Friday 28 December 2012

Talking in soft voices

My wife has a cold and her sneezing scares the child. Yesterday she erupted whilst he was sat on her knee and the poor mite was terrified; it wasn’t just a plaintive little whimper it was the clarion scream that signifies true fear... and she got that reaction by sneezing whereas I only manage it when he squirms his soapy little self from my grasp in the bath and finds himself holding his breath and looking up at me through the bubbles... (he’s far too bright to open his mouth under water, he just lets me know that he’s not happy once he’s been fished out!)

Not only that, but when my wife did scare him, I managed to reduce him to giggles again with my usual mix of animal noises and over-the-head baby acrobatics. She thinks that it is unfair that whilst I can pitch my voice at “werewolf growl” or deliver a chest-thumping Tarzan ululation to giggles and smiles, a simple sneeze from her delivers panicked tears.

I feel that this is another one of those areas where many parenting books get it wrong by trying to do too much of a good thing... they often teach that you shouldn’t startle a child or talk in harsh tones around the child; that hushed, gentle tones should always be used.

My own thoughts contradict this for many reasons: the fact of the matter is that your emotional and endocrine based responses are there to keep you alive and well and protect against social and macro-scale (i.e. something your size or slightly larger) threats that want to do you harm, and in many ways they are analogous to the immune system. Now, whilst some restraint is to be encouraged (i.e. don’t torture your kids [as an aside all the cases of children being water-boarded seem to come from the USA!) wrapping them in verbal cotton wool is likely to produce analogous results to fearfully rationing peanuts whereby low exposure leads to sensitization and death! Similarly, experience of growls, sarcasm and even vastly over-dramatised threats at a young age is likely to lead to the kind of young adult who grins knowingly and thinks their way out of a conflict situation or mugging in later life (if a child has never heard a sarcastically raised voice, they’re likely to be the fetal-position chalk outline with extra groin based damp patches!)

This is something that the wife and I agree to differ on. I feel his exposure to both approaches is advantageous in the long term, and it is interesting that when he’s feeling down both her dulcet tones and my growls have the same calming effect; maybe it’s not so much what you say, or how it’s said, but that you’re there, caring enough to interject.


DAD

Sunday 16 December 2012

The right amount of worry

I have this friend who’s recently become a dad. Our kids are about the same age and I guess we’ve got an awful lot in common, even down to the way our kids were dragged into the world (bonding over forceps conjures an interesting mental image, but I digress!)

The thing is with this dude is that he’s a worrier; part of me thinks that his adventures are more somber because he worries, and part of me thinks that maybe it’s the other way round... he worries because he’s one of those unfortunate individuals to whom bad things happen as a matter of course.

Take our attitudes to caring for a baby. My personal philosophy is that a baby will survive most things with a minimal of fuss, and this is borne out by the fact that whilst I’ve been dizzy and out of action for three days with a seasonal bug, the net effect of the same bug on the baby is that he’s learnt to enjoy gurgling snot-bubbles of various hues out of his nose. Meanwhile my friend panics that the child will somehow contract Ebola from a swallow-borne coconut (an African swallow obviously!) and when looking at a kid from his perspective the child suddenly appears far less robust.

The problem I often face is when dealing with questions. Recently we’ve had the following exchanges and I feel my responses haven’t really lived up to his angst-driven expectations:

“My baby wakes me up every night. He grunts whilst breast feeding!”
“He probably wont pull more than once at Glastonbury!”
“My baby shows signs of autism.”
“Well, looks like you’re holidaying in Vegas in matching suits!”
“I don’t have any time to relax.”
“Let me show you how to cradle a sleeping baby and play xbox at the same time!”

This is the usual pattern of our exchanges, and I often play the voice-of-reason in his more pathetic metro-sexual moments. The last exchange has been rather more worrying and my usual humour doesn’t seem to be cutting it... he said:

“I walked into the room, and the baby was laughing but my wife was in tears, what should I do?”
To which I wanted to reply:
“I saw this in a movie once. Get an exorcist, the baby’s clearly possessed!”

On reflection I really wasn’t the best person to go to for advice in this kind of situation. If I ever encountered a moment like that with my own wife and child, I would probably check the room for sharp objects and then try to make up my mind whether the wife or demon-child posed more of a threat to my person and sanity before calling the ghost busters. For once my somewhat lumbering friend got it right, he gave everyone a big hug, told them he loved them and is just keeping a quiet eye on them both.

It would appear that when it comes to dealing with upset and depression in a family being more of a man means being less of a lad. I think I learnt something and would like to throw the blog open to comments from anyone feeling they’re shouldering it all some days, because you’re not alone.


DAD

Monday 10 December 2012

Seduced by the Dark Side

Those of you with an eye for detail may have noticed the new badges which point to the fact that this blog is now a member of the “mumsnet blogger network” (I’m buried in their directory somewhere in the M section!) , and can also be found in the rather small fatherhood category.

Is this going to change my blogging and parenting style? The short answer is no, which only leaves the question of how long a father who believes in introducing his child to the wonderful world of adrenaline fueled laughter and risk taking is going to hold on to his affiliate status. I tend to find the idea that mums are the only or primary parent either comical or offensive depending on how the marketing spin is presented. As such my link to mumsnet is an attempt to move behind enemy lines and start rattling some cages.

A telling case when looking at gender bias in parenthood is TESCO’s marketing campaign. They have recently managed to be both offensive and unintentionally humorous. I received a magazine, addressed to me, with vouchers from them as part of their “shop even more with us now you’ve had a baby” marketing campaign (I’m not sure what the official name of the campaign is as they have not yet replied to my emails). The magazine had two tiny pictures of men buried in its pages – one of whom was demonstrating a complete lack of chivalry by standing at the top of some steps watching a woman labour to carry a pushchair, presumably containing his child, down the steps. These two solitary men were massively outnumbered by women, often clutching a baby whilst grinning womaniacally (a feminist maniacal grin!). Marketing material like this is offensive; those women would not have the baby to clutch without a man being involved at some stage, and assuming that the woman remembers his name, there is no reason why the guy’s presence in the child’s life isn’t as celebrated (and photographed for glossy promotional literature) as the woman’s.

As for the humorous, the vouchers I recieved contained one that read “introduce a friend to our mother and baby club so she can experience our discounts too!” Reading this as a man I imagined sitting next to a rather buxom young lass in a bar and trying the line “would you like to try some TESCO discounts, because there’s a special club I can help you join!” My imaginary conquest didn’t end well, nor did the imaginary divorce hearing where “TESCO made me do it” was not considered a rational defense!

So, dear reader, I see it as a moral duty to fight the corner of dad-ness. I may even try to goad some of the mumsnet denizens into commenting on my posts, but will remain true to my principles and the importance that being a dad has for me and the sprog.


DAD

Thursday 6 December 2012

Dad’s night out

Two days ago I had my first night out since Harris was born. It was really quite dramatic, and involved both drugs and a nice blonde running her hands up and down my bare chest...

Sadly, this was in the context of being admitted to hospital... the drugs were painkillers and the girl with the nice hands was an impossibly pretty surgeon who was busy deciding how much of me she was going to turn into hors d’ouveres for Hannibal Lecter this time (it seems that every two years a different chunk of my insides is sent to the pie factory in the sky!). The most incongruous element is that I had a lot of fun; the team consisted of the aforementioned bombshell together with an eerily cheerful yet far too tired nurse who kept writing all my vitals in the wrong boxes on the form, leaving me with a resting pulse of 98 and a blood oxygen level of 67, and a diminutive Iranian health care assistant who talked geography and homesickness whilst taking my blood and explaining that it didn’t really matter which tube she filled first (despite the instructions to the contrary on the poster in the nurses’ station!), and all the time I was immersed in the world beyond bills, nappies.

What’s kind of scary is that the only person on the ward who was finding hospital as exiting as me was the guy in the bed next to me. His day out consisted of "worse TV, but better food" and the surgical extraction of the mobile phone he’d somehow managed to turn sideways whilst concealing it in his rectum from the guards at HMP Nottingham (he deserves a medal, it was a large Sony Ericsson, not something manageable like a Nokia). We sat, (flanked by the guards who couldn’t really go anywhere on account of being chained to the patient just in case he received a suspicious call) discussing how good it felt to be on the outside... the only difference being that his sentence is up in 10 weeks time whereas mine runs at least until the kid finishes university.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank ward C31 at Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical Centre for providing a degree of light comic relief along with excellent medical care... it would be really nice if you could start doing theme-nights!


DAD