Don't Worry Be Pappy - Fathering & The Fear

If you're an anxious person you should think twice before having a baby.  If you're not an anxious person you should also think twice before having a baby.  There is a universal omertà that prevents parents from sharing the truest tribulations of having a child.  Secrets that make freemasonry seem an orgy of oversharing.  The biggest secret is the fear.  The fear that starts with your baby's first breath and is just as strong with your last.

Checking that a baby is still breathing seems a mad thing until you have a baby when doing anything else seems a madness of irresponsibility.  Eventually (most) parents are able to reintroduce some basic functions into their lives like eating and sleeping, getting dressed even.  But an instinctive anxiety has been woken that will never be laid to rest.

That is why if you're already anxious you need to realise that there are levels and intensity of anxiety that even at your most overwrought you could scarcely conceive of.  If you're not anxious you need to  realise that you are about to introduce into your life a gnawing insatiable concern, a stone will be cast into your millpond and it will never cease rippling.  Or you will fall into the tiny minority of parents for whom having a child creates no care or concern at all, but there is no relief to be had there, for these are the bad parents incapable or unwilling to acknowledge nature's law that the self must surrender to the child.

As the father of a 13 month old I have enough foresight to realise that I am only beginning to get acquainted with the dimensions of base camp and that the ascent in earnest still lies ahead.  But like any mountaineer surveying a lofty peak I am not blind to the climb that lies in front of me.   There will be crevasses unseen and rockfalls unexpected but the goal and the general sense of the route lies clear before me.  And every step of the way will be the fear.  But parenting, unlike mountaineering, provides a multiplicity of subsidiary fears to lend novelty and variety to the experience.  

I have made a table:

Age	Fear C	Fear B	Fear A
Life BC (Before Child)	Homelessness/Unemployment/ Loneliness	Death of spouse/sibling /parent	Death of oneself
0-6 weeks	Will the baby ever latch on	Death	Death
6 weeks –3 months	Will the baby ever sleep	Will I ever sleep again	Death
3-4 months	Will I ever wear clothes again	Will I ever leave the house again	Death
4-6 months	Will I remember how to talk to adults	This is forever isn’t it	Death
6-9 months	Will the baby ever sit up	I had a sex life once	Death
9-12 months	Can’t wait to go back to work	Dreading going back to work	Death
12-15 months	Childcare	Childcare	Death
15-18 months	Will the child ever learn to walk	Who thought flying long haul was a good idea	Death
18-24 months	Will the child ever learn to talk	Will I ever not be picking up toys	Death
2-3 years	The nursery costs how much	Will I ever not smell of puke	Death
3-4 years	Is it too soon to have another	Is it too late to have another	Death
4-5 years	What do you mean we live 50 yards outside the catchment area	Is it too late to start going to church	Death
5-6 years	Will the child ever learn to ride a bike	Will the child ever learn to write	Death
6-7 years	Can’t believe the child still believes in Father Christmas	How do we stop the child finding out	Death
7-8 years	Why hasn’t my child been invited	I can’t believe we forgot to bring a present	Death
8-9 years	Why is the child being bullied	Why is the child bullying	Death
9-10 years	Being top of the class isn’t everything	Should we get a tutor	Death
10-11 years	Learning a musical instrument is very important	The recorder is Satan’s stick	Death
11-12 years	Big school	Puberty	Death
12-13	Puberty	Puberty	Death
13-14	I hope the child isn’t sexting	I hope the child isn’t smoking	Death
14-15	I hope the child isn’t smoking weed	I can’t believe I thought babies were difficult	Death
15-16	Please don’t get pregnant	Please don’t get your girlfriend pregnant	Death
16-17	GCSEs	GCSEs	Death
17-18	Will the child ever pass the driving test	Car insurance costs how much	Death
18-19	A-Levels	A-Levels	Death
19-20	A gap year was a terrible idea	Child is really missing out without a gap year	Death
20-21	As long as they get a 2:1	A 2:2 isn’t the end of the world	Death
20s	Will the child ever get a job	Will the child ever move out	Death
30s	Will the child ever get married	Please get pregnant	Death
40s	Please don’t get divorced	Please don’t get made redundant	Death
50s	Please don’t buy a Ferrari	She’s completely unsuitable, why didn’t the child learn first time	Death
60s	Please don’t put me in a nursing home	No, really don’t	Death

Baby Come Baby Go

"Treasure every minute"

What parent of a newborn has not had that said to them by a veteran parent (definition - anyone with a child one day older than your own).  And what newborn parent has not muttered to themselves 'Are you kidding! What am I supposed to treasure? The shit, the screaming, the sleeplessness, the sorry mess that was once my home?'  And always it's coupled with the insane warning:

"It goes so fast"

And you think it really, really doesn't.  No time passes more slowly than new baby time, not waiting for Father Christmas to come down the chimney time, not waiting for your boyfriend of 2 years to propose time, not waiting for a part-suspended District Line train when you're late for work time.

But it is true and you will not find out it is true until it is almost too late.  When your baby turns 1 you will notice by degrees, day by day, they cast off their baby form and become a child: limbs lengthen, cheeks recede and random gibberish coalesces into words.

Milestones that were so long wished for suddenly start flashing past like a glorious panorama from a train window that you can scarcely register before you're hurtled down the track.  For the first time in your life you understand how some women can become addicted to having babies in a Sisyphean quest to preserve a state of total dependency.

Babies exist in a state of pure emotion and the expression of their feelings is unmediated by any experience, any learning and any intellectual process.  Their anguish is expressed without restraint but so, wonderfully, is their happiness and the purity of a baby's laughter is the best curative the world can offer to the cynic and the careworn.

If you are not in touch with your emotions or find open display of emotion discomforting the early months of parenting may prove to be a trying experience but you will never receive a better schooling that a life lived in our heads alone is a life only partly lived.  There is in all of us an inner child that is often silenced or banished into long forgotten exile but it is astonishing to notice how swiftly a baby's gurgles can coax that child from the shadows and into the sun where it belongs.

As I watch wistfully the last grains of sand slip from my baby's hourglass I'm treasuring every minute because it goes so fast.

Only boring people are bored

“I’m bored” – what child now ever has the opportunity to utter words so familiar to the youth of its forebears?  My father was so fed up of hearing me and my sister whine this from the back of the car that he repeatedly although unsuccessfully instituted a 50p fine for every mention of the word.  Only the boring are bored is an admonition that comes back to me from that time.  In truth car journeys in our family were an uncomfortable melange of tedious hours of I Spy and instant frantic demands for navigation as my father would veer off at a congested junction thrusting an extraordinary tome into my hands which claimed to teleport you from junction to junction but instead triggered a terrifying episode of real life Whacky Races.

The point is car journeys were boring as the only entertainment consisted of teasing my sister and asking every 5 minutes if we were nearly there yet.  Now screens in the back shut up the children and the screen in the front tells them exactly how nearly there yet they are.  The annihilation of boredom by screen is by now a well worn trope.  I had my first vivid experience of it when at the age of 25 I did my first evening of baby sitting.  An angelic boy of two was put in my care for an evening and I had preposterously envisaged a jolly couple of hours reading Peter Pan to him.  Instead the moment the door clicked shut behind his parents he started to howl relentlessly in entirely well founded objection to the incompetent interloper.  I tried everything in my power (which in truth back then wasn’t much) before in desperation pressing play on the VHS.  It was as if Thomas the Tank Engine had reincarnated as an opium pipe: instant blissful silence. 

Now that I am a parent the thing that really surprises me about my childhood is that however incessant were my complaints of boredom not once do I recall my parents rebuking me for being boring myself.  This may just be a symptom of heroic self-restraint, it may be basic good manners or it may be a reflection of the 24/7 childcare that I [they] enjoyed.  For the fact of the matter is children are often pretty boring.

Worst of all children are actively boring.  They do not engender the passive boredom of a rainy Sunday afternoon in a house devoid of screen based diversion; the nothing to do boredom of our childhood but now consigned forever to history.  Instead theirs is the tedium of the task that must be tackled.  Contrary to popular wisdom nappy changing is a doddle compared to the more hellish aspects of parenting a small child.  It has a defined beginning and an end.  Compare this to the assured misery of getting a tired baby to sleep.  And in contrast to a boring job or task at work which you couldn’t care less about this boredom is suffused with the guilty feeling that you’re doing it wrong, that you’re failing in some fundamental way.

I want to scotch any suggestion that this is a whinge.  The joys attendant on caring for a child, especially your own, more than compensate for the teeth grinding longeurs.  But I do have a concern that the tolerance for boredom of the parents of the future is being so diminished by screen based entertainment that there could yet be a real crisis in parenting 20 years hence.  Perhaps it is time to bring back boredom?

A shopping list for life

When Patek Philippe dad is not carefully safeguarding his watch for his son and his son’s son I like to imagine him being the kind of father who imparts words of wisdom in the queue for the Cresta Run or from the back of a khaki Land Rover in the Serengeti, binoculars slung around his neck.  You may be fortunate enough to have the kind of father who is not abashed to share pearls of wisdom gleaned from learning and experience.  However I suspect that most children establish their father’s views from a lifetime's random expression of prejudices and passions.

I have learnt many things from my father. I can spot the difference between the Ionic and the Doric at 100 paces.  I can name all of Zeus’ lovers (victims).  I know that short sleeved shirts are ‘charlie’.  I know that nothing in life is more important than having the best fancy dress costume.  I can tie a bow tie, even if it’s single ended.  I know that the correct way to eat a banana is from the blade of a knife, with clotted cream.  So really he did cover all the bases.

Notwithstanding the excellent job he did I thought it might be useful to jot a few thoughts down for my own son.  Either for him to peruse at his leisure at an appropriate juncture or alternatively to act as a crib should he ever come looking for paternal guidance.  And like remembering to take a shopping list to Sainsbury’s it could even prompt me to keep to virtue’s path rather than the crisps aisle aka the road to perdition.  So here in a totally random order of importance:

1. Fix your eyes on the horizon not a screen – nothing pixelated beats IRL (ancient expression meaning in real life).

2. Read everything – there’s nothing ever published from which nothing can be learned.  Except the Daily Mail, whose only lesson is that mankind is probably already beyond redemption.

3. Be brave – pluck grannies from burning buildings by all means, lead your platoon in attack (if you really have to) but remember that emotional courage is what takes real guts.

4. Don’t play games – except Monopoly, provided you don’t cry like your dad did when you lose, and tennis.  People are not pawns.

5. Honour thy father and mother – the Bible is wrong about a lot of things, this is not one of them.

6. Consent – obviously the sine qua non but waiting until your yearning meets her or his longing and then you’ll find out what the fuss is really all about.

7. Be sad – you can only really appreciate espresso after you’ve drunk Nescafé, you can only value happiness when you’ve known sadness.

8. Lighting – almost nothing is more important than good lighting, when giving a dinner it is impossible to have too many candles, or flowers.

9. Conformity is the greatest rebellion – when you’re 16, sniffing glue and thinking about a tattoo please believe this one.

10. Don’t bullshit – it stinks and makes you stink too.

11. Cooking – learn it and never apologise for it.  If it’s good people will take seconds if it’s not don’t force them.

12. Conversation – everyone’s favourite topic is themselves and everyone’s an expert on it: small talk is for small people.

13. Never condescend – except to the pompous and the prejudiced; then pile in.

14. One-offs – we all are, every single human being on the planet unique in his or her hopes and fears, don’t make assumptions about others.

15. Rugby – not football.

16. Your body – respect it and people will respect you.  It can do a hell of a lot more than sit on a sofa watching TV and will reward you richly for doing it.

17. Your passions – find them and pursue them even when people like your parents, especially your parents, deter you.

18. People/experiences/things – in that order.  Whatever advertising suggests nobody will love you for your car.  Look what Gandhi left behind when he died and aim for that (although shoes are a permissible substitute).

19. Swim – in rivers, lakes and the seas.  When you get lost in your head you lose yourself, cold water will find you again.

20. Fail – you will learn from this. Victory has no pupils.

But above all: love.  As The Beatles rightly sang, in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.  Don’t ration love, its supply, like your father’s advice, is endless.  Chance your heart, it may be bruised or even broken, but life without love is merely existence.

Don't bash GOSH

There is a cruel echo of the judgment of Solomon about Charlie Gard's unknowing passage through the English and the European courts.  Solomon manifested his wisdom by putting to the test a mother's devotion to the preservation of her baby's life at any cost.  For the wise king's latter day descendants the question is whether exactly that devotion should be repudiated.  However the parallel sadly withers fast.  Solomon's psychological acuity reunited a baby with its mother resulting in an unequivocally just and, for the mother, happy outcome.  No judge's ruling can provide what baby Charlie's parents long for which is a cure and a healthy child.  At most the court can confer agency on them or the illusion of agency which, when parents are desperate, can however unfounded seem as sustaining.

Like many around the world I have reflected often upon this helpless, stricken child and his parents' ceaseless quest to prevail in the face of medical and judicial opinion.  However he has been much on my mind long before he became a national talking point and certainly before he became a political pawn shamelessly deployed by Trump and the object of the Pope's prayers.  Indeed on two occasions I have walked within arm's length of his parents.  Not because I happened to pass them en route to the Royal Courts of Justice when Charlie's case was being argued but because I was in the same place with the same purpose, visiting a child in Great Ormond Street Hospital.

GOSH's doctors and nurses are not infallible nor are they angels.  They are however consummate professionals, many of them not merely national leaders in their field but pioneering world class medics.  The hard and pitiless reality is that when a hospital treats the sickest children in the nation not all of them will go home.

You would hope it might not need saying but every single member of its staff dedicates every fibre of his or her being to trying to prevent that from happening.  The terrible media ferment that has accompanied the Charlie Gard case betrays a common tension at the heart of our relationship with doctors.  We can both expect far too much of them and give them far too little credit.  I don't know how the case will resolve but I do know that condemning his doctors as murderous and unfeeling is outrageous and threatening medical staff at the hospital should be severely punished.

It has been reported that a number of donors to the hospital have declared an intention to withdraw their support.  Such a decision heaps injustice on tragedy.  This great hospital and its sick children need all the money you can spare.  In October I am running a half marathon in support of them and if you wish you can donate here.