by Matt Coyne
In the weeks after your granddad died, me and your mom had that conversation: the one that cemented our decision to try for a baby. And in that moment, we felt like we had called out to the universe, and you, our Charlie, boarded a big, fuck-off white egg, like Superman leaving his home planet, and you would crash-land into our lives at your earliest convenience.
It didn’t work that way. The universe was an uncooperative shithead.
It would be four years before you landed. Four years of disappointments and defeats, false starts and sometimes brutal sadness. And your absence began to feel like a weight belt. But your mom is determined, and I’m Disney-optimistic, and we didn’t give up.
Like so many parents for whom having kids is not straightforward, every time we walked into the wood-chipper of disappointment, we walked out the other side, bloodied but determined to reassemble ourselves and keep going. With no guarantees, nothing like simple certainty.
Then you happened. Your Superman egg appeared on the radar. Faint at first, but a clear blip. We wouldn’t get carried away or get our hopes up, but it was there, blipping away, and as you got closer, the blipping got stronger.
And three months after you announced that you were on your way (in the beautifully inauspicious guise of a smiley emoticon on a piss-covered plastic stick) . . . we saw you on a screen, and the moment that we saw your black-and-white feet and a grainy middle finger, it felt like something perfect.
And it was.
Dad xxx
10
* * *
JUDGMENTS AND REVELATIONS
A Parent’s Prayer:
May we give you hope, curiosity, compassion, and love . . . but fuck things up, just enough to make you interesting.
JUDGMENTS AND REVELATIONS
* * *
When I think about the last year and what it’s like to become a parent for the first time, I’m reminded of standing in my back garden one night a few years ago. It was the night of a Perseid meteor shower: a particularly clear evening that saw shooting stars, one after another, blaze across the sky in a breathtaking, majestic, and humbling cosmic display. It was a night that made you think about your place in the universe and consider the big philosophical questions about humanity and life and everything.
And in my line of sight that evening was next door’s cat, sitting on our back fence, noisily licking its own ass.
That’s the closest thing I can think of to the contrasting experiences of being a parent to a newborn baby: always in your line of sight is the mundane, sometimes disgusting, day-to-day grind of crap and snot and vomit and sleeplessness. But, as unpleasant as all this stuff can be, it just doesn’t diminish the fact that, all the while, something incredible is happening, something that makes you reconsider your place in the universe and everything else.
So, whether you’re standing in your back garden distracted by an ass-licking cat or you’re standing in a nursery staring at a sleepless night and an overflowing diaper bin, all the while this magical, extraordinary thing goes on. The trick is to remember to look up every now and again.
But that can be easier said than done.
REVELATIONS I: BEING A NEW PARENT IS HARD
I am not great parent material.
I am, and always have been, lazy. I take very few things seriously. I am disorganized and lacking in anything approaching common sense. I am immature: just last night I made a salad for dinner and on the plate arranged Lyndsay’s two tomatoes and mini-cucumber so that they looked like a cock and balls:
I am forgetful, frequently dim, and something of an inept and clueless fuckup. And so, for these reasons and a thousand others, becoming a parent hit me like a hammer made of hammers.
In my defense, I think the reality of being a parent for the first time comes as a shock to most people. Everybody tells you it’s going to be hard, so it really shouldn’t come as any great surprise when it is. But that jolt comes anyway: because it is hard.
A friend of ours sent us a note when Charlie was born. It said that our lives were about to change forever, and to prepare for a “gear change.” And becoming a parent for the first time is a gear change—a seriously grinding, metal-on-metal, shrieking gear change. And in the beginning it feels less like changing gears and more like the car you are in has plunged off a cliff, rolled several times, and then burst into flames before coming to a stop halfway up a tree.
For those first few months you are just as much an infant as the one you brought home from the hospital. You have to learn a new language and new skills, and adjust to a new world that bears no resemblance to the old one.
And no allowances are made for the fact that you are also a baby, disoriented and confused. No allowance is made for how unready you might be. There is no slow-learners class (like that class at school for those kids who weren’t ready for scissors); you just have to keep up, and keeping up can be tough.
But human beings, even ones as pathetically ill-equipped as I am, are resourceful and smart. Our capacity for change is an evolutionary birthday cake. And once you learn some of the basics, adjust to your new reality, and ascertain that you can’t actually die from a lack of sleep (I mean, you can, but you probably won’t), you do what humans have done for millennia: you adapt. Maybe you even begin to get the hang of it.
Make no mistake, after those initial months, it still remains hard, exhausting, confusing, and all those things. But slowly, as the weeks and months pass, you realize something: the moments that are terrible are getting shorter and the moments of joy are getting longer.
Until, one day, you start to feel like a parent, and less like you want to drink lighter fluid, run into the wilderness, and never ever look back.
REVELATIONS II: ALMOST ALL NEW-PARENT ADVICE IS SHIT
So becoming a parent is hard. What should make it easier, though, is that billions of people before you have already done it. There is no shortage of experience upon which to draw. No limit to the amount of useful advice out there to make your path easier and more straightforward. Or at least, that’s what I thought before we had Charlie.
In reality, after a year as a dad, I have reached the same conclusion that most other parents reach: the vast majority of parenting advice is shit and, for all intents and purposes, about as useful as this drawing of a dinosaur enjoying a yo-yo:
The problem is that advice for new parents is a mixture of old wives’ tales, scientific trends, subjective experience, and plain old bollocks, all wrapped up as knowledge, wisdom, and fact. When, in truth, most of the time it’s just opinion. And everyone has an opinion, and usually more than one.
It’s a tired old saying, but it is true: opinions are like assholes because everyone’s got one. But when it comes to parenting, everyone seems to have seven assholes, and they are constantly thrusting them in your face, whether you’re interested in their assholes or not.
Some of these opinions are well intentioned, and some of them are cruel and stupid. Some are wrapped in expensive-looking book covers, and some are shared over a cup of tea. But one thing that there isn’t, is a shortage. And that’s an issue. There is just so much advice and opinion that it is overwhelming, and sorting through it all is impossible.
Way back in Chapter 1, I mentioned that there were more than thirty thousand books on pregnancy and childbirth on the market. But there are more than a hundred thousand different how-to parenting books telling you what to do once the baby is here. And, scrolling through them all on Amazon, I think it’s a shame that the Nazis, Stalin, and McCarthyism have given book-burning such a bad name, because a case can be made for making a big bonfire of most of them. (And a fine fire it would be: a hundred thousand books would be a few miles high, and a fire that big could be seen from space, probably by aliens wondering why they could smell the distinct aroma of burning bullshit.)
I’m not really suggesting a book-burning (unless you’ve got a copy of the loathsome Katie Hopkins’s 2013 opus The Class Book of Baby Names, in which case, have at it). And the
re are no doubt some great, useful books out there, ones that don’t pretend to have all the answers.
But even if you had time to read every single one of the hundred thousand books available, see every documentary ever made, and study every scientific paper ever published, the chances are that you would finish more confused than when you started. Because as well as the sheer volume of opinion, you also have to deal with the fact that the advice is confusing as fuck and, from the experts to the nanas, everyone seems to disagree with one another.
Take something as simple as whether or not to allow your baby to have a pacifier. The advice about this simple decision ranges from:
A pacifier is vital for sleeping safety and soothing a tired baby.
to:
A pacifier will give you a cross-eyed, bucktoothed baby who won’t form a word until they are in their late thirties.
(Neither is true: pacifiers aren’t “vital” because a lot of babies don’t have them. And they won’t turn your baby into a toothy fuckwit either, because most babies actually do have them and they turn out fine.)
So where is the useful information and advice that can be fished out of the toilet of that particular debate?
This is just one example. As we’ve already seen, it is also true of advice about sleep training, breast-feeding, TV, weaning, and anything else that you can think of. All of these issues are the subject of contradictory arguments and disagreement. And the only conclusion a new parent can reach is this: actually, no one knows much of anything for sure.
The thing is, I can’t help thinking that there is a pretty obvious reason why no one knows much of anything for sure. Why there is so much contradiction and disagreement and no agreed-upon, right-or-wrong way of doing things.
Maybe it’s just because one size does not fit all.
Babies aren’t cause-and-effect machines; they are complicated. Each one is unique, maddeningly so. Because they are human beings, and humans are annoyingly individual.
It’s why some people like to be hung upside down from their nipples and other people like a nice sandwich and an afternoon playing bingo. We are all different, and that seems to be true from birth, from the moment we take our first breath. So the idea that there is such a thing as a step-by-step guide to raising a baby, a right or a wrong way to do it, or that what worked for Aunt Eileen is guaranteed to work for you, is just wrong.
REVELATIONS III: PARENTAL INSTINCTS ARE A REAL THING
So wading through the torrent of advice available, and trying to sort the good advice from the bad, is pretty much impossible. The only alternative is to just trust your own instincts.
As the venerable Dr. Spock says at the very start of his book Baby and Child Care:
Trust yourself, you know more than you think.
(Of course, he ruined all that by writing another 540 pages about why you should trust him instead, but still, the sentiment is there.)
I always assumed that the idea of “parental instincts” was nonsense. Just pseudo-scientific crap. Whenever people say “trust your instincts” about anything else, it tends to be complete bollocks. I once had a boss who had a sign above his desk that said that success at work was 99 percent trusting your instincts. And that never sounded right to me, especially given that every morning when I get up to go to work, my instincts are to fuck it off and sit around all day in my underwear eating Pringles.
“Trust your gut” is a nice, neat idea, but I’ve never thought that it was anything more than the sort of fortune-cookie philosophy that includes “go with your heart” or “release yourself from your past.”
So it was a genuine revelation for me to discover that parental instincts are a real thing: instincts that seem to lie dormant until called upon by parenthood. And when you learn to trust them, they make the opinions of others seem like white dogshit: pale, chalky, and seldom useful.
When people talk about parental instincts, what they are usually talking about are maternal instincts. And maternal instincts really are something to behold: they are alive and tough and they don’t take any shit. Lyndsay’s maternal instincts were there before our baby was even showing as a bump, and expressed themselves with the instinct to nest and buy all that stuff we didn’t need. And her instincts to nurture and provide, and sacrifice everything for Charlie, were all alive and well on the day that he was born.
One year on, those maternal instincts continue to grow, with the ability to instinctively recognize what Charlie needs or why he is upset. Which is a mom-ability that I have always found impressive, given that those reasons can range from teething and tiredness to the fact that there are too many bubbles in his bath or you would like him to wear a hat.
I’ll be honest: as a dad, it’s not an ability I’ve mastered. Consequently, me and Lyns have slightly different methods for assessing why Charlie might be unhappy:
For me, maternal instincts are a strange wizardry. But paternal instincts do exist as well. It’s fair to say that I have the same instincts for recognizing what is upsetting Charlie, but the truth is that the volume on that intuition is turned down a bit, and I accept that it is just not as accurate as Lyndsay’s more telepathic approach.
That said, I definitely feel the same powerful instincts to nurture, sacrifice for, and provide for Charlie.
I have even developed a protective streak.
Just last week, I punched a seagull. In the face.
It’s not something I’m proud of. We were having a day at the beach, and as Charlie was enjoying his ice cream, he was dive-bombed by an aggressive seagull, and I instinctively reacted and punched it. In the face.
In my forty-odd years on this planet, I have never been in a fight or kicked a dog. I scoop up spiders in a plastic tub and, when I take them out to the garden, I find a comfortable spot to release them. Yet now I find myself the sort of person who decks seabirds because they show an interest in my son’s ice cream.
And the worst thing is . . . I’d do it again. In fact, Mr. Seagull, tell your pals, bring a whole flock. Come near my son’s Cornetto and I will take on all you fucking beaky bastards!?
Like I said . . . I’ve developed a protective streak.
. . .
So an accidentally recurring theme in this book has been the baffling nature of expert advice and opinion. But, weirdly, I’ve just stumbled across another quote from Dr. Spock in Baby and Child Care that reveals something of the truth:
It may surprise you to hear that the more people have studied different methods of bringing up children, the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best.
Maybe we’ll save Spock from the fire after all.
Certainly if I’ve learned anything at all in the last year, it’s something close to this. There are no shortcuts, no simple answers, and very few tricks to adjusting to parenthood . . . apart from one. A shortcut, answer, and trick that I wish had been impressed upon us from the very start. A simple advisory note that should be a motto for all those carrying their newborn nervously from the labor ward to their car, and a caveat at the front of every book on babies ever written:
Trust your instincts, because they are worthy of your trust.
Even if that means decking a bird.
REVELATIONS IV: THE PERFECT PARENT IS A MYTH
For most people, I think it’s the point at which you start ignoring advice and opinions and start trusting your instincts that you begin to feel like you are getting the hang of this parenting stuff.
But that doesn’t mean you suddenly have all the answers. Christ, it doesn’t even mean you necessarily understand the questions. You don’t overnight become the “perfect parent.” No one does. Because, despite what you may have heard, there’s no such thing.
Try to conjure an image of the perfect parent in your mind. (This person will most likely be a woman. Expectations of men are way, way lower.) Perhaps it’s a celebrity or a real person, a friend even, whom you see s
haring their perfection on Facebook or Instagram. That person, no doubt, seems to glide through parenthood without a hair out of place. They spend their mornings weaving their children’s clothes out of hemp and dandelions, their afternoons making rice pudding out of breast milk. They are never unkempt, never tired, never frustrated, and always fucking baking.
And they are con artists. Look closer. Look into their eyes and you will see the lie. These are the calm swans whose feet are frantically pedaling beneath the surface. For every staged photo of contained messy play and baked organic muffins fresh out of the oven, just out of shot you can be sure that there is a baby screaming the world in two and a toddler forcing a mashed-up cookie into a dog’s ass.
How many of these parentally perfect creatures have you actually seen, up close and in real life, in their actual habitat? I’m not talking about on social media. I’m talking about at four o’clock in the morning, when their baby has chicken pox and is projectile-vomiting up the Orla Kiely stem-print curtains.
The perfect parent isn’t real. It’s a fiction that just does not bear scrutiny. It’s like the Loch Ness monster: even if you think you see one from a distance, you get up close, and it’s just a pair of old tires and a shopping cart.
The problem with this fake ideal is that it is far from harmless. In fact, it’s poison. There is an entire industry of lifestyle philosophies and celebrity-fueled culture built around this myth. And it really is the worst kind of myth. The perfect parent is an insidious, fictional bogeyman, an imaginary monster designed to scare parents into thinking they’re fucking everything up. That they’re not good enough. That they are inadequate. That there is an ideal out there somewhere that they just do not measure up to.