by Matt Rudd
‘No.’
‘Thought as much.’
The problem now is that I’m so tired, I’m worried that if I do manage to nod off, I’ll sleep so deeply that I wouldn’t have any anti-child-crushing instinct. Isabel says this is nonsense. I point out the case of the panda. She says this is nonsense: I am not a giant panda. On the plus side, she and Jacob are sleeping brilliantly and I only have two more weeks of paternity leave before I, too, can sleep brilliantly, back at my desk.
Tuesday 8 January
I love Jacob. I really do. But he’s so very, very small and fragile. Because of the whole stomach-slicing style of birth, Isabel can’t carry him around easily. So I have to. Every time I take him up or down the stairs, I have resolved in my mind that if I slip, I will cushion him, rather than put my own arms out to break the fall. I may kill myself, but Jacob will survive. This is what I am prepared to do.
At lunch, which I have made because Isabel still can’t do very much in the way of chores and because she seems to spend most of the day breast-feeding, I sit watching my pasta get cold because I am holding Jacob. Every time I put him down, he cries.
‘He needs a feed,’ I say hopefully.
‘I fed him five minutes ago. I’ll take him in a second. And anyway, you can hold him with one hand and eat with the other.’ Isabel is way ahead of the curve on this whole parenting thing. Despite being sore, tired, pale and red-nippled, she is already putting things into perspective, behaving rationally, becoming supermum.
‘No, I can’t. I might drop him.’ I’m not quite there yet.
‘No, you won’t. Just relax.’
So I relax, take a mouthful of pasta and Jacob’s head lolls unexpectedly, striking the edge of the table. It takes ten minutes for him to stop crying. It takes ten hours for me to stop freaking out at my own stupid stupidity. Isabel says it’s only a little bump. I say he could have been killed. And even if it is only a little bump, he still has a bruise.
And the health visitor is coming tomorrow.
Wednesday 9 January
The health visit is compulsory. Society does not allow people to vanish into domestic anonymity without first double-checking that they are not doing horrible things to their newborn children.
This is unfortunate because the bruise looks epic this morning. It looks like I’ve punched him. I look like a heroin addict because I haven’t slept for three nights. We will be flagged as an abusive family. Jacob will be taken away from us and raised by horribly strict foster parents who, at least, will never try to stuff their faces with pasta while holding an eight-day-old infant. Years from now, Jacob and I will be reunited, perhaps on a television show presented by Esther Rantzen. And I will try to explain that I hadn’t meant to bang his head on the table, I just hadn’t realised how floppy a newborn child’s head could be. And the crowd will boo. And Jacob will tell Esther how, despite his strict Christian upbringing, he finds it hard to forgive me.
‘Morning. I’m the health visitor.’
‘Morning. Hi. Come in, come in. How are you? Can I get you a cup of tea? Or something stronger? No. Silly. Of course not. Don’t know what I’m saying. Tea? Yes, right away. Isabel and Jacob are in the front room. Okay. Fine. Right. Okay.’
Brilliant. The same guilty ramblings I spout when I’m going through customs. Which is why I always get searched. And now why this health visitor is going to take Jacob away from us.
‘Here’s your tea. Hahahaha. Can’t remember if you said white. Or black. So I’ve brought both. I mean milk. I’ve brought milk.’
Calm down, you idiot.
The health visitor tells Isabel that she shouldn’t co-sleep. It’s dangerous.
Isabel tells the health visitor that it isn’t and that it’s up to her how she raises her own child.
The health visitor makes a note.
This is going badly. I explain, apropos of nothing, that the bruise was an accident. She makes another note. Isabel rolls her eyes really theatrically at me, as if to say, ‘Why on earth have you mentioned the bruise?’ I throw back a ‘What?!’ face, as if to say, ‘What?!’ The health visitor makes another note, so I pretend I have some e-mails to answer.
Ten minutes later, the coast is clear and Isabel reveals that the woman asked if I was abusing her. Apparently, they have to ask. Apparently, Isabel saw it as a good opportunity to make a joke about our marriage. ‘Only mentally’ she had answered, laughing. And instead of laughing, the health visitor had made another note.
Saturday 12 January
I think we have a routine. Bed at 8 p.m. Awake at 5.30 a.m. Naps at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. This is fine. This is survival, at least. And Isabel and Jacob seem to be sleeping rather beautifully together. I know this because I still can’t relax. It’s not just the whole panda thing; it’s the responsibility. The sheer mind-blowing responsibility of having a baby totally dependent on you. Well, us. Well, her. But at least we have a routine.
Sunday 13 January
We don’t have a routine.
Monday 14 January
The routine is that I have to get up at 5.30 a.m., even though I haven’t slept, and read Thurber to Jacob while Isabel sleeps. She’s still recovering. He prefers Thurber to Hardy – I can tell by the way he dribbles faster. Isabel reckons I should stick with The Hungry Caterpillar but Jacob finds the inevitability of the caterpillar’s descent into teenage obesity depressing.
Tuesday 15 January
I can’t do it any more. I can’t go shopping, tidy the house, change eight thousand nappies, make tea, make coffee, bounce Jacob to sleep, bounce myself awake, tidy the house again, attempt to write thank-you letters to all the people who have sent us chintzy flowers, lurid babygros and mindless, noisy, cluttery plastic toys. I can’t then tidy the house again, make breakfast, lunch, dinner, a second dinner (because, as I think we’ve established, Isabel is breast-feeding and needs all the energy she can get, even if this means matching the caloric intake of an Olympic decathlete) and a midnight breakfast, and tidy the house again. I can’t do it.
I love being a dad. I’m delighted we’re all alive and that Jacob appears to be not just growing but taking an interest in serious literature. Honestly, though, this is even worse than the third trimester, when Isabel was at her itchiest, her most disconcertingly oversexed, her most bloated and her most intemperate all at the same time.
Thursday 17 January
It’s not worse than the third trimester. I have slept. Hallelujah, I have slept. True, I have been forced from my own bed, but this is understandable. They need each other. I need sleep. The sofa bed: my new salvation.
Friday 18 January
Isabel’s mum has decided that Isabel’s decision not to buy a pram because she wants to carry Jacob everywhere is a silly one. ‘You are not a hunter-gatherer. You are not toiling in the harsh conditions of the African bush. You are in Britain. Your mother didn’t escape from the tyranny of Communist Poland and marry your fine upstanding English father in order to produce offspring that behave like they live in a hut. So, darlink, I have been to John Lewis and have spoken with the lady who is expert in prams, and I have bought you a Bugaboo.’
The Bugaboo is the four-by-four of the pram world: excellent for pushing up a mountain, but something of a handful if you have a small house and you confine most of your pram-pushing to standard-width pavements. Still, it looks cool. And Caroline, the most vocal of the NCT baby-group mums (yes, they have formed a gang and she is the leader), has a sister who claims her children are five centimetres taller than all the other children at her nursery solely because she used a Bugaboo. This, pontificated Caroline, is because it’s the only buggy that allows the child to lie flat. This helps their bones to stretch. When I pointed out that it might be genes, she replied that it might…but was it really worth the risk? Was it really worth having a buggy – or a sling – which could stunt the growth of a baby?
‘I bet the Hunchback of Notre Dame’s parents didn’t use a Bugaboo,’ said her husband, in an attemp
t to diffuse his wife. And then the conversation moved on to torn perineums.
Saturday 19 January
Only two days until I go back to work. Bravely, I volunteer to take Jacob out for an hour on my own to give Isabel some morning ‘me-time’. I aim for the park, proud new dad pushing quite grumpy baby. Grannies smile as I lift him out of the buggy to show him what our local trees look like. In a few months, he’ll be on those baby swings. In a couple of years, he’ll be on the next swings up. Then he’ll be on the big slide. Then he’ll be snogging another teenager over there. Then he’ll be smoking cigarettes behind the hut over there. Then he’ll be sitting on this bench with his own baby, thinking about the future.
This is it now. This is my life. It is all mapped out. My plans to resign from my boring office job, retrain as a sailor and enter the Vendée round-the-world yacht race have been put on hold indefinitely. Ditto resigning and moving to a yurt on the Mongolian steppe. Or resigning and moving to Buenos Aires to drink heavy red wine and master the tango. Adventure and unpredictability have vanished, or rather, they have been condensed into the child looking up at me right now. I think this is probably fine.
‘Are you looking for salvation?’ A man in an anorak is peering down at me through milk-bottle glasses.
‘Sorry?’
‘You look sad. Are you looking for salvation?’
I notice he is clutching a pile of pamphlets entitled Let Jesus Save You. Right now, this seems unlikely. Can’t a parent sit in peace mulling over lost freedoms without being God-bothered? I tell him I’d love to be saved, but I have a nappy to change and it’s going to be a big one. So he leaves.
Sunday 20 January
Alex, newly gay and newly full of joie de vivre, has popped round with Geoff to give us our baby present.
‘Surely the tropical rainforest you sent over was ample?’ I ask innocently.
‘Don’t be silly, dears. This is the greatest moment in your lives – ever. Flowers alone would not suffice. Geoff and I have been talking and, well, we’ve decided we would like to give you something very special indeed.’
Oh, God.
‘Something to mark this wonderful time in your lives.’
This is going to be bad.
‘Your three lives.’
He grips Geoff’s hand, and then Isabel’s. Like he’s Madonna about to walk on stage.
‘Geoff and I would like to design your bathroom for you.’
‘But—’
‘No buts, babes. You wanted it done before Baby arrived, but Willy was too busy at work to do it. We can do it for you. Geoff and I. This country’s newest and hottest interior design team. And I know you’re going to say it’s a bad time, but I promise you won’t even notice the work going on. You’ll blink and it will all be done.’
‘But—’
‘Didn’t I say no buts, babes? You’ve done the nursery yourselves, and look what a mess that is. I simply can’t let you ruin the bathroom, too. Now, here are the catalogues. I’m thinking this bath. And these taps. And Geoff was thinking an LED mirror with a built-in sensor, weren’t you, Geoff? You twenty-first-century designer, you.’
And that was Geoff’s cue. Until then, he’d been uncharacteristically quiet, but he made up for it now with a twenty-five-minute speech on how our bathroom would be the bathroom to set the new standard for all bathrooms. And then he just started saying random words. Light. Space. Air. Movement. Energy. Calm. Length. Girth. Swirling vortex. Drip. Drop. Drip. Movement.
‘You already said movement,’ I point out.
‘Movement. Movement. Movement,’ he continues.
Nothing good will come of this.
Monday 21 January
Don’t tell Isabel. Nobody tell her, for goodness’ sake. This must be our little secret. But, oh my, the joy! The joy of leaving home, of bidding farewell to my beloved wife and my beloved three-week-old child, of strolling to the station on a crisp winter morning, buying a coffee, boarding a train and sitting unmolested for forty-five whole minutes – no, more than forty-five minutes because the train is delayed due to the late running of an earlier service. No crying. No screaming. No panicking.
Bliss.
Let the train be delayed all day. Let me sit here in this railway siding, staring into space, dribbling a bit like a baby but not with a baby that I have to worry about all the time. Even when the pointy-faced little woman sitting next to me still doesn’t move her bag on to her lap when I ask politely, I refuse to let the bliss dissipate. I simply open my paper as unthoughtfully as possible, allowing its pages to encroach on her personal space. I have had enough practice of commuter one-upmanship to remain unflustered in the face of pointy-faced rudeness.
The bliss lasts until the minute I get to work. Even though he only sits two desks away, Johnson sends me an e-mail: ‘Welcome back. And by the way, I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up to speed with the Media Guardian and I’m sorry I didn’t mention this before, though I was being thoughtful because you were having a baby, but did you know that Anastasia has been made Editor?’
‘Corridor. Now,’ I reply.
He isn’t joking. Anastasia, who was work experience less than eighteen months ago, has been appointed the youngest-ever editor of Life & Times magazine. The teenager over whom I once threw a cup of (cold) tea because she was so irritatingly efficient is now the boss. I start strangling the water cooler.
‘Not having anger-management issues again, are we, Walker?’
It’s her: our four-year-old boss.
‘No, no, he isn’t,’ mumbles Johnson. ‘He was telling me how much fun being a dad is. Turns out not much fun at all. Hahahaha.’
‘Johnson, a baby is a lifestyle choice. We mustn’t feel sorry for people who opt to procreate. Even idiots could grasp the fundamentals of a condom if they wanted to. Now, conference in fifteen minutes. And I want some fresh ideas for front of book. It’s looking tired. Tireder than poor Walker here.’
I go back home that evening wondering how best to break it to Isabel. In the end, I opt for the direct approach.
‘Isabel, I’m afraid I have to resign. Anastasia has become Editor.’
‘Oh no, you don’t. You have a family to support. We can’t live on my maternity leave. Now take Jacob. I’ve had him all day.’
And the matter is closed.
Thursday 24 January
It has occurred to me that now I am a dad with a bitch for a boss, the train is the only place where I can relax. At home, I appear to have developed a sensor on my arse that triggers an order from Isabel. Every time I sit down, no matter how gingerly, I set off the sensor: ‘Darling, I’m breast-feeding. Could you pass a muslin?’
I get up, I get the muslin from all the way upstairs, I come back, I sit down and I trigger the sensor again.
‘Sorry, darling. And a glass of water.’
Repeat. ‘And another cushion.’
Repeat.
‘Could you not group your requests in some way?’ I ask. And this makes her apologise and so I feel terrible. But, really.
At work, Anastasia is on my case. She breaks up a group of people ahhing at the new baby photo on my desk. She barks at me every time I look like I’m about to drop off (which is frequently, because the sofa bed doesn’t provide quite the blissful night’s sleep I had initially hoped for). She criticises my poor grammar, even though it isn’t poor at all. Not really.
The train is all I have left. No one can bark at me on the train. And the sensor on my arse is out of range. And this is the reason why I won’t let the pointy-faced woman who keeps hogging one and a half seats on my carriage annoy me. She is short. She is ginger. Life cannot have been easy for her. This is her way of getting her own back on the world. I won’t rise to it.
Saturday 26 January
Today marked our first social occasion as a mobile family unit. It was only lunch at Isabel’s parents who only live a ten-minute walk away, but it was still something of a milestone. We hoped, I think, that it might h
ave gone better, that it might have been enjoyable, but even with military-style planning, it didn’t and it wasn’t.
We asked Isabel’s mum to have lunch ready at midday because, if we have managed to establish any kind of routine – which we haven’t – it was that Jacob tends to need bouncing to sleep from 2 until 3 p.m., or he screams until 8 p.m.
We arrived at 1.20 p.m. because we were about to set off an hour earlier, but then Jacob needed a feed. And a change. And another feed. And another change. Then it started to rain and I couldn’t remember where I’d put the waterproof buggy cover, even though Isabel had expressly asked me to leave it somewhere handy. By the time I did find it, the rain had passed but Isabel had hunger-anger. It comes on quickly in breast-feeding mums. So she demanded toast even though lunch was but a ten-minute walk away. Until, at last we set off.
Frankly, Sherpas bound for the summit of Everest carry less. I had at least nine bags containing everything from nappies and wet wipes to toys, changing mats, breast pads and nipple cream, arnica, snack bars, babygros, backup babygros, backup-backup babygros and a kitchen sink. I walked ten steps behind Isabel and Jacob all the way to the in-laws.
We had roast chicken accompanied by a relentless monologue about timekeeping from her mum and advice on no-nonsense parenting from her dad. Isabel had no appetite because of the toast. Then we set off back to base camp, me with the nine bags plus four Tupperware containers of some kind of Polish stew and, inexplicably, a very large photo album from when Isabel was a baby. By the time we returned, Isabel needed more toast. I needed a lie-down.