So, what’s it like being a father?
Now that I come to answer this question, I really appreciate the fact that serialising the story of Tom’s birth, from receiving the phone call to meeting the boy, has taken me over two months to complete – and furnished me with the benefit of hindsight.
During my first five days as a dad-with-wife-and-child-in-hospital, awash with floaty idealism and sleep-deprived levels of dopamine, I would have described it (indeed, I
did describe it) in near-religious terms. It was glorious, life-changing, a miracle of nature. it was heart-wrenching to have to leave the hospital of an evening, and each morning – after very little sleep, but still more than poor Julie – I would be back there as soon as possible to spend more time with my family*.
During the
next five days, as a dad-with-wife-and-child-at-home, awash with harsh pessimism, and sleep-deprived levels of impatience, I would have described it (once I stopped crying and sobbing) as the hardest bloody thing I had ever done in my life, why
WHY did nobody tell us it was going to be this bad and this hard and what’s that rash on his face, is it contagious, why is he breathing like that, oh hell is he alright, why won’t he feed, what’s wrong with him, why can’t we do this, what’s wrong with us, ring the hospital – perhaps they can tell us whether he’s choking to death or whether this freakish breathing is normal, while you’ve got them on the phone maybe we should discuss their returns policy, what can we hire/buy to settle him – with a bit of work and a lot of money we can probably replicate the hospital environment completely, right down to the nurses-on-call, and then he’ll be fine, how many nappies can this kid go through in one day, that’s it – our lives as we knew them are over.
Now, having come through both of those necessary stages of the roller-coaster and survived largely intact, I can afford a bit of balanced** realism.
As you get to know your child, you also discover your own abilities as parents – and you simultaneously realise that while he has needs,
you have the means to meet them. The confidence afforded by this realisation takes some time to obtain, but it’s what makes all the difference between panic and sanity.
A baby may be a complex system internally, but his responses are fairly straight-forward:
‘Listen, Dad - I have six basic needs: food, cleanliness, sleep, shelter, love and entertainment. Meet these, and we’ll get along fine. Fail to meet these, and I’ll cry. What? Can I modulate my cry so that you know which one I require? No, I bloody can’t! Well, I don’t care if you could write a best-seller based on such a theory – I don’t have the vocal range yet, okay? Well, why don’t you just make something up, then?’
Crying has survived evolution as an all-purpose signal that a need is going unmet. It has done so because its reaction on a parent is tremendous – there is nothing you wouldn’t drop (except the baby, of course) to give your screaming child what it needs***.
This reaction – for me, at least – was hellish at the beginning. Tom’s cry reached deep down into my genetic constitution and flipped levers I never knew existed. I couldn’t even think clearly enough to remember those basic needs.
Julie seemed to snap out of this reaction quicker than I did (but she had plenty of other problems to deal with, the poor mammal), but eventually I came around, too. A baby might be highly demanding, but the reality is that the solutions are all fairly easy and straightforward – if hugely time-consuming; but what better way to consume your time****?
Don’t get me wrong – I’m by no means immune to Tom’s screams. Just yesterday, I was ready to put my head through a wall due to a total and utter lack of understanding of his needs. And this is where they get tricky on you: just when you think you know what you’re doing, the little blighters go and change their routines!
As the weeks pass, the difficulty of meeting needs is softened further by the gradual development of their responses and interactions: following you with their eyes, a smile, a coo, a laugh, etc. It blows me away to look back over the past nine weeks and see how much Tom has changed. He’s developing so quickly, it won’t be long before we see him as ‘a boy’ rather than ‘a baby’.
In short, being a father is a hundred times harder than I expected – but a thousand times more rewarding. I thoroughly recommend it.
* ‘My family’ has become my favourite phrase, and I now find any excuse to use it. After Julie and I were engaged, I relished in referring to ‘my fiancée’ – but that soon sounded pretentious. After we wed, I loved saying ‘my wife’ – but the proliferation of colleagues and associates using the gender-neutral reference ‘my partner’ left me feeling old-fashioned. But everyone has a family, and this one’s mine, so I’m going to espouse proud paternity as much as I bloody-well want, okay?
** This is a bit of a fib. There’s nothing ‘balanced’ about my emotional responses to the boy – I love him, I love him, I love him. He has already filled me up with a completely irrational set of emotional responses: I laugh and coo when he vomits, I congratulate his efforts when he poops, I take hundreds of photos of him every day and inflict them on my friends, family and colleagues. Leave me alone – I’m just being a dad!
*** I’m hoping that I toughen up on this before Tom’s old enough to realise that he’s got me around his finger. I really don’t want to be one of ‘those’ parents you see in the supermarket, blackmailed into buying disposable/edible rubbish by breath-holding and temper-tantrums.
**** Well, off the top of my head there’s reading, writing, eating, sleeping, watching TV, catching up with friends or seeing a film. Just kidding, Tom. Really.
