Fatherhood: Year One

It’s seventeen months since I became a father but it’s taken me this long to get my head together enough to write about it, so here goes …..

When I set out to have a baby I had no idea that there was an international conspiracy of parents who are all sworn to uphold the terrible secrets of parenthood. Once sworn in we are duty bound to pretend that all is rosy, make a few anecdotes about lack of sleep and say how wonderful our children are lest we put the continued viability of the human race in jeopardy by telling the awful truth.

I have however decided to break this silence and I think the best way to do it is to tell my own tale. Unlike the few vacuous books concerning fatherhood in bookshops (there’s usually about two stuck in the back somewhere amidst the 50,000 books on motherhood) I want to try and detail the internal processes that went on in my mind as fatherhood unfolded rather than just recount some tale like a story told down the pub couched in football analogies and bravado. This is what the few books I read attempted to do and they were useless to me especially given that I know nothing about football and comparing things to the offside rule just bewildered me even further.

So to kick off (damn thats a football reference isn’t it) I thought I ‘d go right back to the beginning ….

The Pregnancy: Boot Camp With Showers and Holidays

Pregnancy is a breeze! For men that is I should clarify. You will undergo some minor troubles responding to your partners strange mood swings and emotions, and having your sleep broken towards the end due to bathroom trips but all of this is merely the gentlest of introductory training for what is to come, you should embrace it and enjoy it. The only psychological problems you may have during pregnancy is the odd bit of worry about being a good father. I can attest that you’ll be fine and all your worries will disappear once you’re in the job along with most of your other higher order cognitive abilities.

What will make any problem in pregnancy very easy to deal with is this: You will have slept, and you have all your free time available to help and pamper your partner and make her feel better and yourself feel like a good partner. This is something you will sorely miss in the long dark nights and sleep-deprived days of despair that are to come, treasure it while you can. As an added bonus during the pregnancy phase you can also have showers and wash your hair whenever you want and go to the toilet without bringing your offspring with you, what luxury!

The Birth and The Death

Birth we are told is a miraculous experience and we are also told it is hard. Hard for women that is. What we are not told is that birth is severely traumatic for men as well, and that we have no hormones with which to dull the memory. You won’t just be sitting in the pub waiting for the baby to arrive, this is the 21st century and if you’ve bought into all that hippie shit like I have you’ll have OD’ed on active birthing classes, breathing exercises and anatomically sensible delivery positions. You’ll be going into that hospital geared for war to do battle with the forces of medical orthodoxy who only want to truss up and drug your partner and put her on the assembly line of nameless breeding stock. You’ll be consulting your flow charts ready to challenge any non necessary medical intervention with righteous anger.

In general you’ll be behaving like a big hairy stupid man who needs to fight something or obsess with detail to offset your discomfort at the fact that the woman you love is about to undergo a potentially hugely traumatic event and you can do nothing to stop it, you can not save her, you can not make it better. This is much more painful that it sounds, especially if you have control issues.

The only thing you can do is be there with her, use all the hippie shit you learned to get her through it and politely work with the midwives when they stray off your birth plan and or have to call for backup because they don’t know how to deliver a baby whose mother isn’t on her back.

You can do all this but the worst thing is that all the while your partner will be in pain and at times she will doubt herself and want drugs and you’ll have to say no because you agreed to beforehand and this will make you feel like a medieval torturer, not only will you witness your wifes pain but you will feel responsible for it, so if you thought you had mental problems beforehand, you better get ready for the shed load of subconscious guilt that comes from staring into the whites of her pleading eyes and being a tough bastard.

Thankfully though the night will pass and dawn will greet you with the single most miraculous thing you will ever see; the eyes of a new being seconds old staring deeply into yours and the knowledge that you are all they have, that they are totally dependent on you. That terrifyingly wonderful moment will last forever and become the fulcrum around which your lifes memories rotate.

However once the intensity passes and tiredness crashes down around you, you will be shuffled around zombie-like spending time with your partner and baby until at some point you will be be separated from them for the first time since the birth.

In my case I was ejected from the hospital by a security guard (don’t ask) due to some kind of hospital policy concerning husbands being present in the ward at lunch.

I wandered out to Merrion square and sat on a park bench and rang my sister and cried, whether it was happiness or sadness I can’t tell, I think it was just mental exhaustion. Then I sat there a while longer staring blankly at the trees and I felt very very very very strange and removed from myself, a feeling I’ve had only a few times in my life when I’ve had someone die on me.

I would later come to realize of course that this was the moment I began to die. You see thats not something they tell you about when you plan on having a baby, that in giving birth you have to kill yourself. Now you might be wondering what am I on about amn’t I still alive? Well yes I am, but I’m not the person that went into that hospital that night, I’m a successor entity who just happens to occupy the same body and has inherited the memories of the person formerly known as me. That person is now dead, he still makes the occasional comeback from the grave and makes a fool of himself but I got my revenant suppression incantations down pat now and I can exorcise him pretty quickly, which is just as well as he’s better off dead. I’ll explain this later, but first on with the show …

Week One: Its like Vietnam except without the guns or Viet Cong or the army and stuff

The first week is madness, in hindsight, its not thats it difficult, all it is really is changing nappies and minding a baby, stuff that you’ll do in your sleep (literally) a few weeks down the line. What marks it out is that its all so new and scary and you won’t sleep as your child has no circadian rhythms yet. I can’t really explain this week properly except to say its possibly one of the hardest weeks of your life.

From here on in things get weird. You won’t get that raw visceral madness of the birth and first week, instead you’ll start to get the hang of your new duties and life will start to slip into routine, and in the absence of raw pain you’ll begin to process it all and start to suffer.

You Selfish Bastard

You see I went into parenthood with an awareness that it would be hard work but I was thinking of it in terms of tasks and a new set of duties and responsibilities I would have to take on board. I reckoned a bit of hard work never harmed anyone, right? What I was not entirely prepared for was the psychological challenges that would push me to the edge of insanity and fundamentally alter who I am in a drastic and painful way.

You see I have come to realize that I was fundamentally a selfish being. I don’t mean this in a negative way or that I was one of those immature assholes you meet occasionally, in fact by those standards I think I was quite emotionally intelligent even if I say so myself. What I mean is that I believed I was entitled to certain things such as time to myself, peace and quiet, time to read a book, time to meditate each day, the ability to watch an entire episode of Battlestar Galactica without interruption. You get the gist, basically I believed I deserved these many small things, I was literally “self”-ish in that I believed my “self” had importance and was entitled to its own life and luxuries.

Now you might say there’s nothing wrong with an outlook like this but as a parent it will bring you nothing but misery because your self will rarely get the things it believes it deserves, and when on those occasions it does get a treat it will be taken with annoyance at the delay. Its much better you see to kill the self and its needs, and when you get a moments peace to read or meditate or watch Battlestar Galactica its a not just a bonus its a celebration.

And so I allowed my self to die and allowed a father to be born, I had to accept that in becoming a father I had taken a vocation and its was one of service that placed my own desires very low on the scale. Its taken me a year to finally get my self to die or or at least be put in some sort of zombie-like abeyance until some future date when it might be safe to let it loose. Of course your “self’ will not go down without a fight and trying to at first recognize the problem, think about it, and then take action all while undergoing the immense psychological torture of prolonged sleep deprivation while holding down a day job and looking after a baby and partner will put you through the wringer. Your emotions will be all over the place and at times you’ll feel like someone has replaced your brain with that of a maudlin’ teenage girl, you’ll whine and moan and wonder “why me” like a spoiled little child and you’ll hate yourself for it.

You might think you won’t be able to commit this voluntary suicide but you will because you’ll find you have a new internal drive fueled by your bond to your child. People make out that bonding with your children is a good thing. It certainly does have it pleasures but rarely mentioned is how out of control it makes you feel. Having somebody that can bend you to their will and bypass all your rational faculties just by looking at you is deeply unsettling and will be yet another wild emotion to add to the drama queen pageant going on in your head.

The other hard thing about killing your self is giving up on all the subtle things you didn’t even realize were part of your self constructed identity, part of the story you told yourself about who you were. For my part I learned that I had partially built myself myself on several things, my perceived intelligence, my reliability, and my ability to read. So going to work after several months of not having more than two hours of continuous sleep and realizing that I was now stupid was a deep blow, dealing with the fact that I could barely remember how to open an editor never mind write any code, and that I had difficulty understanding the post it notes I left for myself the day before so I could work out what I was supposed to do that day was very hard to come to terms with. As was letting people down and missing deadlines as I was forced to delete every other responsibility I had in my life outside of work and my family. Most hard to deal with for me though was the realization that I could no longer read, even when I got the time I would stare vacantly at a page and reread the same sentence over and over again struggling to understand it until my eyes closed with tiredness. In the first six months I didn’t read one book, since then I’ve manged four books by sneaking off for breaks during work and reading in the toilet while pretending I’m in the lab. This has been a killer for me as reading has been a cornerstone of my life and my primary interface with the world since as far as I can remember, even as a child I remember being overjoyed when I was prescribed reading glasses.

Losing all these things was painful but necessary and now that “me the father” is mostly in control you might think I would be happy, that having reached a state where on most days I can do my duties without much qualms or drama that I would be on a high. Well the answer is no because you see you kind of have to give up happiness too. Why? because if you hang out for happiness the days when you don’t get it which are innumerable will be unbearable. Instead you can get something much better … contentment. Let me clarify, for me happiness is a high, an elevated state of emotions. I spent much of my pre-baby days seeking happiness and it was great. if I was bored I would read, goto the movies, go out socializing, go to an activist meeting of some sort etc and I would happy. My happiness required continual maintenance and if it was neglected I would be sad. The things in my life which brought me little happiness I would seek to escape from, be that a job or a relationship. My happiness was consumptive and had to be fed.

As a father I have had little time to feed my happiness and so I’ve given up looking for it and I’ve settled for contentment and discovered it is so much better. Contentment for me is the zero point on the emotional scale and it takes no energy to stay there, all you have to do is just accept things the way they are and do your work and you’ll find the suffering ends when you just accept the pain. If your looking for happiness and your child cries you’ll wish you were somewhere else and you and your child will suffer. But if you give up on the pursuit of happiness you can just be right there in the moment with your child and feel her pain or discomfort as well as your own and be content.

Now I’m not content everyday but I’m getting there and life is so much brighter when you just accept things.

Your troubles are nothing, you are nothing

I thought I’d leave this till the end. No doubt several women have been reading this article and have been thinking: “you whiny moany bastard, you don’t know how lucky you have it”. Well sorry to disappoint you but I’m afraid I do and that is the single worst thing about fatherhood. I can guarantee you that no matter how hard done by you may think you are as a father, it is nothing compared to what your partner will undergo. Becoming a mother is so ludicrously hard I think its safe to rank anyone who volunteers for it as clinically insane (but hey at least they have hormones at birth and in their breast milk to keep them loved up, we men don’t get any drugs ). Being constantly aware of this inequity of pain means being constantly aware that your own pain is inconsequential and unworthy of mention and so you have to live with it yourself with no support from anyone, put a brave face on it and help your partner while inside parts of you are ripping each other to shreds.

But of course while this is the practical course of action I do like to remind people dismissive of fathers issues that all suffering is relative and not correlated to the amount of pain received. For example a brat teenager on MTV’s My Sweet 16 may suffer more when she gets the wrong luxury car than a child soldier in Africa who has seen his 20th comrade die and become inured to the loss. You cannot really measure or compare suffering as its an internal process and deeply personal, so to dismiss anyones suffering even a moany father or brat teenager on MTV is to display a gross misunderstanding of the human condition in which all suffering is equal (but perhaps not as deserving of immediate attention).

So Would I Do It Again

Well I would go through anything for my daughter, but thats because I know and love her now. If I’d known beforehand I would run away screaming and at the moment wild horses couldn’t bring me to have another baby but somehow I think I know I’ll eventually want to have one to give my little girl a brother or sister, but for now I’m living in denial.

If you think some of the outcome of my tale sounds a like a good character building experience and worth undergoing, I’d like to highly recommend you get some therapy, or go become a monk as it’ll probably be just as good but without the mess and the minimum 20 years of servitude

Tips

So how would I recommend a potential father prepare. Well aside from the fact that you can’t here’s some ideas:

• Don’t focus all your energies on the birth, try to read up on baby stuff and what to do afterwards or you’ll find your self trying to wash a baby while reading a manual.
• Become accustomed with consciously controlling a mild form of schizophrenia, it’ll help you no end, I’ll be forever grateful for those teenage years I spent practicing chaos techniques for temporarily switching belief systems.
• Practice meditation, you’ll find the ability to observe how fucked up you are essential to getting over yourself and being a good father.
• Spend some quality time with your partner beforehand. It’ll’ be a nice memory for both of you to hold onto.
• Prepare for your death, take a holiday, indulge yourself and say your last goodbyes.
• Finally when you do get your first few days off alone from parenting, be prepared for a real live mental breakdown involving memory loss, too many blue drinks, late nights staring into the abyss and images of a fruitbowl burnt into the tissue of your brain (don’t ask, I can barely remember myself).

So thats been my fatherhood year one experience, should you be on the same path I hope yours goes just as well and remember year two is much easier, relatively speaking