A real boy

Bruce is currently out on his first independent excursion with our son, which means that for the first time in six weeks I have the place all to myself. They’re only going down to the comic shop, so in lieu of inviting scads of local teenagers on Facebook to come over and trash the place, I’ve opted for the simpler pleasures of writing and sipping a hot cup of coffee. I’m sure there are other, better activities I could be engaged in that require both hands and the absence of screaming (showering, cleaning, sleeping, eating a messy curry) but I’m a creature of habit, so.

The day before last, Bruce took some banked time off work and we went out to have Hartley’s hearing tested (passed!) and also to register his birth. Lately we’ve been taking him out for entire afternoons, and so long as he is in his front-facing baby carrier, we’re able to board busses, browse the shops along the high streets, sit down to lunch and return home with nary a peep out of him.

He picked the registrar’s office in Islington (the furthest he’s been from home, in other words) to spark a debate about our little agreement, however, and Bruce and I regarded our screaming bundle in mute astonishment as he exercised his little lungs in the chilly air and passersby scanned our faces for telltale signs of a deviant or neglectful parent.

I always imagined that when my kid lost his shit in public, my Super Mummy persona would emerge and I would intuitively jump into action, which I was mostly right about, except the actions mainly involved grinning and shrugging and digging around impotently in the change bag for some magical hush potion, none of which solved the problem. Luckily he managed to calm himself down by the time we reached the bus stop, but it will be a dark day in North London when it’s for real and I am alone with him on some form of packed public transport during rush hour. Because he can really belt it out when he puts his mind to it.

Look at me here, an adult alone and in possession of two or more sex toys, a television and a cupboard full of hot drinks and what am I doing? Writing about the baby. It really is an all-consuming role, though, this parenting thing, and some days I wake up and wonder if I will ever again be able to eat breakfast and take a shower in the same morning, or watch an entire episode of Big Love without turning to Bruce and giving him the Is that the baby? look or, hell, go out for an afternoon or evening on my own.

But by then he’s already squirming and grunting and indicating that I should feed him or pick him up or change him already for heaven’s sake and I don’t have long to ponder these things. Though I finally understand what it was my mother was trying to protect me from all those livelong teenaged years. How on earth do teenage mums and single parents do this? Don’t answer that, I’m just being silly. I’ve come down with the flu again, which will add another challenge to the week ahead, as though I needed one.

Bruce just called to say that he was minutes from home, so I guess that’s time. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to write here again, though I suppose half the fun of having a blog is finding the time to write in it, yes?

Hartley: One Month

I can’t believe that it’s been a whole month since the three of us began this terrifying, wonderful journey.

If you’d told me back in December that, within a few short days of meeting the little human whose gestation caused me months of sickness and pain, I would discover a new and intense kind of love that would have me jump out the emergency exit of a plane at 60,000 feet without a parachute if I thought that it would save him from harm, I might have been a bit dubious.

But here we are, high above the earth without the customary safety features, and I finally understand that nobody is born with a maternal instinct, or perhaps all women are, but it is not something you can teach a person or prepare for yourself because it will not kick in until it has something (someone) to kick in for. And I’m holding on for dear life, except this time it’s not my own – it’s his, and I would fashion him a parachute from my own skin if we suddenly went plummeting towards the earth and there was no other way to save him.

Quite often as he’s falling asleep, he will throw his arms out stiffly and bring them trembling back to his body with a whimper, as though he is falling from a great height. I try not to visualise a thousand perils, an infinity of ways the earth could take him from us. I try to harden my heart, because it is much too soft now, almost liquid, and while it takes the impression of every hiccup, every sigh, every discontented chuckle and near-smile, it also traps the debris of imagined catastrophe, of extradimensional grief.

Fear and joy are two sides of the same heart, though, and he has brought us so much joy. He is the inventor of ‘rooty tooty’ and the Anaconda song (sung to ‘I Want Candy’); his soiled nappies and pouty-lipped wailing the cause for celebration and laughter; his wonderment fodder for our own renewed perception of the world, which has never seemed so incandescent, so furiously moving, so mutable and transient.

Our arms have found new ways of holding, of handling and doing - our bodies the very means of transport, of shelter and sustenance. From ourselves this incredible thing has emerged, and into him we continue to pour our entire selves, because he is here and we love him and can do nothing else.

Parenthood does not get worse before it gets better – it’s worse the moment you take off, and then over time, somehow, it does, mercifully, get better.

It has been one month since I first held your warm, solid, shivering body against mine and saw your strange, beautiful face through a fog of fear and exhaustion, Hartley (my darling, my insatiable anaconda), and you’ve grown more beautiful each and every day since. I love you very much.

Milestones

Hartley turned 4 weeks old today, and we are so proud of our little mite: for sleeping through a 3-hour-long shopping trip on Saturday - one that included three bus rides (and two quick jogs to catch said buses), a stop for lunch and several stuffy shops, including a spontaneous trek along the Broadway for coffee, jewelry and a much-needed bag of Percy Pigs.

I also managed to take him out for the first time on my own this afternoon, though I had plenty of assistance from Amy, who helped me dress him in his awful new winter clothes that he hates, got him buckled into the baby bjorn, saved me from perilous sidewalk slush and pot-holes, and generally settled us in for a brunch at the noisiest, kid-friendly restaurant this side of North London. Bless him, he didn't make a single peep, even though a much older baby one table over kept shrieking at irregular intervals, and seemingly for his own amusement.

This week, he has learned how to spend periods of time awake and content, and will either focus on elements of his environment, like our faces or his cot mobile, or listen intently to music we play him (Cat Power was an instant favourite). And although it's rare at this age, I swear that sometimes when he meets my gaze, he breaks out into a full-on, non-gas-induced baby smile. He was holding his own head up and sucking his tiny thumb at one week though, so I wouldn't be surprised.

It's a cliche to be sure, though I can't help but think that he is the most beautiful baby I have ever laid eyes on. Thank goodness for that, because he still does his fair share of screaming when he's not building his public reputation as a complete angel.

The Kindness of Strangers, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Wail

They say that babies don’t come with a manual, but that isn’t entirely accurate. After a few sleepless nights and senseless worrying about completely normal infant behaviour (sleeplessness, crying for seemingly no reason) I begged Bruce to order us What to Expect in the First Year. I suspect it will serve much the same purpose as that initial pregnancy bible, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which I only referenced in times of extreme uncertainty or distress. It didn’t always help, but it does give you a momentary sense of purpose, and the fleeting impression that you’re in control - even mothers need security blankets, see.

My sister-in-law is over and I’m stealing a few moments to check emails, drink a cup of decaf and do a few basic things hands-free before they are once more filled with infant need. Starting Monday, the two of us will be left to our own devices when Bruce goes back to work, and rather than panic about it, I’m just going to go with the flow and do what I’ve been doing all along – feeding, changing, settling and then co-sleeping away those hours of down time when he needs nothing else except rest.

Last night at some ungodly hour, I tore open the poppers on the legs of a new little sleeper our neighbour gave us as a gift recently, and a massive black spider scurried out from inside it and across the covers. Rather than lose my shit as I’m wont to do around spiders, I scooped it up in a soiled baby vest, crushed it and tossed a shirt over the minor massacre, reaching instead for the adorable ducky vest that my excellent internet friend Lass sent through the mail (thanks Lass!) (Well I wasn’t going to put him in the spider sleeper, as it will henceforth be known - at least to me, and until I’ve washed it a few dozen times to be sure there are no remnants of spider or microscopic spider eggs).

*Also in the package from our kind Lass was an incredibly cool little bib that will come in handy when he’s older and onto solids, and some lovely burp cloths for when I’m able to fit back into the tops I actually care about (having breasts isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be, especially when they have the potential to win you the wet t-shirt contest you didn’t intend to enter).

I’m still amazed at how something as uncommon as a new baby - especially in the virile, ever-multiplying district of Muswell Hill - can inspire kindness in the most unlikely of people: namely neighbours we’ve never met or ones who’ve expressed no prior interest in knowing us.

But then it’s not until you’ve had one that suddenly, all the things that once pissed you off about crying, weird-looking potato-headed little people start to become the very things you grin your face off about, such as when you’re in a restaurant and someone’s offspring suddenly bursts out into a chorus of Waaaaah, waaaaah, waaaahs. Even in the middle of the night, there’s no denying that this is the happiest, most life-affirming sound you will ever know.

*photos to follow when His Sleeplessness properly wakes from his fitful nap

Getting to grips

You know how sometimes you go to a fair and see a ride and think to yourself, Hey, that doesn’t look so bad – in fact, it looks pretty tame and you get on and the ride starts up and it’s everything you thought it would be; that is until it suddenly shoots about a hundred feet into the air and tilts at a crazy angle that makes you feel as though the worn out old seatbelt could at any moment tear away from your hips and you’ll go spiralling over the heads of those poor sods queuing up for that other ride about twenty kilometers yonder and just then it starts to undulate in such a way that your stomach isn’t sure if it wants to explode or implode or maybe jump ship out your ass and you’re like, Actually, MOTHEROFCHRISTGETMEOFFATHISFUCKINGTHING! except that you should have thought of that earlier, because now it’s much too late and you know you’re going to have to suffer this horror for at least another five minutes?

Except that parenthood lasts a wee bit longer than five minutes, and involves something very small and vulnerable that you can’t help but love with your whole entire being, and he’s on the ride too except fortunately for him he hasn’t the wherewithal to retain bad memories and will root around on your chin, the edge of a cushion, a duvet cover or whatever because he hasn’t figured out yet that only mummies and not faces or inanimate objects have nipples, and for this reason you need to make sure that you stay firmly in the seated position because otherwise neither of you will make it through this thing alive.

Bruce and my dad have nipped out to Mothercare for a few essentials, and both our mothers are out there in the other room with our sleeping infant, who seems to have become more unsettled by this whole Being Alive in the World condition than he was last week. He refuses to nap until you feed him and then joggle him around a bit and then feed him again and then change him and then give him some gripe water and then joggle him around some more and then sacrifice a chicken when the moon is in the seventh house and then feed him – every two to three hours. But then he sleeps like an angel.

This mixture of love and concern, joy and sinking despair can be very overwhelming when you’re onto a third day where none of you have slept and you find yourself sniping at the very people who are there to help take him off your hands and your husband is stumbling around like the living dead and trying to get you to have a nap instead of chewing your fingers into little stubs or possibly saying something that will forever fracture the delicate relationship you’ve managed to foster with your parents who, might you add, have not yet clarified whether they’ll definitely help finance a whole year of maternity leave or whether that was just something they said and maybe even meant but only in the moment. Not quite yet.

Then this tiny mite starts to cry and I feel my stomach sink a little bit but I’m up like a hero and taking him into my arms and he roots around on my cheek and my chin and my nose for a nipple, stabbing his little face at me like a tiny anaconda and going Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah until I have him lying on his side in bed next to me, my boob out and in his face, and he tenses up and makes two fists which he pulls back like an angry little man winding up as if to say Why, I oughta . . . except that instead he stabs around at my breast with his whole face until his mouth finds a good latch and he gives an almighty suck that makes both of us go quiet.

And then there’s no denying that it’s all worth it somehow. I’m not sure why, but that’s the honest truth. Motherhood is so much harder than I thought it would be, and so much better too.