Brown Baby

by Nikesh Shukla

  Wouldn’t you totally hate-watch that film when it’s on ITV2 and you don’t really want something that requires your full attention at 10 p.m. on a Sunday?

  Goddamn it, I would.

  I got back to the house around midnight.

  There were two sets of voices crying. Your mum, in the spare bed, on the ground floor, and you, upstairs, hoarse but still distressed.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ your mum said. ‘You have to be the strict one.’

  That’s the thing about controlled crying. In order for it to work, one of you needs to be the one who keeps to the strict intervals of comfort and doesn’t cave and pick her up and soothe her with milk or cuddles or both.

  I ventured up the stairs. I could hear you, in your bed, snuffling. You had no voice left. A three-month-old with no voice, crying with everything you had left.

  Halfway up the stairs and I heard a shuffle behind me. Your mum was at the bottom.

  ‘She hasn’t stopped in like two hours,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ I replied. ‘What’s the comfort phrase?’

  ‘Shush, shush, shush, it’s bedtime. Shush,’ your mum said tonelessly. She was beyond tired, beyond patience. Wired and numb and unable to relax. I offered her a cup of tea.

  ‘I want a fucking sleep,’ she hissed, and went back into the spare room to lie down.

  I walked up to the top of the stairs. You sounded awful. Like picking you up would solve everything.

  I entered the room. I thought about the Bradley Cooper version of the film. Like, one commanding feminist dad shush from Bradley Cooper would send the baby immediately to sleep, crisis over, control restored, sleep level unlocked, end film with a big kiss and a thoughtful, sad yet hopeful song by The National.

  You were kicking your legs out. Experimenting with lying you down in the Moses basket, we always did as KellyMom, the insipid earth mother blog for blonde-haired blue-eyed white American mothers, advised and placed you at the bottom of the basket so your feet touched a side. Dunno why. Just did. KellyMom is very convincing with her blonde hair and blue eyes and Californian tan and earth mother advice at 3 a.m. when you’ve had no sleep and need to go to work the next day. If your desperate Google hole leads you to KellyMom, that means you’ve already bypassed the pointless and specific-to-each-poster’s-child anecdotes on Mumsnet. And NetMums. If you’ve made it out of that useless pit of people’s opinions, you find something commanding about KellyMom.

  Your eyes were closed, your cheeks were damp. Your hands were aloft, straight and zombie stiff. I held them both and pressed them to your chest.

  ‘Shush, shush, shush, it’s bedtime,’ I offered delicately.

  This was my big moment. When the life change happens. When I realize the dysfunction of my previous life and start acting in accordance with the theme of the film I’m in. Where I become the person I’m meant to be.

  It was electric.

  You quietened. Sighed. Actually sighed. It was like a breathless whimper. And. You. Stopped. Crying.

  Because of me.

  Me.

  I was Bradley Goddamn Cooper, goddamn it. Except naturally chubby. Naturally brown.

  I smiled and let go of your hands. I went to dry your cheeks but thought, no, I’ve been asked to be the strict one.

  I left the room. I allowed myself one fist pump. At the hip. A quick one. In case anyone was watching.

  I went to the toilet. Everything in the household was quiet. A buzz of sleep and possibility and tiredness and brilliance. Success. Vindication. Feminist dad strikes again.

  I was halfway through weeing, when it came: a new cry, hoarse but with a renewed vigour, a reset energy, a powerhouse of pain.

  I sighed. Defeated. Fuck’s sake. This wouldn’t happen in a Bradley Cooper film. I heard your mum groan downstairs. I set a timer.

  It was the longest five minutes, listening to you pump your feet, crying yourself hoarse. Your lips meeting to make your cries sound like a ma ma ma ma ma noise, accidental but pointed enough to make us feel guilty. I lay on the bed and tried to do normal things like it wasn’t happening.

  I read. The same sentence over and over again.

  I thought of things to tweet. But nothing could quite sum up the guttural primordial scream of anxiety and frustration inside me. And I’d not even been home twenty minutes at this point.

  I remember reading an article on Rife Magazine about the realities behind Instagram posts. Like, what was happening in the room when the person took the photo and decided to post it. They were so revealing of our motivations for the post.

  One person wrote of a selfie where they are beaming and the sun is shining on them and they seem hopeful and ready to take on the world: ‘The day that the photo was taken was actually a pretty rubbish day. My mum’s really ill. I had gone to a doctor’s appointment with her in the morning just before work. I rocked up to the office afterwards, which is where I took my photo. But it turned out when I went to the doctor’s appointment with my mum, she has something that her mum (my grandma) died from. So she’s at quite a high risk of dying. So that’s when I found out and I took this photo at work because I had to re-send a photo . . . And it’s been really wonderful, everyone’s been lovely but it’s been quite a rubbish time. It’s weird because on two comparisons, my career’s going pretty well, life at home’s pretty rubbish, but I’m just trying to find that little balance and there’s this nice upside through everything.’

  The presentation of ourselves is always in conflict with the moment when we step up to the podium.

  What could I tweet in this moment? Would I mention controlled crying? What could I say that would engage people? What am I trying to elicit from them? Stranger-sympathy? Unwanted advice? A presentation of myself as ‘dad who is present and invested in their child’?

  And what if no one responded because it’s midnight and the majority of my followers are asleep or don’t know what controlled crying even is?

  These fragments of presentation. What do they achieve?

  And if I started reposting memes or commenting on popular culture or politics, where would the truth be in that?

  And my friends still hadn’t texted to check in.

  The moment felt too full to take to social media, either by actively commenting on it or passively commenting on everything else except it.

  What a fraud I was, lying on my bed. Letting my baby cry.

  I tried again to read.

  The timer went off. I went into your room. Your movements were slowing but your crying wasn’t. I shushed you and held your hands still, to your chest, and you stopped crying.

  I left the room.

  I lay down on my bed.

  I breathed in the quiet like my lungs were filled with silent success.

  You snuffled and I heard the pumping of your legs in your growbag. You cried again.

  I closed my eyes, trying to ignore it. Your mum entered the room and lay down next to me.

  ‘I guess we’re in this together,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse too. She had been crying.

  ‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ I told her.

  ‘I need you to be the strict one,’ she told me.

  We lay in each other’s arms with the light off. And moments later, you stopped crying.

  I sat up.

  ‘I think she cried herself to sleep,’ I told your mum. But she too was asleep.

  The next day was sluggish.

  My friends hadn’t texted me still. When I woke up the next morning, I expected to have at least received an update on their night of derring-do. Who had snogged someone. Who had gone home with someone. A barrage of in-jokes. You had to be there. And you weren’t. So you will feel our wrath from a blow-by-blow run-through of what you missed now you’re boring and can’t stop talking about your kids apparently.

  Nothing in the morning.

  Which was a strange disappointment to wake up to, a useless first thought of the day. But for a second I had forgotten you, baby. You had ma
de it through the night. You slept all the way through. It worked. And I didn’t even notice. Is this the version of your life to come? Where you are to be ignored for the politics of friends? What is this thing in our brains that pushes us towards the intangible and the unsolvable? Why does the thing that matters least count the most?

  I woke to your crying and I sprang out of bed in protection mode, desperate to preserve your mother’s snores and your sense that once morning looms, a cry is a justified alarm clock.

  My feet banged into the carpet. I stumbled, I steadied myself with a hand on the wall. I woke up feeling like I had just fallen asleep and I was being asked to fuck up a home invader.

  I was unsteady.

  Those early days of sleep deprivation make everything feel heavier. Your body. Food in your mouth. The air. News. Being told you didn’t do something right.

  We sat, with you, in the garden. You lay in my arms, face up to the sunny sky, your eyes darting around, trying to drink in the perimeter. You were curious about everything.

  ‘Look at the bags under her eyes,’ your mum said.

  I didn’t want to look at you, so I laughed emptily and looked around the garden.

  ‘I can’t believe we all have to go through that tonight,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Don’t ruin this moment,’ your mum said, tapping me on the shoulder. ‘Tonight is a long way away right now.’

  ‘Every night’s an adventure,’ I said to you, pressing my nose to yours and making the same ‘coin being dropped onto a pile of coins’ noise I’ve been making since the day you were born.

  I don’t know why it started, other than an attempt at a fail-safe signal that only you and I knew, in case of bodysnatchers. Touch the nose and make the coin being dropped onto a pile of coins noise. Also the brown five, which is a high five with the back of the hand, where our melanin touches and electric things happen. My two fail-safes for my children.

  I hope bodysnatchers can’t read. Because I just gave the game away.

  As a child, I had recurring dreams about your fai being kidnapped (by Rumpelstiltskin of all childhood nightmares) and me spending the dream trying to get her back. I’d like to think that maybe, years later, I was setting up systems for us in case you were ever kidnapped. Mainly, I think I always wanted a secret cool handshake/greeting. Like how Will and Jazz greeted each other in The Fresh Prince. Like how Zack and Slater greeted each other in Saved by the Bell. Like how Andy Garcia and his crew greeted each other in Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead.

  Pressing palms together and promising each other ‘boat drinks’.

  In the Bradley Cooper movie version, his handshake with the baby will be so complicated that initially he’ll lift the baby’s hand to do it, but a montage will show the hand growing until the baby is now a teenager and they’re greeting each other with a bam-bam-bam complicated handshake.

  It all makes so much more sense in my sleep-starved brain.

  I touched my nose to yours, made the noise and let your fist curl around my little finger. You drew it to your mouth and I let you suck on the tip like it was your dummy.

  Sleep deprivation dulls your senses. It was only when you yelped in pain that I realized you’d been running your tongue over a ratty sharp shard of my fingernail.

  Moments later, you were asleep, with no fuss, in my arms, your arms zombie-straight in front of you. The day naps provided no problem. No fuss. No rhyme nor reason for why you could drop off mid-play. They brought a level of frustration that could only be quantified by how many fucks were uttered on noting you were asleep.

  Fuck’s sake, how is it this fucking easy during the fucking day but at fucking night, and on and on until the air around me was a deep censorious blue.

  My god, though. When you were asleep, it gave me pause to look on you with fresh eyes. You became this still, precious bundle that I felt a primal deep love towards. When you were asleep, your best features shone, closed eyes. When you were asleep, suddenly, I couldn’t be mad at you anymore. I understood the eye roll that parents do that essentially says ‘What can you do? It’s so hard in the moment but then in still moments like these, you’re able to go, yeah, I love you I guess.’

  It’s all you can do when all you want to do is sleep. Otherwise how would you get through the next day? It doesn’t get easier. That’s a lie. You just get more resilient. More used to operating on low power mode. This is why when kids start sleeping later than you, you don’t get the old ways back. You’re stuck in this new state of a broken sleep. That’s when you start saying things like ‘you’ll miss the best part of the day’.

  In the early days, you’re told to sleep when the baby sleeps. Which is so dumb. For two reasons.

  If you sleep when the baby sleeps, how the hell do you get anything done? Baby life is admin. It’s doing the dishes, washing clothes, cooking something that’s not cheese on toast, washing clothes, catching up with yourself, washing clothes, catching up with your friends vicariously, washing clothes, trying your best to not live in filth, eat filth and wear filth. Washing clothes.

  If you sleep when the baby sleeps, you have effectively given up. You live by their routine. You are pandering to their tyranny. You’re never sleeping longer than an hour anymore. And you’re wearing dirty pants.

  We both knew that this was the weekend to break you down and make you submit to our ways.

  As we geared towards the night’s Festival of Sleep, we assessed what had worked and fudged it into a hastily thought-out routine. We shared the bedtime. We both bathed you, filming you, with your round tummy, on a slope in a children’s bath inside our tub, looking at the both of us in amusement, your thumb and index finger wiping down the opposite sides of your tongue as you said ‘gheeeee’ for as long as your breath would allow. It was a filmable moment. You were so goddamn cute and I wanted to bask in the glory of you forever. Afterwards, your mother breast-fed you. Her reasoning was that if we were being brutal distant parents with a plan to break you into submissive sleep, we could allow you one last human touch of a breast and the warmth of human milk and the proximity of parent and child. I lay on our bed and waited for you both. I was trying to fashion the best arch text to my friends who had still not messaged me. Something like, Don’t worry, guys, no seriously, no no, seriously, no seriously, honestly, please, I’m fine. But I couldn’t balance the levels of passive-aggressiveness it needed to communicate the message and give it the gravitas of ‘hey I’m just fucking about’, ‘fuck off’ and ‘I’m fucked off’ that it required.

  The irony is, my two friends now both have kids and they’re cancelling on me because the kid is unsettled or they’re not replying to my texts quick enough because they’re busy with their kids or they only can talk about kid shit because . . . kid. It’s a sweet revenge that they are exactly where I was that night. It’s almost cruel that neither will remember how much they pushed me away. Or how much I needed them. Or how I felt like I was beyond pub!, pints!, bants!

  But none of this mattered as I lay on my bed, listening to you suckling hungrily, your mum sighing. All the lights in the house were off. We were settling you into a routine. The conditions were set.

  I heard your mum lay you down.

  I waited. Taking a deep breath. It worked last night.

  (Eventually.)

  Tonight was the first night of the rest of our lives. Now we could really dive into some Netflix shit, drink wine, have adult conversations about our days without interrupting each other to go and settle you. This was the start of us clawing ourselves back from the cliff-edge of biffy parents who don’t know who the fuck they are anymore.

  Everything was going to change.

  You cried all night. You did not tire. You did not stop. You did not wear yourself out. You just . . . kept going. And we, in solidarity, were there with you. And no matter how much one of us wanted to cave, the other kept us going. It was hard. We were helpless. All we needed to do was pick you up and comfort you. All we needed to do was sle
ep. I thought I had known tired. Now I knew tired. That tiredness where everything was out of focus and I couldn’t form a single thought, let alone speak it out aloud.

  I drank coffee from 2 a.m. onwards, assuming I was in it for the long haul. Your mum lay next to me, reading angrily.

  ‘Everything was supposed to change,’ I sobbed. Tonight was meant to be the first day of the rest of our lives.

  At 6 a.m., I realized this was ridiculous. I got you up. You immediately stopped crying. You snuggled your head underneath my chin and settled in, your eyes drooping.

  ‘No,’ your mum said. ‘Don’t let her fall asleep. That defeats the point. She has to just be up now, till nap-time. And only then an hour. Or she wins.’

  Your mum was right.

  I took you downstairs. I fed you while your mum slept, tapping your cheek to wake you when your eyes rolled back into your head. I played with you while you lay on the floor and kicked your feet.

  The bags under both of our eyes were heavy.

  I took you for a walk in the sling, you facing outwards, so we could explore the world together. People smiled at papoose dad, weekend dad and his cute mixed-race baby. I talked at you to keep you awake. Your head kept drooping, your eyes kept flickering, you kept making a zombie sigh to signal you were humming yourself to sleep.