by Matt Coyne
Because of these random associations we make to names, me and your mom started to have conversations like this:
“What about Mark?”
“No, sounds like a dentist.”
“What about Jason?”
“No, sounds like a piss-head.”
“What about Sarah?”
“No, sounds like the sort of girl who would get her friends to tell you that she fancies you, just so that when you ask her if she wants to go Rollerblading, she can humiliate you by saying no in front of the entire school cafeteria. Then, to add insult to injury, start rumors about you, saying that you shit yourself during PE (when you didn’t, you just sat in some hot chocolate). And then you’re the one who gets in trouble for carving her name into a desk with the words ‘Die, Sarah, die.’ ”
Y’know, er . . . conversations like that.
So when it came to giving you a name, we got a bit stuck. Naming you felt like giving you a bearing, it felt like we were placing a flag in the earth that said: “This new person is here, he is part of our community of humans, and with this name you can mark him as worthy of title.” So it seemed quite important to get it right.
Strangely, as soon as you arrived and we found out that you were a little boy, we settled on the name Charlie pretty quickly. (You have to decide pretty quickly after the birth; otherwise you’re calling the baby “the baby” all the time.)
In hindsight, it seems that we’d actually been circling around the name before you got here. Charlie was your great-grandpa’s name, and he was a good man. Dependable, hardworking, and about as cheerfully Irish as you can get without straying into leprechaun territory. And it seemed a solid idea to continue a family tradition.
Don’t get me wrong—I know some people are insistent on giving their babies traditional family names, but it wasn’t like that. Naming you after my granddad wasn’t a line in the sand. We liked the name as well. If my granddad had been called Jedediah Fuckfingers the Third, we probably would have gone for something else. But when it came down to it, Charlie seemed like the name of someone who was kind and lucky and a good friend.
What is really strange, though, is that after all the talk and agonizing about names, when we finally gave you yours, it felt a lot like we hadn’t named you at all. It felt more like it was what you had always been called, and we had just uncovered it somehow.
So we hope you like it.
If you don’t, tough.
Just keep in mind that it could have been worse. You could have been born to a celebrity and called North or Apple, for example. (Good luck going to school in the industrial heartlands of Yorkshire when you’re named after a fruit or a point of the compass.) And if you think that’s bad, there was a piece in the newspaper, the same week you were born, about other dodgy names that parents have given their kids. I made a note of some of the names from that article. They include:
• Monkey
• Ninja Qwest
• Vejonica
• Sex Fruit
• Phelony
• Chairish
• Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced “Albin”)
• Uteraz
• Yr Hyness
• Punched
• Horse Dick
• Mafia No Fear
• Anus
• Robocop
So, if for whatever reason you’re not a fan of the name Charlie, suck it up—you could have been called Robocop Horse Dick Coyne.
MILESTONE NO. 2: YOUR FIRST SMILE
So then you were here, name and all. And I think your entrance is pretty well covered in Chapter 1. (Don’t let that put you off having kids. It’s worth every “red in tooth and claw” moment. And besides, when it comes to childbirth, you won the lottery—you’re a man. All you have to do is turn up with change for the parking spot and keep an expression on your face that suggests you know what the fuck is going on.)
In the very moment of your arrival, it was pretty clear that your mom loved you immediately, unconditionally, and without any reservation. But you and me? For the first few days, we eyed each other quite suspiciously.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved you too, but you were quite boring. Nothing personal—all newborns are pretty boring. After the adrenaline of labor and coming home subsides, it’s a bit like finding a jellyfish washed up on the beach: once you’ve looked at it for a bit and poked it with a stick, you find out that it doesn’t do a lot.
And, because you didn’t do a lot, it was quite hard for me to get a handle on who you were.
When I look back now, the first sense of that handle was in this milestone: your first smile.
There isn’t a great deal to write about it, other than to say that the first time you did smile, it was something momentous.
I once did a ball-achingly boring school project on a Victorian intellectual called John Ruskin. The only thing I can remember about it was something he said about penguins. He said: “One can’t be angry when one looks at a penguin.”
He might as well have been talking about your smile, and while that might sound sentimental, and you may be reading this as a teenager with rolling eyes and saying to the page: “God, Dad, that is so embarrassing,” I don’t care. Maybe one day you will have a kid of your own, or maybe you already have one and you have found out for yourself: your own baby’s smile is a firework. A thing so powerful that it is almost like armor. A defense for a creature without defense.
You first smiled at around two weeks. Experts, baby professionals, pediatricians—they will all tell you that newborn babies don’t smile, and certainly not at two weeks. They will insist that babies don’t start smiling until they are around two months old and that, before then, it is just a reflex or a sign that they are passing wind. But the first time you smiled, I knew what all parents know: that when it comes to this, experts are full of shit.
You did smile. And rather than accept the perceived wisdom that it was impossible, we came to the conclusion that anyone who tried to tell us otherwise was wrong and trying to deprive us of something magical, and that those people were bitter, twisted, joy-thieving fuck-faces who make Darth Maul look like Ellen DeGeneres.
You smiled.
It was a Sunday night, and we’d just taken you out of the bath and were drying you on your changing table. Your mom was singing: “Jump, jump went the little green frog.” Which is a song about a frog whose eyes go “blink, blink, blink.” And I was attempting to distract you by doing the “actions” over your mom’s shoulder (these were mainly facial expressions that I thought looked a lot like a frog, but which your mom cruelly told me looked a lot more like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sex face).
It’s impossible to know why (and you will never remember and be able to let us know), but this combination of weird sounds and making faces fired something like amusement in your tiny brain. You momentarily focused on us both and smiled: first with an up-curve of your lips and then with your eyes. And your mom happy-cried (she was doing that a lot then) and we celebrated. We needed it: at the time, we were as knackered as we would ever be.
So, as a milestone, your first smile was an important one for all of us. At a point when we were struggling with how high-maintenance and what a massive pain in the ass a baby was turning out to be, it was a transference of energy, a reviver, and a moment when I thought: You know what? This kid’s all right.
MILESTONE NO. 3: YOUR FIRST TOOTH
You weren’t born with teeth. Which I’m quite glad about. Apparently some babies are, which must be quite bizarre. Teeth seem a specifically non-newborn accessory, like a beard or a pipe.
The only reason I was worried about this was that I’d read somewhere about a baby from the UK who was born with ten of his teeth, all there and ready to chew. And I was a bit weirded out by the idea of you arriving, and gazing up at us for the first time to reveal a grille of Simon Cowell–esque gnashers. (I worried about the strangest things before you were born, but I’m guessing your mom was even
more pleased that you didn’t arrive like that. I don’t think any mom would be that keen on breast-feeding a newborn that looks like it could make short work of a stick of rock candy.)
Anyway, for most babies, teeth appear at about four months, and your first one appeared as timetabled and it was a moment of relief. Not least because it demonstrated some sort of progress through the trials of teething.
Before you were born, I’d heard parents constantly explain away their children’s crying, screaming, and tantrums with the excuse that their little one was teething. In my pathetic ignorance, I probably thought that it was just an excuse for their baby being a grouch.
Especially since babies always seemed to be teething. When my friends’ kid’s crying was excused away for the twentieth time that month with “It’s his teeth coming through,” I used to think: Jesus, how many teeth is this kid going to have? It’s a baby, not a shark.
But, in reality, it’s not making excuses at all. Cutting teeth is brutal and can take ages. Days and weeks of pain for just one stubborn tooth to force its appearance. The experience of seeing the pain you felt during the arrival of your first tooth was a lesson in my ignorance and stupidity, and it was a lesson well learned.
The classic signs were there, that your first tooth was on its way, a good two weeks before it could even be seen. You were slavering like a Saint Bernard staring into a butcher’s shop window, and you had the telltale flushed cheeks, the bright crimson of a drunk gnome. And that’s exactly what you looked like, minus a stupid hat, a fishing rod, a toadstool to sit on, and any hint of cheeriness.
As this first tooth started to push through, you were miserable. All you wanted to do was chew. To put my or your mom’s finger or thumb in your mouth and bite down with angry gums. Until one painful day when a razor-sharp shred of enamel cut through and your mom realized too late that she had her finger in a human pencil sharpener.
It soon became clear that offering you a teether was preferable to having our fingers chomped on or allowing you to gnaw on a table leg or a stray electrical cord. So we bought you all shapes and sizes (simple rings full of gel that could be frozen, and others in the shape of a giraffe or a set of keys), and you sat on our laps as you forced through those early teeth by chewing away on these things like a rabid puppy with a pigskin shoe.
Usually, the first teeth to arrive are the bottom two. The cutesy little Tic Tacs that you see in the smiles that grace baby magazines. But your first teeth were the top two canines. The vampire teeth. Which were pointy and made you look like Count Orlok or one of the Lost Boys. For a while, it was difficult to tell whether you were upset because you were teething or because you didn’t like direct sunlight or garlic and were hankering for the blood of the innocent.
As a milestone, the first tooth wasn’t a very enjoyable one. It was hard watching you get your first tooth and, for that matter, all the rest of them. You no doubt can’t remember the discomfort, but if you’ve experienced toothache since you will know that it is one of the most excruciating things you can endure. It was heart-shredding at times when you were coping with the pain of teething and the accompanying fever and chills and you couldn’t express that pain in a way that we could make it better.
So teething is crap, but when a new smile came with your first tooth, it was a bonus milestone. A moment that seemed like real progress and a twinkling that felt like we were dealing with a little person, developing a character and growing fast. And, yes, for a while when you smiled, you looked like a cross between Nosferatu and Blade, but for three months you were our little vampire, and you looked badass.
So, sunshine, look after your teeth. Cut down on the sugary drinks and cookies, and brush and floss twice daily. Because I don’t know about the ones you have now, but the first lot you had, they took some getting.
MILESTONE NO. 4: CRAWLING
Apparently, babies are supposed to start crawling at about seven or eight months old. But you took your time. Each week we went to one of your activity classes (like baby sensory or whatever), and we were surrounded by little kiddies of about the same age as you, and they all seemed to be tear-assing around on their bellies like windup toys: little giddy soldiers commando-crawling all over the place. You just kind of sat there and watched, occasionally rolling on your back and staring up at the ceiling for a bit. You could see all these kids crawling around, but had no interest in doing the same. You looked at them like they were idiots, and they looked at you like you were the class stoner.
You were like your dad: lazy. But you’d also got it sussed out. If there was something you wanted, and it was a few feet away, you’d just grab the rug it was on and pull it toward yourself like you were reeling in a fish. Or you’d just stare at something and jabber until someone fetched it for you. In a lot of ways, you behaved as though crawling was beneath you.
In the end, one day we decided to stop fetching you stuff. And, after a couple of weeks of you looking at us like we were slaves who had revolted, it started to work.
Eventually you seemed to get bored of waiting for things to magically appear in your hands and you started rolling toward them. Then, after a while, you started to shuffle and shimmy on your stomach, coordinate your arms and legs, and slowly but surely move . . . backward.
You mastered going backward pretty quickly. For weeks, you couldn’t move forward at all, but you could reverse under the settee with remarkable speed and efficiency. This reversing wasn’t deliberate, though, and it created its own frustration. You could see the place you were trying to get to, but the more frantically you tried to get there, the more your brain ballsed the whole thing up and made you reverse away from it. (That’s got to be pretty annoying; I’m sure there’s a metaphor for life or something in there.)
And with this frustration as the catalyst, you started to crawl. Sort of.
To begin with, it was slow and it wasn’t pretty. But if anybody needed a small object that was less than three feet away, and had a good hour to wait . . . you were the man.
We checked your progress on the NHS website, which said that there were three stages to learning to crawl that we should be aware of; but for you, from beginning to full crawling, there were about six.
Stage 1. The Plank: Basically, we’d put you down on your front and you would just lie there motionless. (It was only your breathing that told us that you were still actually alive.) Your uncle Paul suggested we try you on a different surface, so we tried you in the garden rather than on a carpet. But you still didn’t move. You just lay there facedown on the grass, as if you’d just jumped out of a plane and your parachute had failed to open.
Stage 2. Tummy Time: This was the same as The Plank, apart from the vaguest of movements. Your legs kicked a bit, but to be honest, you were mostly just licking the floor.
Stage 3. The Inverted Turtle: By now, we could put you down, and while you still wouldn’t crawl, your head would pop up and your arms and legs would start to windmill, a bit like an enthusiastic bath toy deprived of water.
Stage 4. The Carpet Hump: Lots of backward motion, some attempted forward motion, but, yeah, you were mainly just humping the carpet.
Stage 5. The Zombie Drag: And then you were crawling! You were never going to win any land-speed records, and you did look a bit like one of those legless zombies off The Walking Dead, dragging itself over a train track. But you had come a long way in a short space of time, and we couldn’t have been more proud.
After a few days, though, you’d really got the hang of it and we began to wonder why the living fuck we had ever been so desperate for you to crawl in the first place . . .
Stage 6. The Horror: Okay, as much as we were delighted that you had begun to crawl, once you’d really got the hang of it, it was terrifying. You were like one of those face-huggers from Aliens skittering around the place. If we turned our backs for a second, you were gone, seemingly always heading toward the most dangerous thing in the room.
Until that point, I’d never noticed what
a death trap our house was, and flush with the success of your newfound skill, you thought yourself an explorer, curious and invincible: “Ooh, there’s a sharp corner of a piece of furniture, I think I’ll go and impale my eye on that”; “Ooh, there’s an electric outlet over there, I’d better lick my fingers and stick them in it like it’s a fucking bowling ball.” It was/is a nightmare. You never stay in the same place for more than a matter of seconds—when you’re not messing with outlets, you’re emptying drawers and bookshelves or stuffing pulped breakfast cereal into the disc drive of the PlayStation.
* * *
(I’m going to stop writing there for a second, because two minutes ago you were playing around my feet and now you’ve disappeared into the kitchen, no doubt to hang off of the oven door or lick the side of the trash can. . . . You do that.)
MILESTONE NO. 5: YOUR FIRST WORDS
The hardest thing about you starting to burble and make chatty noises was that your mom enforced a rule in the house that there would no longer be any swearing. It made sense. We didn’t want you wandering into school at four years old with the vocabulary of a pissed-off construction worker.
“Morning, Charlie, how are you today?”