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What am I getting myself into?
In the final months of my wife's pregnancy, people would
corner me
in the lift at work and say things like, "So, are you enjoying your
last days?", as if I had terminal cancer. A lot of people fear
parenthood as the death knell of their creative ambitions. All those
distant dreams — that career as a superstar DJ! That best-selling
novel! That winning goal in the World Cup final! — must become a bit
more focused. I started compiling a mental list of
activities that I'd never done and now would never get round to doing.
Scuba diving, inter-railing, shark fishing, joyriding, going on a Club
18-30 holiday, visiting the opera, attending a hard house night... I
quickly realised that all these things actually sounded rubbish, and I
for one found the notion of dividing my spare time between 'Bear In The
Big Blue House' and a box of Lego quite appealing.
Besides,
my sense of humour, a once noble creature, had long been reduced to
'dad jokes': making rubbish puns, putting stupid lyrics to songs and
inventing crap gags, all guaranteed to embarrass my children for years
to come. I started trying this out as I talked to
our 'bump' every day, and actually enjoyed it. And really boring things
suddenly seemed interesting — recycling, DIY, weeding the garden, even
pottering around the shed! I started to worry that I'd soon end up
tucking my shirt into my underpants and shagging with my socks
on.
Scary times
We both found it difficult to get excited in the first few
months
of pregnancy. Like many, I was a slightly reluctant dad, but even the
most enthusiastic fathers will feel that the whole thing is a bit
unreal. And the complete lack of any bump for the first few months led
even my partner to doubt that she was pregnant at
all. There's also the
very real fear of miscarriage
— like many couples, we'd had a pregnancy scare a few months
previously. My partner, Jenny, missed a period and tested positive.
Then, just when we'd both got REALLY excited about having a baby, her
periods started again. During the second (successful) pregnancy, that
fear only really subsided at the 20-week ultrasound scan,
when the radiologists assured us that everything was fine and dandy. It
still seemed a very surreal experience, with the images on the sonogram
largely meaningless to the untrained eye. "Wow! Is
that its fingers?"
"No, that's its legs."
"Oh.
Is that its belly?"
"No, that's a lung."
"Oh.
Is that its head?"
"No, that's the left
ventricle." And so on. Later in the
pregnancy, Jenny would panic if she didn't feel the bump kick
for a while. Sometimes I could feel movements she couldn't and would
reassure her that everything was fine, or take her to the GP so that
she could hear the baby's heartbeat through a sonicaid. Some books tell
you that you can hear the baby's heartbeat through a bog roll, but I'll
be buggered if I could.
Family finances
Pregnancy, of course, got us panicking about
money.
How were we going to pay for this? How much maternity leave
is paid? What paternity leave can I afford to take? Can we move to a
bigger house? How much will it cost to have this little sod leeching
off us for the next 20-odd years? We started
projecting ahead, thinking about going part-time, and then recoiling
with horror when we found out the cost of local nurseries, childminders and
crèches. We actually found that life became much
cheaper. After years of nagging, my wife's 20-a-day smoking habit
was kicked immediately (she always threatened that she'd only quit if I
knocked her up: she wasn't joking). We were no longer getting through a
couple of bottles of wine a night, or spending whole Sunday afternoons
in the pub, or going out every night.
And, because I
felt guilty drinking when she couldn't, those lagers in the fridge
would stay untouched for months on end. In our case this led to a
rather useful windfall at the end of every month, and a shocking
realisation about how much money we'd blown over the years...
And
that wedding that we'd been vaguely planning — and dreading the expense
of — suddenly turned into a cheap afternoon down the local register
office (although the bus ride to the town hall wasn't quite what she
had in mind when she dreamed of marriage as a little girl). The thing
was that we always wanted to BE married, we were just a bit embarrassed
about GETTING married. As our attentions become more
focused, we started getting ultra sensible about our flat. Without the
haze of beer bottles and cigarette smoke, we realised that we lived in
a complete s**t hole. We started tidying up rather a lot. That crappy
kitchen that we'd vowed to change ever since we moved in finally got
fitted. That tiling in the bathroom got sorted out at last. The
faintest whiff of fatherhood suddenly endowed me with rudimentary DIY
skills that had evaded me for years. I suddenly found that I could
plaster, paint, damp-proof walls, drill holes and put up
shelving.
Body matters
Sex was no problem for the
first few months of pregnancy — most of the time, with all those
hormones pounding around, Jenny's sexual appetite was as voracious as
ever. The only problem was our constant (misplaced) concern that sex
would put pressure on the womb and harm the baby — a worry which would
sometimes kick in at the most inopportune moment. In
the final months, only two sexual positions seemed possible — doggy and
her-on-top. It also became more difficult to cuddle in the same way. As
she started to get swollen
ankles, dodgy knees and varicose veins,
she began to pad herself up with what seemed like a dozen pillows
before bedtime. After about 35 weeks I even had to help her put on her
shoes and socks. As her breasts became larger,
different problems ensued: "Are my boobs looking
alright?"
"Yes, they look great."
"But you
always told me that you preferred small breasts?"
"No,
yours always look great."
"But are they better when they're
big?"
"Err, no. Yes. Whatever." It's
also worth pointing out that, however great they're looking, antenatal
breasts must be handled with extreme care. They do become incredibly
sensitive. My
partner was actually more sensitive about her changing body shape than
I was. Because I was seeing her every day and because it happened so
gradually, I was somewhat immune to even the most extreme changes.
Even
when she'd wail that she was the size of a house and had the belly of a
darts champion, I tried to assure her that she looked great and was
still gorgeous
all the time. Why, I'd say, you only have to explore the more extreme
titles on any newsagent's top shelf to discover how pregnant women
trigger off the strangest carnal impulses in many
men...
Strange dreams
For the first few months of the pregnancy, Jenny was
completely
knackered
all the time. She'd come home from work, wolf down her dinner and be in
bed by eight o'clock. I found myself doing all the cooking, washing and
tidying. With her in bed by dusk, I'd end up
spending countless nights alone watching 'Newsnight' until I realised
that this was actually a good opportunity to go out with my
friends. "You can do what you want," said Jenny,
regally. "I don't give a toss. I'm going to
sleep." Dreams became complex and
surreal
for both of us. She had a recurring dream of giving birth to a flat
six-inch disc which was then inflated by the midwives into a baby. She
also woke me up one night to inform me of a dream in which she could
see the outline of a vacuum-packed child on her
belly. Meanwhile, I was having spooky
premonitions of looking after a child, dreams which would
often end with me waking in sheer terror.
Food thoughts
Morning
sickness — or just
around tea-time sickness in our case — turns many pregnant women into
sophisticated bulimics. Jenny would suddenly disappear into the toilet
halfway through a fizzy drink or some creamy food, after which I'd hear
a barrage of coughing and retching sounds, which I'd try to politely
ignore. Minutes later she'd return and blithely demand to eat the rest
of my sandwich. For the first few months she
craved bland food — I found myself making more mashed potato, fish
fingers and peas than I'd ever made in my life. I was also alarmed by
the amount that she was suddenly capable of
eating. The
cardinal rule of any relationship, of course, is that no man should
ever make a detrimental remark about his partner's weight. When I found
myself making comments like, "Jesus, you're eating a lot of chips, you
big fat cow," they didn't go down at all well. The
rule is that pregnancy insulates your partner from all criticism. She
can do no wrong, and if she wants to eat a large cod and chips with
mushy peas, three slices of bread and butter and added mayonnaise, that
is her right. So shut up. As well as food cravings,
she had smell cravings, developing an almost erotic obsession with the
odour of Sainsbury's Microban washing-up liquid. This was handy. I
think it was the first time that I'd ever seen her do the washing
up.
Moody blues
I was warned that all the extra oestrogen pumping around
my partner would make her swing violently from
Mother Teresa to Charles Manson and back
again. Pregnancy
actually turned her from being a hard-nosed, tough-talking,
razor-tongued vixen into a soppy, sentimental old fool, who'd start
sobbing during RSPCA adverts or episodes of The
Simpsons. Obscure children's books, pictures of fetuses and
even Kooks
by David Bowie would reduce her to tears, as would my comments that she
really couldn't get away with wearing that figure-hugging crop top
anymore.
Class act
Terrified of looking like some slack babyfather, I made a
point of rushing out of work early once a week to get to the
antenatal
classes
on time. I actually found them more useful than my partner — she'd
already read widely on the subject, while I sat there like an eager
schoolboy soaking up all this new information. I
found myself crossing my legs and wincing in unison with the other men
in the class when the midwife discussed vaginal tearing, and
contorting in horror when we were given the brutal details of an epidural.
I found it useful to ask plenty of questions. What
books can't tell you about is the specifics of your locality — what
painkilling drugs
your health authority prescribes, what waterbirth and homebirth provision
they offer, what additional classes they offer. Remember to take note
when they give details of breathing through the
contractions — you can actually be quite useful
here.
The drive to hospital
Many expectant fathers become obsessed with driving to
hospital.
This is their big moment, their cameo role in the drama, and they spend
weeks working out the shortest route, finding every possible rush-hour
detour, avoiding every speed bump and Gatso camera trap, and then doing
a reconnaissance job on the nearest available parking
places. I did all this
and then remembered that we didn't actually own a
car. When
Jenny's waters broke, we took a minicab to the hospital, with my wife
perched on a towel and a plastic sheet, and our birthing ball tucked in
the boot. And I'm glad that we did take a cab, because so many other
expectant fathers on the early labour ward seemed to expend all their
energy demanding parking permits, shouting at the midwives about
parking tickets, and rushing out every 15 minutes to move the car.
All
this while what their partners needed was someone to act as an
advocate: someone to alert the midwives, someone to swear at and say
this is all your fault, you , through
gritted teeth
during contractions. This is the one moment in pregnancy when you can be useful, so
don't mess it up by acting like Jeremy Clarkson.
The birth
It was two in the morning when Jenny woke me up and said
that her
waters had broken. The due date was a week off. I was prepared for this
in theory, but all I could think of was my mountain of assignments at
work tomorrow. No time for that now. As our cab wound through dark back
streets on the way to the hospital, it finally occurred to me that I
was going to be a father. Next was
the wait. In our case there was a 36-hour delay between the waters
breaking and the contractions starting. That meant 36 hours of plodding
around the hospital, sitting on birthing balls and bringing in
sandwiches to replace the awful food they were feeding
her. Then
the contractions kicked in. Jenny was surprisingly calm and polite
between contractions, but then I'd hear the most blood-curdling howl
I'd ever heard in my life. You meet ultra-butch, Alpha-male dads who've
fainted at this point, and you can understand why fathers used to be
barred from births. But
the worst thing is that there's not a lot you can
do. Your
instinct is to cuddle your partner, to try and protect her and make the
pain go away, but of course it won't. It's horrible. And the last thing
she wants is the man who put her through all this telling her, "Don't
worry honey, it'll be all right." Your
main role is as an advocate — to convince overworked midwives that your
wife's contractions really do hurt, that she's started dilating, that
she still wants to stick to her birth plan, and no, she
still doesn't want an epidural. Like
bare-knuckle boxing, labour is an endless barrage of noise, blood, shit
and bodily fluids. And yes, chances are that there'll be some tearing
involved. I became an auxiliary midwife as my wife
was choreographed through more and more improbable birthing positions (on
your knees, on your back, bend double, get in these
stirrups). Later,
the midwives had me holding up one of my wife's legs at a bizarre angle
while I tried not to look at the carnage going on between her legs.
Jenny told me afterwards that I worked best as a big, safe, chunky
cushion to lean against. After the most protracted
scream I'd ever heard in my life, out it popped. I picked up our wonky-headed, blood-covered,
prune-faced little baby, with a furry back and alarmingly
hairy ears. The fruit of my loins. "It's a girl!" I
shouted excitedly. This was a relief. Our boys' names
were all rubbish, but we both liked the same girl's name — Lilah. My
wife instantly forgot the excruciating pain she'd been in seconds
previously. "Hello Kitty," she gushed as soon as she
picked Lilah up. Kitty was what she called the cats. For days
afterwards, the midwives thought that the baby was called Kitty. Or
Poppet, or Sweet Pea, or Babu, or Biddu, or Chunky, or Chicken. Maybe
we'll keep one of these for baby number
two.
John Lewis
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