Who's The Daddy?

I am. I’m the Daddy. Don’t get too excited, I’ve nothing new to report on that front yet. But in my efforts to keep this place ticking over during the quieter summer period a lot of the stuff I’ve churned out has ended up to being fairly worthy and po-faced. Dull, frankly. And because we all deserve a break from that, here’s something a little more cheerful. ‘Sappy’ some might say.

Fatherhood is a shock. Obviously everyone takes to it differently, but my own personal experience of becoming a new father was like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. To say I wasn’t ready is like saying King Harold might have been wise to invest in helmets with visors. Conversations with friends in similar situations reveal this to be a pretty common reaction.

Because it is almost wholly reactive. Mothers get a nine month period of adjustment prior to birth. The changes and cravings, the aches and embarrassments, and the simple truth of a life growing inside them makes the fact of what is to come an undeniable reality. For fathers to be, the undeniable reality of pregnancy is that their partners get fatter and slower. Possibly more flatulent.

You can try to prepare yourself. Of course you try to prepare yourself. You tell yourself it’ll be hard but worth it. It’ll be difficult in places but you’re strong enough, strong enough together, to do this and the rewards will be so, so much greater than the efforts. But that’s all in your head. It can only be in your head; intellectually, in the abstract. The reality, the physical, emotional actuality of it is impossible to grasp until it’s really there.

One day it’s not, and then it is. This thing is in your life. This thing which steals your bed and your sleep and your time. This things which you’ve just witnessed destroying the body of the person you love most in the world, putting her through tens of hours of inconceivable pain which you are utterly unable to alleviate. This thing which then draws all her attention and humour and sanity leaving you with nothing. This thing which is so completely, so utterly alien as to be almost unrecognizable as human. Even its movements are freaky; jerky, spastic twitches which look like nothing so much as bad stop-motion animation. And this thing is what you’re meant to love unconditionally.

It took me a long time to learn to love my son.

Three months is about the limit. After three months I was convinced we’d bottomed out. Nothing could be worse than this, and nothing could ever get better. I’d made my bed and was going to have to lie in it and just deal with getting kicked in the spine every five minutes throughout the night.

Babies learn to smile by about three months. I doubt this is a coincidence. My sister reckons that learning to smile is an evolutionary thing. Babies that don’t learn to smile don’t survive to have offspring, and parents that don’t instinctively react to babies’ smiles don’t have offspring that survive. I have a good deal of sympathy with this line of argument.

Because that smile is the first real sign that this is an actual person. Somewhere in there is somebody capable of more than just taking your everything and giving you back only vomit and shit. There’s a personality there now, and that’s something I could come to love.

And I have, to the point where it’s physical pulling on the heart. I’m not being poetical or metaphorical, this is a literal, tangible sensation right behind the ribcage. The little one’s had a heat rash recently, and scratched his face all to hell. But as he sits there after breakfast, his mashed-up face spattered with banana and yogurt, he looks at you and smiles and there’s an unmistakable tugging in the very centre of your being. Your last check-up gave you a clean bill of health so there’s only one other explanation. Every parent thinks that their child is the most beautiful in the world, but in our case it’s true. Objectively, impartially true.

There’s a park round the corner from our house, and my wife has spent the last year ingratiating herself with the mummy mafia who control the local turf. There’s an unspoken, unwritten but strictly adhered to timetable regarding who gets to use the park. It‘s divvied up according to the kids’ ages; the under-twos appear to have been allotted the mid-to-late morning slot.

This is obviously fine most of the time, but in the stupidity that is the Japanese summer basically any time that isn’t dawn or dusk is just unfeasible. I know it’s good for youngsters to spend time outside, but they’re humans, not lizards. So now the evenings are like a desert watering-hole during a drought – lots of normally antagonistic groups forced together through necessity and enduring a hostile and wary truce. Which makes it the perfect time for me to start sticking my nose in.

Fortunately the other mothers know me through my wife, and most of the kids are still too young to have picked up much in the way of prejudice, and they’re far too interested in kicking their balls about or heading off on a bug safari. So I get kind of a free pass. It is, though, the first time I’ve really seen my kid interacting with a larger group of older children.

He only learned to walk a couple of months ago, so as the older boys rush off together he toddles after them with his little zombie-like gait. A long way after them, because they, displaying the natural disdain of the older for the younger common the world over, couldn’t give a toss about him. It’s heartbreaking. Your first reaction is, obviously enough, to storm over and grab one of the little cunts by the ear whilst bellowing, “LISTEN UP, SHITBUCKET! YOU PLAY WITH MY SON! WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TO IGNORE HIM? EH?”

This is not a move that will increase your family’s standing in the local area. Nor, more to the point, will it make the other kids want to play with your son. So satisfying as it might be, you just have to accept the fact that this is part of growing up. Your job as a parent is to prepare your kids to face the world by themselves, and you’re not going to be able to protect them from every little slight or snub or insult which comes their way.

I’m fucked if I’m not going to try, though.