Tears before, during and after bedtime

No parenting blog is complete without the obligatory post on tiredness.  However before you immediately click away in boredom at yet another whinge about sleepless nights this is no self-pitying complaint.  Broken sleep is to babying as rain is to nature.  A baby's cries are the price to be paid for a baby's smiles and the cost of the former is a farthing to the fortune of the latter.

But still the sleeplessness is something else.  One piece of advice I do recall from my life BB (Before Baby) is that no sane father should ever engage in competitive tiredness with a mother.  This advice easily given is fantastically difficult to put into practice.  Just trust me you will never ever be more tired than the mother and even suggesting as much rightly reaps any punishment of her frazzled nerve frayed choosing.

We are in the midst of teething which as every mother and father knows is the trigger for parental seething.  What I have found interesting, in the rare moments I have maintained rational thought, is comparing baby induced sleep deprivation with other more familiar forms from my past.

The first thing is that it is genuinely external.  If you live next to a pub, under a flightpath or next to a fire station you will know what it is to be rudely awakened by forces beyond your control but you can acclimatise to these noises.  In my life BB most causes of sleeplessness have sprung from internalised anxieties.

Working from my youth onwards the things that have kept me up at night or waking in a cold sweat at 4 in the morning include but are not limited to:

Exam the next day

First date the next day

Flight the next day (for some reason if I have to be at an airport before 1000 I can never sleep)

Soldiering the next day (during a very short lived part-time military folly)

Interview the next day

Court the next day (obviously this is an evolving and recurring source of sleeplessness)

Wedding the next day (a one off (I hope!))

Marathon the next day (definitely a one off)

Then there is insomnia which usually sets in due to a combination of the above or just bog standard existential angst.

Baby tiredness is different.  It's random.  One night you will get 6 glorious hours.  The next it can seem it's 6 dismal minutes.  All causes of distress can be investigated repeatedly leaving only the insane baby basis for howling the house down at 4 in the morning namely crying because they are tired.

These nights are obviously ghastly and pose an examination of the solidity of any parental relationship which frankly should appear first in line in the wedding vows.  But the days are interesting.  Quickly you get used to functioning at 50% and then eventually at 5%.  In a strange way it takes the edge off sensation in a not wholly unpleasant way, like still being drunk the day after the night before, except the hangover is worse and doesn't go away.

And through it all you can cling grimly to the life raft that will liberate you from this pitching sea of exhaustion and that is the knowledge that this will pass.  Not today, not tomorrow but some day, mere months hence, you will go to bed and you may even wake up after your child.  Cherish that thought because the next day they will be a toddler.

The Mamas & The Papa: Where are all the men?

Last week I attended a Baby Sensory class with the baby.  It was in fact my second visit but what was different this time is that I was the only man present together with 16 mothers and the female teacher.  Granted some of the babies were boys but I take the view that children are gender neutral until they buy their first razor or have their first lamentable experience of everyday sexism.

Baby Sensory is a literally all singing and dancing affair where babies are exposed to different sensations to help fling them further and faster down the runway to being the next Mozart or Shakespeare.  The dearth of dads came as little surprise but it did get me thinking.

While it may be comparatively unusual for women to find themselves in environments where they are literally the only woman present, an experience with which the Queen is very familiar, it is all too common for women to find themselves vastly outnumbered.  Perhaps as a token panellist on TV or radio, the sole woman director on a board, or the lone female in court many are the environments in which the ways of men and men en masse are all too well known to women.

How often is the opposite true?  Having been to a single sex school it has only been in adult life that I became constantly exposed to mixed company let alone predominantly female company.  The notable moments when I have been truly outnumbered include attending a book club evening at the wonderful  Persephone Books on Lamb's Conduit Street and easily London's best bookshop. It publishes largely 20th century novels by women, we ate bread and cheese, drank madeira and chewed over 'They Knew Mr Knight' by the gloriously named Dorothy Whipple.  More recently I was on stage at the Royal Festival Hall in 2016 celebrating the Women's Equality Party's 1st birthday at the Women of the World Festival.

However I have had to seek out these experiences which were not presented to me as an unavoidable part of everyday life.  I believe I have profited from these experiences, as we all do when we choose to be immersed in the points of view of others.  All I hope for my son as he grows up is that he too will have and take such opportunities and that he will be aware of how heavily felt is the male presence and discourse in society.