Category: Blog

Hello and thank you for checking in on me.

I have been a little pre-occupied of late, regular readers of my blog will hazard a guess that the birthing process was successful and that I am currently knee deep in baby waste and rattling toys. Your sharp analysis of my status would be correct, hence the radio silence.

Although I have been tempted to post regularly, I’ve felt that with very little sleep and the lack of deep conversations held within my household, I would probably struggle to construct a coherent and worthwhile sentence to convey the joy and equally, the stress of becoming a parent.

However, I now believe that I have recovered sufficiently to fill you in on the grizzly details.

Oh, wait….my daughter’s wailing at me, now to play the guessing game – feed, change, nap time. Be right back.

I will start this week’s blog off with a public service announcement. I urge all men that are due to be father’s in the not so distant future, when  asked by your partner if you would like to watch the Channel 4 programme, One Born Every Minute, just slowly leave the comfort of your armchair or sofa and shuffle. Shuffle to the nearest exit and run as far away as you possibly can. Leave it an hour and make your return back home. By this time, the horror of that programme would have subsided and it would be time for the news or something a little less disconcerting. I would especially recommend not watching it if you are entering the final stages of the pregnancy and you are just that little bit curious and fancy preparing yourself for the big day. Nothing will prepare you for the sheer horror of this programme.

If you have never watched the show before, I will fill you in. It is shot in a fly-on-the-wall documentary style, with cameras placed in different areas of the maternity wing. Some are placed in private rooms for the couple, some in theatre for when the baby and mother need that little bit of help and the other is placed in what looks like the midwives tea room and all they do from what I can make out is sip tea, eat biscuits, make names up for lady parts and generally have a bit of a giggle.

As I’ve mentioned, avoid it all costs, but if you are insistent on ignoring my advice and you feel you have to watch it, I would recommend the first half an hour, when the tone of the programme is fairly light-hearted. The mother and father are quite jovial, the midwives are very personable and clearly enjoy what they do, although shoving their hands into other peoples crevices wouldn’t fill me with joy every time I woke up in the morning, I struggle to shake someone’s hand if it is offered to me.

As soon as the second half hour comes around, that’s the time I recommend switching off. As soon as you hear a blood curdling scream coming from the room adjacent to the one the couple are in and you see their once cheery face now turn into one of concern and petrified anguish, it is time to make your excuses. Take up needle work, do the ironing, go fix that gutter you’ve been meaning to do for some time. Just do anything other than staying put. You’ll thank me. Let me be your crash test dummy.

See, I’ve watched bits of the programme before, my wife being in the medical profession is interested in any TV programme that has a hospital in it, Holby City, documentaries about Doctors, Animal Hospital? Anyway, when I’ve watched it previously, it has had little to no effect on me. Ok, I was maybe a little squeamish, anything associated with hospitals makes me feel queasy, so as you can imagine, watching an hour of hospital footage is not my idea of a comfortable watch. My wife suggested that I watch this week’s episode as she thought it would be a good insight into what to expect. I thought that her logic was sound, I was sure I would pick up some hints and tips, but for some reason watching the programme with a baby on the way gave me a whole different viewing experience. I’ve got to be honest; it made the pit of my stomach lurch uncontrollably as I imagined us in that very same situation in less than two months’ time.

One crumb of knowledge I devoured during the programme was how not to act as a soon-to-be father. Not that I would react in this manner anyway as it is not in my nature, but one particular young father witnessed his partner going through excruciating pain and he thought the sensible way to deal with this situation was to pace uncontrollably and use his fists to punch walls that seemingly hadn’t done anything to deserve that type of punishment. Whilst his partner was in theatre having the baby delivered by forceps, he was fit to burst with rage and he thought the best way to deal with this situation was to go to the pub. His parents, who were trying to calm him down, managed to dissuade him eventually.

One of the midwives did comment that the hospital and especially the labour ward did strange things to men. The gist of it is that men suffer an emotional breakdown, we are either angry and frustrated with the world or we tap into our caring, loving side and blub until whatever has irritated our eyes has worn off. Maybe that is why men of an older generation never stayed with their wives during pregnancy and why the pub or the shed were more preferable options.

Maybe they knew all about the hospital emotion-alizer (made that word up there) that triggers this change of state as men enter through those hospital doors. Well, they’re not going to get me. Just as my wife will pack her necessaries in a bag before we leave for the hospital, I will also. A big crash helmet and some tin foil wrapped round me should reflect those harmful rays and by the time our little son or daughter enters the world, I’ll be in an emotionally calm place.

Do you think that will work?

The last few months have been a steep learning curve and I am pretty sure that curve will continue well into the new year.

I am extremely lucky. My wife and I are the last to join the world of babies in our social group, so this has allowed me to delve into the wealth of experience provided by our nearest and dearest. Whether the fact that we have witnessed so many couples grow into families with our baby-less eyes and in turn this has delayed our decision to become parents is another point entirely.

I have taken the opportunity to talk to friends and family and ask questions about becoming a parent and it doesn’t seem like the impending doom everyone makes it out to be. Sure, life will change dramatically, but the feedback I get is that becoming a parent is the best and worse thing that can happen. Now, I could read that two ways. A negative point of view would be that the worse moments cancel out the best moments and makes the whole experience distinctly average, but that doesn’t fit with the model that most parents follow, surely they wouldn’t replicate an average experience 2, 3 or 4 times, just so they fit in with the social convention that we are just here on this earth to breed.

I prefer to see if from a potentially naive, positive point of view and I hope that the best moments outweigh the sleepless nights, constant fretting and ear-shattering screams. This is the predominant feedback I have acquired since we learnt there was  no turning back, so I hope their generous and informative words were not just some rouse to get us initiated on the parent and baby scheme.

As I’ve mentioned, I am still on the learning curve and picking up golden nuggets of information. For instance, a close friend of mine recently told me that when taking his two-year old to bed, he reads her a story. So far, this seemed like a reasonable thing to do, it probably happens all over the world at nap time. However, the twist was that he didn’t read her a story about princesses, hungry caterpillar’s or bears that like honey, no, he would find a piece of literature that would be the most boring book to read to a two year old, something they would have no interest in at all. Once he explained to me why he did this it made total sense. If he read the story about the princess or the hungry caterpillar, this would only serve to keep her awake longer than she should have been. Her mind would have been filled with images of a caterpillar turning into a beautiful butterfly instead of  getting a well-deserved rest. She would fall asleep purely by listening to her Dad’s dulcet tones.

His plan made logical sense, don’t get me wrong, I believe the imagination needs to be fed and there are appropriate times to do it, but I guess it’s equally important to get a good night’s sleep. Adults are the same, watch a scary movie just before you go to bed, wake up in the middle of night trying to strangle the cat because you woke up and it had evil eyes, same reaction, just different input.

See, they don’t teach you that in baby books.

Another element of parenting that can’t be taught via the medium of literature is attending a first birthday party, which I was lucky to do recently.

If I hadn’t quite got my head around what my life would be like over the next few years, I certainly had by the end of the afternoon, and not in a negative way either. This party was like an initiation ceremony, or an open day for prospective parents, just to see if we liked it. Our hosts showed us around the world of parenthood, ‘This is the ball pit, this is where kids throw balls at each other until one of them cries.’

We played various party games, I was lucky enough to win a chocolate coin whilst we played pass the parcel. I learnt how to make kids party food, by making a cheese and pineapple hedgehog, although, retrospectively, I might have got the demographic wrong, most of the kids were interested in chocolates and party rings, but the adults certainly approved of it.

We got to interact with other parents, who seemed jolly and happy, not as happy as the kids were to be interacting and playing with the birthday boy’s toys. He was more interested with scraps of wrapping paper and wind-up sprouts rather than playing with his new car or tractor. He was clever though, he let all the kids play with his toys, but no one was interested in the wrapping paper, it was all his.

I felt that we were welcomed with open arms as honorary parents, soon to ditch our provisional licence and be allowed to drive on our own unassisted. It would soon be our turn to join the secret organisation they call Mama’s and Papas.