . for their baby. The more honest experts will point out that there isn’t a theory that works for everyone. As our lovely Spanish health visitor, Sylvia, likes to say: “There’s no silver bully.”
It’s true. There is no quick fix and sometimes no fix at all, other than time.
With this in mind, a friend of mine told me the most commonsense, comforting, and sensible thing I’ve ever heard on this subject and it’s this:
They don’t sleep . . . and then they do.
It’s not profound. It’s not a conclusion reached by years of research or by experimentation on rats or puppies. This wisdom didn’t require letters after my friend’s name or a decade of study. But, nevertheless, it is true.
I can’t help thinking that, if you happen to be trying out a sleep-training technique at the same time your baby decides to start sleeping, you will swear, from now until the end of time, that that technique works. It is human nature to see patterns and order where none exists.
And, when it comes to babies’ sleeping habits, patterns and order are maddeningly elusive.
As I write this, Charlie rarely wakes at night. At around ten months, he just started “sleeping through.” He didn’t sleep . . . and then he did.
But for those of you still wearing out the carpet, joining the murderers for a 2 a.m. drive, or reading this book in the middle of a long-stretched night, I offer you this as truth, reiterated as a lamp of home and hope in the distance:
They don’t sleep . . . and then they do.*
*(But they still wake up really fucking early.)
4
* * *
WASTE
This child produces more shit than Nickelback.
Seriously, if I put a copy of everything that Nickelback has ever produced in a garbage bin, I reckon that wouldn’t fill it. . . . Three days of diapers and I can’t close the fucking lid on ours.
WASTE
* * *
When the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, saw the inhuman devastation his creation was capable of, he is said to have quoted from a Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. He said: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” . . . I was reminded of this the first time Charlie shit in the bath.
Nothing prepares you for it. One moment we were enjoying “splishy splashy”; the next there was a scene of devastation. The kind of ecological disaster that environmentalists drag dead and gasping seagulls out of. It was a quagmire, and in the middle of it sat our baby, a miniature swamp-thing, still splishing and splashing and looking vaguely pleased with himself.
This is as bad as it gets. But 50 percent of caring for a baby is shit. Literally.
MECONIUM!
According to the NHS website, from the very first diaper change you should “try not to show any disgust at what is in their diaper, you don’t want your baby to learn that doing a poo is something unpleasant or negative.” First of all, I don’t care what the experts say: a newborn baby hasn’t got the faintest idea what “disgust” looks like. Secondly, on the whole, shit is unpleasant. Treating it like a friendly brown pet is going to lead to trouble.
With all due respect to NHS psychologists, I would be more concerned by the long-term psychological impact on a child of their parents grinning inanely at excrement, unwrapping a diaper as if it were a wedding present: down that road serial killers are made. So, despite what the professionals say, I don’t think we should feel too bad if we open a diaper and look a little horrified. It’s usually with damn good reason.
When first born, and for the next week or so, a baby craps out a thing called “meconium.” It sounds like a made-up planet, or one of the X-Men. When I first heard the word, my initial thought was that I wished I’d known it when I was trying to come up with a name for a synth-indie band in about 1998. In fact (and this is about as informative as this book gets), meconium is the remnants of what the baby has ingested while in the womb: amniotic fluid, bile, mucus, an old boot, a bicycle tire. . . .
It is black. It has the consistency of tar. It looks like demonic Marmite,I or the sort of thing the devil would use to resurface his driveway. In fact, the sight of it will have you searching your child’s scalp for a triple-six birthmark. Enough to say that it is disturbing, and on first viewing it is yet more unwelcome evidence that your baby is at death’s door.
The good news is that after a few days the meconium stage passes. The bad news is that you come to miss the simplicity of these shits, as the next few months will be dominated by conversations about the variation in the ones that follow. What color they are, what consistency, what frequency, what they smell like, and how much one in particular looked a bit like Jeff Goldblum.
WHAT IS THIS SHIT?
So, apart from the Lure-Shit (see introduction), here are the abominations to look out for:
The Standard: Self-explanatory—this is your everyday, run-of-the-mill shit. Easily dealt with by a seasoned changer.
The Wrapper: This is a seemingly harmless Standard, but thanks to an ill-fitting diaper or the little one’s sleeping position, the contents have wrapped around the baby’s body, giving the impression that your child has been deliberately basted. If it wasn’t you who put the last diaper on: apportion blame. If it was you: blame a faulty diaper.
The Phantom, or the Wish-Shit: This also has all the characteristics of a Standard—the straining, the sound, even the smell. And yet when the diaper is removed, there is nothing there. Don’t worry. Basically, a wormhole has opened up between the butt and the diaper and the waste has left our time and space. (I’ve no idea where in the universe the wormhole comes out and where all this ungodly shit and horror end up, but I’ve got very good reason to believe it’s the baby-changing facilities in the Doncaster branch of T.J.Maxx.)
The Hermit: As with a Phantom, the diaper is empty, but you can see the beginning of something on its way. You wipe and confirm it’s there, but it’s shy. Come back later.
The Expressionist: A fart/crap combo. The combination of pressurized air and waste can create a postmodern masterpiece. (Don’t stand and admire—this could easily be a Lure-Shit.)
The Soup: The diaper has formed a bowl, and it is full. Don’t just fold this one over: it must be held like a chalice with reverence in both hands and carried to the trash, or somewhere it can be poured, preferably over the back fence or into Mount Doom.
The Death-Shit: What characterizes this monstrosity is the vein-popping effort and strain on your baby’s face, as if it is trying to lift a car. This is the shit that killed Elvis. And the realization of that effort is a thing of awesome power. If other dumps seem like a military bombardment, this is “shock and awe,” as in the space of a
moment your baby loses half its body weight. Do not attempt to clean this up alone. Call your partner. Christ, call the UN.
The Jeff Goldblum: Chances are you will never see one of these. This only ever happened to us once, but it did look a bit like Jeff Goldblum.
Of course, you don’t have to memorize all these different types of waste. Things can be simplified by grading them according to severity. In our house we use a variation of the Richter scale. Anything above a four is a two-person job; anything above a six is a Code Red. Sevens and eights are Beast Mode.
We’ve never had a nine.
In the darkest corners of the Internet you hear about a nine. By all accounts, a nine requires haz-mat suits and renders any changing mat a hot zone with the same half-life as the Fukushima cafeteria.
CRAP EXPERTS
Whichever type of shit you have to deal with, the experts seem to ignore the fact that variation exists. Best-selling books on babies are filled with paragraphs that begin: “If your baby has soiled . . .” without acknowledging that the term soiled covers everything from a light dusting to some of the horrors discussed above.
There is a similar problem when the books talk, with characteristic delicacy, about “pee-pee.” As the father of a boy, I thought that the tip about placing a tissue over his bits, to avoid piss in the face, was pretty good. But, again, this doesn’t allow for the fact that sometimes he pisses like he’s been on a bachelor weekend, and no tissue is going to hold back that flow. On these occasions we need plastic macs like you get in the splash zone at Sea World. And, apart from the tissue idea, none of the books suggest what to do when your baby has urinated so much that it has collected as a puddle in the changing mat and he is just splashing around in it like a cheerful duck.
In promoting the myth that all filled diapers (and babies) are created equal, almost every book on the shelf fails to tackle the truth of toileting—a failure often characterized by a ludicrously simplistic diagram of a placid child calmly having its backside wiped and its diaper replaced. It is with some disappointment that I always turn the page to discover that there aren’t further diagrams showing a parent dealing with “shit-neck,” or with the frustration of having stuck the sticky tab of the old diaper to the sticky tab of the new one. (I do this all the time. My record for accidentally sticking soiled diapers together is four. The result was a decorative chain that looked like the product of a deranged incontinent’s arts and crafts hour.)
JEDIS OF SHIT
In fairness, parenting classes are actually pretty good preparation for dealing with all this unpleasantness. Most parenting classes provide a useful introduction to diaper-changing, but I for one entered into it thinking that it was probably a waste of time. I mean, how hard could it be to put a disposable diaper on a baby? Stupidly, with the brightly decorated diapers and sticky tabs, I thought it would be just like wrapping a particularly nasty present.
As part of our “Introduction to Diapers,” I was partnered with another man, and we were given a doll to practice on. (I’m not sure why we weren’t paired with our partners—it was something to do with reinforcing the father’s diaper-changing responsibilities.) To add to the realism, hidden inside the doll’s diaper was some sort of chutney to represent the waste. It was trickier than expected. I didn’t undo one of the tapes properly, and as I tried to pull the diaper off, it snapped open, flicking a bit of chutney into Jeremy’s mouth. Caught up in the role-play, he momentarily forgot that it was chutney and started to dry-heave into a nearby trash can.
This was an unpromising start to my own diaper-changing career, and Jeremy’s partner was looking at him like she had made the greatest mistake of her life. (Which, of course, she had: over the period of the weeklong parenting classes, it became clear that Jeremy was a fucking moron.) But, despite a faltering start, over the next few classes we practiced, we got better, and after a while, we all felt pretty good that this was one skill we had mastered. We were the Jedis of shit.
Of course, the daily reality of diaper-changing made a mockery of this confidence. So as useful as parenting classes might prove to be, just remember: dolls stay still. Dolls don’t piss in your eyes and crap up your sleeves while you’re sorting out the shit they’ve just made. Dolls don’t dip their hands in it like it’s Nutella or grab the thing you’re cleaning them with and stick it in their mouths. And dolls don’t spend the entire time crying and screaming as if the world is ending . . . or, much, much worse, laughing in your face at how pathetically out of your depth you are.
THE CHANGER
One of the main problems is that there is no guaranteed way to know what particular travesty has occurred in a diaper without looking. By which time you are committed to being “the changer.” Before we had Charlie, I always found it bizarre how a parent could be out for a meal or whatever, suspect a baby had crapped, and plant his or her nose in the baby’s ass to check, breathing deep like it’s sea air, and then casually sharing: “Yep, he’s crapped.” I now know that, with all the sophisticated technology that exists to measure every possible vital sign, this old-school method is the only way to ascertain if a baby has gone. But even this method is without guarantees. You can try to judge it by the smell, sound, or rumble, but in truth you could get the trousers off and find a Phantom or be staring straight at a nine.
There’s also no timetable to diaper-changing: babies lack regularity. Like when I was a student and living on a diet of processed meats, they can go for days without any sign. Other times they’re prolific. Our number one Google search for the first month was “how often should a baby poop.” Amazingly, the experts said it was normal for it to be every five days, but also normal for it to be twelve times a day. How the fuck can both be normal? If a baby is a month old and takes a dump every five days, then he or she has only shit six times in his or her life; whereas if a baby goes twelve times a day, he or she will have crapped 360 times? I worked out that if you sat these two kids side by side in a fish tank and left them to it, the one on the right would have drowned them both before the one on the left had squeezed out so much as a teaspoon.
So, with this in mind, it’s important to have a sensible approach to the division of labor. There is the simple turn-based “I Did It Last Time.” Or the more controversial “He/She’s On You” system. There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. The I Did It Last Time method requires both parties to remember who changed the last diaper, and when you’re changing up to twelve a day, this can be difficult. Also, this confusion can be exploited and the weakness of a person’s sleep-deprived memory used against them. If your partner is on the ball and has the memory of a cyborg, then there is no escape from your turn. Lyns is like that, and in this scenario the I Did It Last Time approach lacks a little flexibility. A meteor could crash through our ceiling, severing both my arms and legs—Lyns would still look down at my quivering torso and say: “It’s your turn, stumpy.”
The He/She’s On You method is much more flexible. Whoever the baby is on when he/she goes is responsible for cleanup. The problem with this is that it turns into a monumental game of pass the parcel, and your baby becomes a nuclear football. After using this method for a while, we found ourselves in a kind of escalating cold war of brinksmanship, holding on for as long as we could and then handing him off at the last minute. Incidentally, the key to a successful handoff is spotting “the face” early. In the seconds before an arrival, a baby’s face turns a shade of red and his features pause in concentration as if he’s trying to open a particularly stubborn jar. The trick is to hand him over before he gets the top off.
Whether you choose the I Did It Last Time or the He/She’s On You method, there are one or two other complicating factors. Like what to do if the baby shits while independently in his crib, or on a stranger, or on a family member distant enough to tell you to fuck off at the suggestion that they roll up their sleeves. Anyway, considering all the information above, we ended up with a combination method that worked for us. I’m making it
sound complicated, but I’ve condensed it into a simple diagram:
FROM THE REVEAL TO THE INDIANA
So you’ve assessed the damage and ruled out a Phantom, the diaper needs changing, and it is your turn.
When changing Charlie’s diaper, I find it useful to imagine that I’m a player on the UK game show The Cube, in which the contestant is locked in a large glass box and made to complete challenges in a race against time, and host Phillip Schofield is standing nearby looking anxious but encouraging. After all, the process is in itself a series of challenges against the clock. From the moment you begin to change a diaper, the countdown has begun to complete the task before the next event. In fact, if The Cube were outfitted with pipes that sprayed the contestant in piss and shit as they lost a life, that would be a pretty accurate re-creation of the time-sensitive pressure enjoyed by the changer.
So, there are several parts/challenges to changing a diaper.
First of all there is the Reveal. The Reveal is characterized by hope. As the tapes of the diaper are undone and the contents exposed, a part of you hopes and prays for a Phantom—or that it is the merest shadow of a crap.
This is followed by Denial. Having exposed a travesty, you instantly close the diaper again, denying its existence and trying to return to a state of not knowing, like Schrödinger trying to shut the box on his dead cat.
Then comes the Turnover. This is a genuinely good piece of advice given to me by our health visitor: it basically involves turning the diaper over on itself to capture the mess in a kind of shit-calzone. This usually stops it from going all over your baby and yourself.