This time last year I wrote in these pages about my fear of imminent fatherhood. My girlfriend was close to full term, and the realisation that life as I knew it was about to give way to one that I maintained never much appealed was beginning to dawn. We had been together, my girlfriend and I, for more than a decade by this point, and while a child was the inevitable next step, I was reluctant. I’d come to love the life we’d stealthily built up together: the friends, the restaurants, the holidays comprising backpacks, malaria tablets and a
Rough Guide. The very notion of babies seemed, to me, too complicated and convoluted to ever take seriously on board.
But, largely at my girlfriend’s insistence, here we were anyway, on the precipice of parenthood. Eight o’clock on a freezing Christmas Eve night, and amid the kind of blood and butchery I thought had gone out with Victorian times, a couple of squabbling doctors finally delivered my daughter into the world. My girlfriend was exhausted but happy; the Spanish mother-in-law to be, who had just that minute burst through the doors of the delivery room, was incandescent with fresh grandmotherly joy.
And me? Numb. I was utterly numb.
Within a week, the prospective mother-in-law had relegated me to the status of lodger upstairs as she dominated both the baby and her sleep-deprived daughter with a zeal bordering on the lunatic. With little else to do, I headed to Oxford Street to lose myself in the post-Christmas sales crowd, where I promptly experienced something entirely new and unexpected: a panic attack. Unable to breathe, I felt on the brink of tears and a very genuine terror, convinced that I had made the most dreadful mistake. For the next few days, I feared that, like my own father, I would shirk my responsibilities and flee. But my girlfriend — a good woman, ultimately — endeavoured to make it clear that she needed me, and that this was just the beginning of something, not an end. Her argument was a convincing one. I stayed.
And, mercifully, things did improve, albeit slowly. The mother-in-law returned to Spain, and the business of fatherhood became a full-time concern for me. It was absolutely bewildering. I barely knew how to hold her, much less nurture her. And the love I was told I would feel towards my daughter — an instinct as natural as breathing, apparently — stubbornly refused to come. I liked her, definitely — she was a curious little thing — but I was too exhausted, mentally and physically, to feel any more devoted an emotion at that point. (Interestingly, my girlfriend admitted to similar feelings, a nugget of information I clung to whenever a creeping guilt began to assail me.) Nearly a year has passed now, the most arduous of my life. If I have coped at all, then it is thanks almost entirely to my girlfriend who, by consulting me on every decision to do with our daughter, no matter how minor, drew me in and reminded me of the absolute necessity of my role, thereby constructing us into a functioning family unit. I couldn’t have done it without her.
But then she at least had had previous experience. At 18, she’d been a live-in nanny for a year, and more recently, all her friends back home in Spain had become mothers themselves. None of mine had taken a similar plunge, and so I had none of the peer pressure that I’m convinced would have been so useful. My local bookstore hardly helped. After discarding the idiot-dad guides written by low-ranking stand-up comedians, I opted instead for proper literature, but my choices hardly whetted my appetite. Though undoubtedly engrossing tomes, between them Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin made parenthood sound like a descent into the very pit of Hell itself.
The 21st-century kitchen goddess-cum-philosopher Nigella Lawson once said that when one has children, they stop being the picture and become instead the frame. A worthy homily, undoubtedly, and very prettily expressed, but while this was eminently true of my girlfriend — who, incidentally, had become my wife three months after the baby’s arrival for reasons more bureaucratic than romantic — it was less so of me. Like all new mothers, she became instantaneously and admirably selfless, with nothing more important to her daily life than maintaining her infant’s myriad needs. I, meanwhile — like, I’m guessing, at least a significant percentage of fathers — remained bullishly unwilling to relinquish my cherished rituals. I didn’t like the idea of no longer being able to pore over the Sunday papers for hours on end, nor lounge lazily in front of the television whenever the mood took me, simply because the baby needed attention, changing, feeding, whatever. But, in the increasingly strained words of my wife, “the milk bottles won’t sterilise themselves, will they”? No, evidently not.
And I wasn’t the only one to resent the baby either. My 16-year-old cat was never particularly happy about the new arrival and descended into what turned into a permanent sulk. Within six months, as if to punish me, she stopped eating and became increasingly ill. Then last week I took her to the vet, who told me that she had effectively given up the will to live and that the kindest thing we could do now was to put her out of her misery. I was devastated.
Curiously, the cat’s final act on her last night was to pad silently into the baby’s room — a room that she had always previously avoided — where she vomited in one corner and crapped in another. When I later discovered this, I couldn’t help but think it an ultimate dirty protest against the cat’s most unwelcome usurper.
But despite these teething troubles of mine, Nature nevertheless methodically did its work and I began, gradually at first and then really quite suddenly, to feel an overwhelming love and protectiveness for my daughter. I now find myself cherishing every moment we spend together — well, almost every moment; I’m still not fond of the nappies and night feeds — and the sight of someone else’s offspring immediately makes me pine for my own. For the past few months now, Amaya has attended a crèche, and she diligently brings home all those viruses that forever rampage through such tender immune systems, viruses which she unfailingly passes on to me.
I complain about it, of course — I wouldn’t be a bloke if I didn’t — but somehow the suffering is worth it. I’m sounding like a soft sap from a Richard Curtis film, I know, but the girl has transformed me into a sentimental fool. The weight of her head on my shoulder, for example, fills me with a piercing tenderness, and I go to ridiculous lengths to elicit a smile from her cheeky face. I once heard that there was no sweeter sound than that of a baby’s laughter, something I always considered nonsense. I don’t any more.
Best of all is her character, already seemingly fully formed and entirely independent of her parents’. She is wilful and mischievous; she cries and laughs with the most amazing enthusiasm; she is tirelessly energetic, especially at bedtime. And watching her increasingly interact with the world around her is so fascinating that I find I want to race ahead in anticipation for whatever comes next: the talking, the walking, the favouritism I’m told she will feel for her father over her mother.
Parental love is strong stuff, comparable to a Class A drug and so heady that I forgive her everything — even for coming between my wife and I. We are still coming to terms with the necessary realignment of our relationship, and at the moment, sex between us is rather like Sardinia: a nice place we visited last year before two became three. But we are trying hard to amend this, to convince one another that not everything between us must now be exclusively baby-related. The consumption of wine, I find, helps profoundly in this.
My friends, I think, are proud, and perhaps even secretly surprised, that I’ve stepped up to my responsibilities to become, more or less, a decent-ish dad. Just a few months ago, for example, I taught my daughter how to wave. All by myself. I devote a significant part of each early evening to playing with her, and I do so willingly. OK, I did I drop her a while back, but it was only the one time, and we don’t like to talk about that.
