On sabbatical from fatherhood: reflections, observations, and commentary on being a father

“Having a child is to show an absolute accord with mankind. If I have a child, it's as though I'm saying: I was born and have tasted life and declare it so good that is merits being duplicated.”

(Milan Kundera, Farewell Waltz)

How many times have I mentioned something along the lines of ‘this is a far cry from the kind of crap I used to write about!’? Well, here we go again: when I started this blog in 2009, I never thought it would one day turn into a post on children – my own children, in fact (or rather, child).

Before going any further, have a look at this article:

Why all parents need sabbaticals from their families

 Okay, so I am getting ahead of myself. My daughter is not even 6 months old, so I certainly don’t need a sabbatical at all just yet, though I am in the midst of a brief one as my wife and daughter have just gone to Vienna for a week on their own. I’m not sure what to do with myself.

Before crossing that Rubicon, I’d like to share some reflections I’ve had on fatherhood. As I mentioned in a recent post, the world is inundated with baby advice books and they can get pretty damn overwhelming. I’ve been very selective in what I’ve read and the advice I’ve taken onboard, but I quickly realized that once you are in the midst of raising a child, you forget just about everything you’ve read or heard and go on pure instinct and intuition alone. Or at least that’s the approach I’ve inadvertently adopted. At this point I can’t even recall what I’ve read, or whether I’ve even read it at all when it comes to ‘knowing how to raise’ a kid. There is so much advice out there that it’s hard to keep it all straight. And nothing can really prepare you for what it’s really like.

I’m not sure of the exact demographic breakdown of my readership, but amongst all of you dear and loyal readers I’m sure there are a number of parents, there are some who will one day probably have poppets of your own and may or may not realise that yet, there are some who feel ambivalent about kids and I know a fair few who have sworn off children altogether and hate the little turds. This post is aimed at all of you.

And I may screw this up, but more than anything, my intention is to avoid any clichés, which can be so tricky when talking about kids. They grow up so fast! They change so quickly! Time flies! Appreciate them while they’re young! Their shit looks like curry sauce!

What follows are mainly things I never really thought about until my little daughter arrived.

1 A colleague many years ago once told me, ‘you can’t re-heat old coffee’. She meant it both literally and metaphorically. Let the past go. Move on to the future. Let the coffee stay cold and make a fresh cup.

Forget it: old shibboleths die hard. You have to reheat old coffee unless you want to waste copious amounts of it.

Perhaps a bit cliché, but at the same time it has a nice ring of originality to it, and I wish I could take credit for having come up with it myself.

2 I wonder how many parents, while lying in a cramped, uncomfortable position with their infant peacefully sleeping on their chest, tell themselves ‘damn, I wish I had some superpowers.’ In this case meaning either Spiderman’s webbed fingers or, probably better, The Force. Why? Because I’m often lying with my coffee or book ever so slightly out of reach, willing it with all my telekinetic might to inch it closer. Or I realise that the book I want is too far out of reach and I don’t want to wake a sleeping baby. When there’s a cat on your lap, it gets even dicier.

3 Speaking of reading, the Luddite that I am, and I have covered this topic a million times before, but having a Kindle is a godsend when you have a kid. I have no problems with e-books at all, I think they are a marvelous creation and they make life with kids so much more enjoyable.

4a Babies love music, or at least mine does, but it can be a tricky and delicate balancing act when she’s making a fuss and needs calming down, and I’m trying to manoeuvre my computer into position and get my temperamental Bluetooth speakers on and functioning before my little one loses her shit completely. My iTunes collection is ridiculously large and there is crap in there that I’ve never even listened to or didn’t realise I had. So sometimes I sort by album, not artist, and put on a nice album and then she falls asleep. I get comfortable, with my Kindle or whatever, and relax to the soothing sounds of whatever. And then when the album ends and a new one begins, half the time I have no idea what the next album even is, or I have to listen to a few songs before I recognize it.

The point? Babies are great for discovering long-lost music classics you forgot you had, or even discovering new stuff that’s unknowingly been in your collection for years. This has been a real treat.

4b I do fully realise that there is such a thing as ‘smart speakers’ with voice commands, and this would potentially solve the problem of fiddling with my computer while trying not to drop my baby. But, Luddite that I am, I’d be missing out on discovering some of this ‘new’ music. The same goes for reading – when you don’t have access to the internet or a tablet or a phone, and you find yourself having to read whatever is available, it’s amazing what you end up discovering.

4c I can now listen to all sorts of guilty pleasures, all in the name of ‘it’s good for the baby, she likes it!’ Truth is, the baby likes what I say she likes. I could play the sound of chainsaws, cats being strangled or a symphony of cacophonous farts and she’d probably enjoy the rhythm of it.

That said, this is, so far, the ultimate ‘baby soundtrack’ that our little mite just loves. Or at least we think she does. I’ve tried to make it as eclectic as possible, but generally she goes for 80s disco-y, pop-y numbers.

New Order – Blue Monday

Erasure – Always

Toto – Africa

Marina and the Diamonds – Primadonna (only with my wife)

Smashing Pumpkins – Tonight, Tonight

OMD – Souvenir

Alphaville – Forever Young

Chvrches – The Mother We Share

Pet Shop Boys – Always on my Mind

Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse of the Heart

The Cure – Pictures of You

5 None of the baby books I read could have prepared me for the back and neck pains I’m now experiencing, what with all the contorting and twisting and sitting in awkward positions, not to mention bending down, picking stuff up, carrying heavy baby crap everywhere.

6 Writing is hard, whether emailing people or this blog – I need massive blocks of time (I’m very inefficient) and any threat of being interrupted is enough to put me off writing. Great excuse for procrastinating, by the way.

Voice-to-text software might be nice.

7 You have to eat pretty damn fast, indigestion be damned.

8 In those rare moments where you have time to actually make yourself a cocktail, nothing elaborate or too over the top: keep it simple and be more tolerant if it’s not up to your usual standards. A nice dry martini (ideal ratio of gin: vermouth: 6:1) is about as complex as it gets. Anything more exotic (put the blender away!) and you’re in trouble. And in the midst of summer, it will lose its chill quickly so drink up, fast.

9 I may ruffle a few feathers with this one, but I don’t care: it kills me the number of poor kids I see, in the middle of summer, close to 30 degree heat, all bundled up in Arctic winter gear. Regular readers will know how many times I’ve crapped on about people and their irrational fear of air conditioners and draughts, but seriously, some of what I see has to border on child abuse. Why are kids wearing wooly hats, heavy socks and massive ski coats in the middle of June and July? These poor things look like they’re suffering.

That isn’t the truly offensive part, but this may be. I don’t live in exactly the most salubrious part of town, and the majority of parents in these parts do tend to ‘overdress’ their kids (and we’ve had the occasional babushka tell us off for having our poor daughter practically naked in public). But I’ve noticed a stark and dramatic difference the closer I get to slightly more ‘upscale’ areas. The further I get from my neighbourhood, the less clothing the kids are wearing. In other words, more ‘progressive’ and ‘educated’ people don’t torture their children in the same way that the local barbarians do.

And these same local Neanderthals are also the ones who drink beer in public and smoke around their kids. And a lot of the women nonchalantly push their kids in their prams or pushchairs while texting or playing games on their phones. Yeah, they know how to raise children the right way.

10 Why do French nursery rhymes sound so much better than English ones?

In a similar vein, the Ukrainian and Russian songs that my wife sings, some from fairy tales and some from cartoons, are ridiculously addictive and catchy, though for the life of me I can never remember the words. So I make up my own words to accompany the tunes.

11 If you’re a voracious reader like I am, and tend to sacrifice all else in life because of reading, you have to be very efficient with reading and down time and when you do have a few precious free moments, you appreciate it so much more.

There is also more pressure, totally self-inflicted, to be more selective with reading. I have long feared not living long enough to read everything I want to in life and there is even greater pressure now.

So, in the interests of killing two birds with one stone, I’ve started to read things like Homer, ostensibly for my little girl’s ‘benefit’, but in reality it’s probably more for mine.

12 I’ve attempted to avoid your typical banal, cliché ‘topics here, but in real life it’s almost impossible. The default question that everyone asks: how are you sleeping? In all honesty, I don’t have a problem at all with people asking this question because what else can people say? I mean, I really would prefer people to ask juicier – literally, in this case – questions about things like the consistency and colour of my baby’s stool, but that seems to be a taboo topic. But it is far more interesting to talk about than sleep.

Full disclosure: I’ve never been a good sleeper anyway so I am not sure how to truthfully answer the sleep question. If I get 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep – very, very rare over the past fifteen or so years, I kid you not – I am absolutely delighted. So I suppose the lack of sleep is nothing new, though I can’t say it’s ever something you get used to.

(no pun intended in that paragraph – really; most of my puns are actually intended, which is why they are usually so bad.)

13 Among other things, I’ve been reading The Iliad to my little girl. She really seems to enjoy it, especially the parts relating to bloodshed, carnage, plunder and people’s limbs being ripped off. I’m not sure if this is something I should be concerned about and whether I should read her some ‘lighter’ fare, though her 2^nd favourite choice of reading is Roald Dahl’s Dirty Beasts and Revolting Rhymes, which is hardly much better.

But speaking of banal clichés, when I share this with people, and when I mention how she responds to some of the more gruesome parts of the book, the typical comeback is just about always something like ‘ no, I think she’s only responding to your intonation and the way you are reading it.’ Really? I mean, the way people tell me this, they say it as if they are the first person who has told me this, and that they are shattering some delusions I may be harbouring about my child’s taste in literature. Honestly, can’t people come up with something better to say in response to this, something, at least, somewhat original? Something like ‘wow, really, your daughter definitely has psychopathic tendencies then, you might want to get her checked out!’

You know what? She’s not merely responding to my ‘intonation’ – she loves this shit! Really. What creative, future literary baby wouldn’t?

‘Meriones went after him, and when he caught up with him struck him in the right buttock, and the spear-point passed clean through under the bone into his bladder…

…the bronze passed clean through his teeth, severing the tongue’s root, and he collapsed in the dust, the cold bronze clenched in his teeth…

…Eurypylus ran him down and lunging forward drove his sword through Hypsenor’s shoulder, and sheared off his heavy arm. The bloody arm fell to the ground, and dark death and his cruel destiny came down and fastened on his eyes…’

Parents! Don’t bother with all those stale, insipid and turgid nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Read your kids Homer and all the other classics from the very early days and develop their sense of culture as early as possible. Don’t shield them from the cruel realities of this horrid world we live in, a world of bloodshed and terror.

Or, as in this passage, perhaps you just want to share the glorious ritual of eating dead animal flesh.

‘So he spoke, but the son of Cronus did not yet fulfil his prayer;

He accepted the sacrifice, but prolonged their miserable toil.

Now when they had prayed and sprinkled the barley grains,

First they pulled back the bull’s head, slit its throat and flayed it,

Then cut away the thigh-bones and wrapped them in fat, covering

Them above and below, and laid raw hunks of meat on them.

These they laid on to billets of dead wood and burnt them,

Then spitted the entrails and held them over Hephaestus’ fire.

When the thigh-bones were burnt up, and they had tasted the entrails,

They chopped the rest of the meat small and threaded it on skewers,

And cooked it with great care and then drew it all off.

When they had finished their work, and made the meal ready,

They feasted, and no one’s heart lacked a fair share in the meal.’

Parents! I need your help. If you have any kids, and you’ve made it this far (thanks!), what have I missed? Please let me know and send along other lessons you’ve learnt from parenthood and if I get enough contributions, I will share them in a future post. Just give me your top one or two.