Before and After: The Parent's Reward

One of the most pitiful misapprehensions a parent can evince is dismay at their child's ingratitude.  I'm still a newcomer to this game but I hope fervently that I shall not become one of those dads bemoaning his teen taking everything for granted.  If you want gratitude get a dog.  

Instead the joy of children is in their unexcelled solipsism.  This realisation hit me forcefully with the arrival of our baby.  His beginning was an end for me.  And not the end of freedom, of impulsive weekends in Paris (like they ever happened), of disreputable nights bleeding sybaritically into days at Gerry's on Dean Street (yeah, not many of those either actually).  But an actual end.  Because to your child your life before their birth did not exist.  They may take an interest, they may not, they may trade exaggerated tales of glamour, tragedy or drama when they start dating but it's all second hand: your life become prologue.

Even more gallingly when life as you know it hits the buffers upon their arrival, when literally every moment is spent in anguish about the adequacy of your parenting they are blissfully, insouciantly, unaware of the comet thudding impact they have had.  Furthermore, adding insult to injury, when they become walking, talking reasoning beings they can't even remember any of it.

Summon up the earliest memory of your parents.  Now realise that preceding it were months, weeks, days, hours and minutes of self-sacrifice, of anxiety about your wellbeing, were you warm enough, fed enough, rested enough, stimulated enough and, of course, changed enough.  I would therefore like to take this opportunity to thank my ma and pa.  True it is there was quite a lot of delegation of the more liquid aspects of early parenting but even allowing for that I don't think I've done much by way of articulating, still less demonstrating, my gratitude for all that they did and, perhaps more importantly, forewent when I turned up.

And as night follows day so do thoughts of before turn to thoughts of after.  If nature is, God willing, uninterrupted your children will be your genetic legacy.  When you are dust and ashes your children will be your living history.  A more vital and visceral reminder of your mark on the world than any novel, painting, song or tweet ever could be.

It is in our parenting that we achieve the fullest revelation of our relationship with our parents as this illuminating article on attachment theory demonstrates and at the same time it is in our children that we see the future we shall never know, that is the paradox of parenthood and all the reward we should ever reasonably expect.

Blank Slates & Babies

'Treasure this special time, it passes so quickly' is something my wife and I have been repeatedly told in the last few weeks.  Given the annihilation parenthood brings of everything you once held dear  this advice seems absolutely absurd.  Even the routine of the irregular is lost forever when a child is born and the permanent twilight zone that new parents inhabit feels anything but special.  Having a baby is like the worst ever game of charades - every clue is crying and every answer milk.

And yet dimly I understand the meaning of these well-wishers.  A baby in its earliest weeks and months is the definition of a blank slate.  When we wonder why we procreate it is of course to satisfy primal genetic urges to replicate our DNA but there is also the enjoyment of moulding a miniature version of ourselves.  Anyone involved in a long term relationship knows how stubbornly resistant partners can be to seeing the world our way which is, of course, the right way.  Children are the perfect solution to the impasse which soon develops

How defenceless a newborn is; how completely dependent.  Few things are more amusing than a baby's startle reflex, especially when they sleep, but how completely inadequate a response it is to the hungry attentions of a predator.  Without us parents babies are just lunch to the nearest sharp toothed carnivore.  

And so in those first few weeks although a baby may wail a bit we can satisfy ourselves with how completely they will be attuned with our Weltanschauung (as my wife would say) when in just a few short months they can communicate.  But then how crushing the disappointment when finally the longed for moment comes.  Your child proves even more recalcitrant and unreasonable than your wife (NB your wife, not my wife).  How prone to the blandishments of TV advertising, how sugar obsessed, how contrary.

This is what people mean when they enjoin you to hold close every second with a baby because babies can't disappoint: in fact they can't do anything except babying.  What I especially enjoy are the expressions so loaded with meaning so utterly divorced from what the baby is at that moment experiencing.  My particular favourites are glances of importunate beseeching and earth stopping reproach.  A baby's face is an open book but all the words are unknowable.

It won't be long now before I discover the baby shares my wife's scorn for French baroque music ('too many bells'), that he favours a Full Windsor knot and that he doesn't like oysters.  Until then I am treasuring every minute.

Let's Talk About Sex Baby

My son is 7 weeks old today.  If I was writing this blog properly this would be all about sleepless nights, estrangement from the life I once knew and hilarious anecdotes about nappies.  Instead I have been thinking about other things.  In particular the burden of having 'the chat' with my son has been weighing heavily on me.  Many have observed that modernity has robbed children of their childhood.  But it's a prudent fact that no child is too young to be safe from the dangers of the world.  The baleful reality is that no matter how awkward it'll be for both of us I am just going to have to tell my son that Donald Trump will indeed be the next president of the United States of America.

I was put in mind of this topic by a friend lamenting on social media that she feels the time has come to tell her 5 year old daughter the facts of life and regretting that by doing so the Age of Innocence will be in full retreat.  It is almost certainly a hallmark of my inexperience as a parent that I am baffled by British birds and the bees anxiety.  If you find sex embarrassing, anxious making and shaming then I can see why telling a small child about it would provoke just those feelings in you and the child.  If on the other hand you think it is fun, wonderful but something worth approaching in an adult way there is a good chance you will communicate those attitudes to your offspring.

Children can't possibly understand adulthood but the mere fact that they are surrounded by giants suffices to give them a clue that theirs is not a permanent state.  Sex, drugs but maybe not rock'n'roll are properly left to adulthood or at least liminal adolescence.  Pretending they don't exist, however, is what in ages past left girls menstruating in horrified confusion.

Childhood is, nonetheless, undoubtedly a time of innocence and the preciousness of that is acknowledged universally.  Every child born is innocent of hate, of violence, of selfishness, of jealousy and of pride.  No parent worth the name would wish to introduce these concepts to their child until it is absolutely necessary.  Ignorance of the ills of the world is worth truly treasuring because it is an innocence that must and will one day be lost; ideally not until a child is old enough to reason with human fallibility.

I have no anxiety about one day telling my son where he came from.  In contrast I already have minor panic attacks about one day explaining how to reconcile atheism with an acceptance of the divine, whether monogamy is a virtue, and how to change the spark plugs.  

Economists often like to explain the complexities of macroeconomics by recasting the national debt in terms of household income and expenditure.  Bizarrely this approach has never translated as a prism through which presidential candidates can and should be assessed.  We like in Britain to ponder whether a politician is someone we could go for a pint with.  I venture that in future there should be a babysitter test for presidential candidates.  Of the many things I so ardently esteem about Barack Obama is that he so palpably understands and fulfils the responsibilities of a parent as this delightful sequence of images demonstrates, he is an adult who gets children, what they want and, much more importantly, what they need.

In contrast the next President is an adult who is a child and a child whose innocence of the sins of the world was long ago stripped from him.  And I'll bet that wasn't from having 'the chat' too tenderly.

Shaking the Apples - You, me & baby make three

One sure way to antagonise your expectant partner when reminding her that eating for two is not in fact NHS guidance is to add that you will nonetheless be drinking for two.  There are, I know, partners who are sympathetically abstinent but I can’t pretend to anything like that degree of virtue.

And so it was, following a quiet supper party at home followed by a couple of whiskies, that I was awoken by my wife at 0430 insistent that her waters had broken.  Discretion prevents me from sharing the test for determining whether she was right: suffice to say she was.

Thus began labour and an experience that no book or class could ever really have prepared us for.  We had just days before finished learning about hypno-birthing from a delightful lady who had us happily visualising rising balloons in the comfort of our living room while sitting on a huge bouncy ball.  At the end of the class I was taught some massage techniques including one extraordinary action she dubbed ‘Shaking the apples’.  Our living room has no curtains and I have no idea what the neighbours opposite made of me kneeling behind my heavily pregnant wife pummelling her buttocks while our tutor looked on approvingly.

For those not familiar with labour in a typical NHS hospital it is worth knowing that the process begins in triage where a midwife checks that labour is indeed underway.  If it is the condemned woman (mother to be) is transferred to a ward where she labours for as long as it takes.  And it can take a very long time.  This is the part where you are supposed to be at home listening to whale song if you are doing hypno-birthing properly.

My wife was in a very noisy and surprisingly public ward with three other women.  One of them was a lot further along and making that audibly obvious.  Voluble imprecations to God to make it stop and insistence to anyone who would listen that she couldn’t possibly go through this did not inspire confidence.  The other two bays seemed to be occupied by alarmingly young women/girls who the moment the other victim was wheeled off for the Final Countdown noisily complained about her with one of them contemptuously saying ‘Don’t know why she was praying to God; God aint’ gonna help her now’.

By this time my wife was herself firmly in the throes and being wired up to a monitor I could see from the numbers when her contractions were starting before she could feel them.  This conferred a curious feeling of being like a torturer’s assistant knowing in advance when the electrical charge was coming.  At one stage, cannula in hand, my wife and I went for a rather testy stomp in a nearby park.

For a surprisingly long time she got by purely on Teutonic grit before eventually accepting a canister of gas and air.  Eventually a midwife of remarkable brusqueness accepted that my wife was sufficiently dilated that we could be wheeled through to the birth room.  Here we were attended by two delightful Spanish midwives.  By now over 12 hours had passed since the waters had broken. 

 It is at this stage that I realised that if you ever want to know what labour feels like you must, of course, ask a mother but if you want to know what actually happens then you must ask a father.  Mother Nature is a wily old bird and the tsunami of hormones that engulf mothers in the aftermath of childbirth is plainly designed to erase the hard disk.

In reality my magnificent wife kept her equanimity throughout and I never got to witness the fusillade of Prussian cursing that I had secretly been looking forward to.  At one point she very politely and calmly ventured that she might quite like an epidural.  So calmly was the request made and so clearly missing the necessary screamed prefix ‘fucking’ that I could see the midwife was minded to ignore or even gainsay the request.  However her professionalism kicked in and she went in search of the Sunday night on-call anaesthetist.  Who, 30 minutes later, we discovered was in theatre with two emergency caesareans.  So a shot of Pethidine was all she got.

Suddenly the baby was crowning and with a heroic heave was out in the world.  We were parents at last.  The theory test was over, the practical just begun.

The NCT - An Appreciation

Nothing prepares you for childbirth – and yet, paradoxically, how we prepare.  Over the last few months I have given much thought to how women in nature must have experienced labour.  Something surprisingly different from their daily experience certainly but was there an ability to trust in the body’s natural processes that has long been lost?  As Alexander Pope warned a little learning is a dangerous thing and there must be few women left in the world giving birth without at least some awareness of what will happen to them and the risks attendant upon giving birth.

As a London cyclist I am very interested in the question of risk perception: a risk that causes me no little or no concern I know deters thousands.  Similarly we all know people for whom a fear of flying either makes it an impossible or a genuinely traumatic experience.  Every one of us has a unique response to risk and the same is true for our experience of pain.  One person’s slight discomfort is another’s unendurable torment.

And so to NCT training.  The National Childbirth Trust was founded in 1956 as the Natural Childbirth Trust changing its name at the start of the 1960s.  The vast majority of parents have their children with either no training at all or by attending the sessions offered by their local hospital but for the curious/anxious/diligent rest there is the NCT.  Plainly any experience of NCT will be dictated by the teacher, fellow parents and one’s own expectations and anxiety about the whole undertaking.

Something I have rapidly learnt as a birth partner (father in waiting) is that there is no limit to how interested and useful one can be but also that there is no place for judgement as far as labour is concerned.  I would no more suggest to my wife what her approach to pain relief should be than I would tell her how to apply her makeup.

That isn’t to say that I haven’t found NCT fascinating and in its own bizarre way extremely enjoyable.  Weekly 2.5 hour sessions sitting in a circle with 8 mums 8 bumps and 8 dads in varying stages of apprehension and involvement has been a sociological insight well worth the time and expense even without the practical advice imparted.

An unintended highlight came at the start of one evening  session when a bloke in his 50s wearing sunglasses wandered uncertainly in prompting the teacher quickly to whisper to him ‘Sorry mate, AA is downstairs this week’.  He wandered out with an amiable ‘Didn’t look like my lot’.  The teacher said things could get much more confused when there was a clash with Weight Watchers.

Any anxiety that we dads had about our purpose in all of this was neatly encapsulated in an account of a previous breastfeeding session when one of the fathers emailed the teacher in advance asking if the other mothers would definitely be alright with him attending, when she asked why he suggested they might be unhappy with him seeing their breasts.  For the uninitiated it is worth knowing that no nudity is required on the NCT.

Of course the real purpose of NCT is to plug you into a supply of local expectants and my wife has dutifully signed up for the obligatory Whatsapp group.  Part of me marvels gratefully that so great an institution should have grown up so quickly but another part wonders whether it is a shame that women’s wisdom concerning childbirth has become so formalised.  If you haven’t yet, and if you still can, ask your own parents what their experience of childbirth was.  I find that demystification, like charity, begins at home.

Baby Buying for Baby Bearing

A favourite theme for newspapers is the eye watering cost of having children with the average cost of raising a child from birth to 21 now apparently £230,000, significantly less than the cost of this parking space in London. Somebody obviously needs to tell the Telegraph that the age of majority reduced to 18 some time ago. 

The cost of living is now so exorbitant here that it seems to be having a significant chilling effect on the childbirth rate. If you can’t afford a roof over your own head you are certainly not going to risk losing one over your baby’s. That being said deciding to have a baby following a literal cost/benefit analysis seems to be a sad basis for determining whether to bring a life into the world. 

I knew it was going to be expensive. I know it will be expensive. However none of my planning could have prepared me for the mania induced by the John Lewis baby department or the awesome power of an expectant mother’s nesting instinct. On a recent visit (one of many) I was trying to make eye contact with some of the other first time fathers but all seemed locked in survival mode behind 1,000 yard stares. As I passed one who appeared to have some awareness of the outside world I muttered a rueful ‘Having fun?’ as we passed. He clearly didn’t dare answer leaving it to my wife to toss an admonitory ‘I heard that!’ over her shoulder. 

In fairness to my wife she acceded with alacrity to my suggestion that before splurging we beg and borrow if perhaps not steal. And I have to credit my friends far and wide for their munificence; although when you are in the midst of ante-natal anxiety it is very hard to imagine a day will soon come when being relieved of this paraphernalia will be its own godsend. 

Of the myriad anxieties that beset prospective and new parents the desire to insulate your child’s childhood from the cares and cruelty of the adult world must be the most natural. However for me its nearest rival, the thing that most spurs me to single-handedly dig a moat and construct a spiked palisade, is holding off the dismal day when my child becomes a consumer. 

Which leads seamlessly to the topic of prams. Here I have to disclose my hypocritical underpinning. Mine was a childhood of the Silver Cross perambulator and Nannies' Lawn in Hyde Park. And we are talking 1980 not 1930. I even, briefly, had a Dutch nanny who played the harp outside my bedroom door when I was put to bed: which I realise instantly disqualifies me from having any valid opinion on parenting ever. Even making allowance for all that I am staggered at the cost of prams. 

This BMW tie-in for petrol prats, this overpriced outrage for the fashioninnies and, of course, the Bugaboo, that being your exclamation when you see what buying one does to your bank balance. I don’t know about you but if I’m going to pay upwards of a grand for my baby’s ‘transportation system’ I’m expecting some kind of sedan chair illustrated with Aesop’s Fables wielded by oiled Olympians.

I'm no supporter of infant indoctrination but an early general lesson for my baby will be form follows function and that anyone who spends £3,400 on an Aston Martin buggy is bonkers.

Secret Baby

You have not kept a secret until you keep the secret.  I'm hopeless at keeping secrets; an incorrigible gossip who has to divert all my will power to keeping my professional confidences without which I wouldn't have a job.  I'm so used to my private life being an open book that when my wife told me she was pregnant I knew that though she'd have the burden of carrying our baby I'd have the burden of carrying the secret until a sonographer neither of us had ever met permitted what was private to become public.

Because my wife's pregnancy was mercifully unafflicted with morning (afternoon and evening) sickness and because her cravings never got more exotic than pickles, which for a German hardly counts, by the time of the first scan her pregnancy still seemed very much more conceptual than actual to me.  The first scan is, with wholly unintended humour, called the dating scan.  Because if you're having that scan and you're still dating perhaps parenting is not for you.

As we made our way into the North London hospital entrusted with being the first piece of architecture our child ever sees

I had my first insight into how medical pregnancy is, at least in this country.  It's no wonder women live longer than men given the familiarity with doctors and nurses having a baby engenders.

Going into the room with the sonographer I quickly realised what an extraordinary job theirs is.  Fathers/birth partners/retinue are given a seat the other side of the bared barely bump.  This presages either a moment of true wonder or, if something's wrong, what must be almost unbearable anxiety or devastation.  For good reason does the sonographer get the first look.  Mercifully all was well and it wasn't twins.  In my job I am used to bearing witness to elation and despondency but sonographers are the improbable heralds of life and death with their jelly and their wands.

Two months later we were back for the much less promising sounding anomaly scan. This time hearing the heartbeat was strangely a much more vivid experience than the spectral images which manage both to leave one marvelling at the wonders of technology but also frustrated by its limitations.  Again we were given the guarded all clear and it is with some sheepishness that I admit to only discussing what my reaction might otherwise have been after the event.

Before the scans I don't know whether the three month convention existed.  If it did not I'm not entirely persuaded that its development has been a positive thing.  Fortunately for the future of mankind many pregnancies result in the birth of a healthy baby.  That some do not is a sad fact of life.  For those confronted with that unwished for outcome it would perhaps be a source of solace to know that there are others out there dealing with the aftermath of that situation.  If miscarriage is kept secret whose feelings are we sparing?

My Wife is Having a Baby

I am having a baby.  My wife is having a baby.  We are having a baby.  You know the team players because it’s always We.  With now just a few weeks to go it’s an expression I am finally on board with.  My reluctance to adopt it had nothing to do with denial about what was happening but instead a real reticence to pretend a role in a process so awesomely and uniquely female.

But there is something else too.  Whatever the biological facts are fatherhood is a choice.  Mothers cannot opt out of the extraordinary transformation pregnancy wreaks on their bodies and whether pushed or cut out of them their babies’ visceral journeys to the outside world are fraught with peril and jeopardy.

Every second that passes from conception that ball of cells gets one day closer to being a bundle of joy and that is so whether the father is feet away or thousands of miles.  And of course physical proximity is often meaningless or worse when emotional distance puts fathers beyond the reach of their offspring.

Therefore fathers get to choose.  I say get to choose because in many bleak cases some men choose never to be fathers to their children for the whole of their lives.  And because nature abhors a vacuum another man or men or an idea has to fill that father shaped hole in those children’s lives.  Perhaps it’s a conscious choice but I am sure for many there is a sudden or dawning realisation that the fact of fatherhood is finally concomitant with the feeling of fatherhood.

Many deplore that  the marriage proposal is still accompanied by the moribund expectation that its occurrence will be at a time and place of the man’s choosing.  Few however comment on its mirror: the announcement.  Every mother that ever told her child’s father had to choose when and where.  The important distinction being that men ask permission and permission can be withheld whereas ‘I am pregnant’ is a declaration.  It is a mighty powerful announcement to make and an augury for the power of pregnancy, a power that man cannot wield.

I am dimly aware that whatever my feelings are for a child in utero they will be as nothing compared to what is coming and unlike revising for a test it is very hard to know how to prepare my feelings for the lifelong exam that is fatherhood.  Part of me wants to trust all to instinct but then common sense prevails and I bury myself again in the baby books.  And now NCT, which has been everything I had hoped, but more of that next time.