Love is...How annoying am I?

Before Tinder started and after actually meeting people ended there was Internet dating.  A theoretically inspired site, www.MySingleFriend.com, was completely scuppered by one major flaw in practice. You wanted to find someone special so you got your best mate to write a sales pitch for you. In fact on reflection a rather bizarre business model, after all who gets their drinking buddies to draft their C.V.?

Anyway the problem was that your mate bigs you up because that is what mates are for. You meet someone but pretty soon they’re disappointed, they read the Ad but you’re not all that. False advertising might earn you a quick buck relationship-wise but what most people are ultimately looking for is a lifetime investment. And this is where a simple tweak to the site’s premise could reap dividends.

Instead of bullet pointing your most admirable attributes you get your mate to lay out your flaws, drawbacks and deficiencies in excoriating detail. And of course you don’t stop with your best mate. Other contributors must include your parents, your sister, your boss, your childhood nemesis and, most importantly, your ex.

Now obviously this seems mad and counter-intuitive but this is basic due diligence or KYC as David Brent might say.  Because ultimately what sustains a relationship over years and decades is not the cherishing of your partner’s finest qualities or their hilarious best story (still so fresh on its 1,000^thtelling) or their rock hard abs slowly dissolving into blubber. No; what really keeps it on the rails is putting up with your partner’s shit and their willingness to put up with yours.

And if you don’t know what I’m talking about here it’s the ‘for worse’ bit in the wedding vows that everyone pretends does not apply to them. Well it does: it applies to you, it applies to me and it applies to everybody.

People say that having a child is a testing experience and that is an accurate description if by that they mean it is like taking a Japanese exam that never ends, when you had been learning French all year.  I would like to say that having a child with another human being really brings out the best in both parents. But I won’t because that would be a complete lie.

Instead parenting is like an endless voyage of discovery in which you slowly come to understand how utterly different in every conceivable way your childhood was from your co-parent’s to the point where you see why in some cultures marrying your cousin seems like a good idea.

But the thing is.  And this really is the thing. If you spend your entire time fulminating about how unbelievably wrong your partner’s parenting is you will be overlooking a very, very important point – and that is how unbelievably wrong your parenting is. But not just your parenting, in fact every aspect of your ‘contribution’ to the relationship.

There’s a lot of talk at the moment, thanks Marie Kondo, about throwing out anything in your life that does not bring you joy. If new parents did that the queue to the Principal Registry of the Family Division would stretch to Land’s End.

Instead I have a little mantra that should ensure parental tensions dont exceed a fast simmer and certainly never boil over.  You may remember a whimsical cartoon that used to appear in certain newspapers (when people still bought them), it featured a cutesy boy and girl and every week there was a new answer but the strap-line always remained the same Love is…

If you really want to know your partner, really put yourself in their shoes then you will understand that the ultimate answer is a question and it’s a question you should ask yourself daily –

How annoying am I?

Nursery, nanny or on your knee?

There comes a point in every parent's life when their child will be left in the care of a stranger.  Even the most committed earth mother will not be in loco parentis for ever.  In some ways it's like removing a plaster; there is a school of thought that believes fast and soon entails less pain for everyone rather than slow and sore.  As with so much of parenting it's probably not something you give much thought to until the crashing realisation comes that you are responsible 24/7 for keeping a reckless, incapable human being alive and, as far as is possible, happy.

Every family is different and every child takes differently to the change from exclusively parental caring to being looked after by some random your dad met in the park (just kidding).  I say just kidding because there are few more fraught discussions between new parents as to who your priceless cargo will be entrusted with.  Unless you are the Rees-Mogg family, in which case your children's nanny was your nanny and your father's nanny too, the process of identifying a person or institution is anxious making and uncertain.

My wife is German.  Our child is German.  Germans speak German.  Our child speaks German (insofar as toddlers speak anything that is not inexplicable howling and scarcely intelligible demands to watch bus videos).  The reason our child speaks German is that my wife completely reasonably demanded we employ a German nanny.

It is only by a miracle that this happened because, it transpires, German child carers are about as easy to come by as flying nannies with tradesmen admirers.  But we found one and she poured all her gemütlich goodness into Hardy Junior Nummer Eins.  And then she left.  At just the point in time that the child was still too young for us to explain that nursery represented a first thrilling rung on the ladder that leads away from parents to independent living, thinking and, most importantly, spending.  But also at just the point in time that the child was old enough to make plain to any passer by en route that this strange man was intent on abandoning it in the charge of Beelzebub and his minions and I will scream until you call the police, thank you.

Suffice to say the first days of nursery have not been greeted with wholesale enthusisasm.  Indeed as soon as the child awakes an imploring mantra of 'No Kita' starts up.  My wife, with an unerring sense of self-preservation, has delegated the drop-off to me.  On a recent journey the mantra accompanied us the whole way until I missed the turning whereupon it tailed off in shocked relief.  Having turned the car around a hopeful 'Zu Hause?' started up only to be replaced instantly by a terrible keening noise when in fact I turned into the open prison.

This is a grossly unfair designation for a jolly, professionally run outfit with all the safeguarding staff even the most neurotic parent could hope for.  But still it's not home: you know that, they know that and the child sure as hell knows it.  Nurseries always put me in mind of that dreadful greetings card: Jesus is coming look busy.  I imagine that a buzzer sounds when a parent is spotted approaching on the CCTV and suddenly it's a hive of story telling, messy play and sing songs.  As soon as the door is closed every child is chained to a cot with a jam smeared dummy.  Obviously I know it's not like that but that's what comes of giving a child Matilda and The Witches to read.

Anyway this post is in solidarity with any other parents who are 'transitioning'; with an encouraging reminder that they'll be instititutionalised before you know it.