Stray Thoughts Scraped from the Brain of a Recent Father

I'm writing this at 1:30 in the morning, with my son strapped to my chest. He's breathing gently, and occasionally stirring slightly. I keep worrying that he's too hot, or too cold. He's five days, three hours and twenty minutes old.

I won't be identifying him by name here -- privacy is rare enough on the internet, and I'm not going to blow it for him by naming him on a public forum before he's old enough to consent to it. As far as this blog's concerned, he's R.

* * *

Being present at a birth is one of the most draining, traumatic, shocking and paradigm-shattering experiences imaginable. I honestly think, until I actually saw R. emerge from his mother, I'd never believed that this was genuinely how it happened. I remember very clearly thinking, "My God, it's actually true!". Lord knows what I'd been expecting to see -- some kind of stork, perhaps.

* * *

My respect for people who voluntarily go through this experience on a daily professional basis has rocketed through the ceiling. Forget soldiers and firefighters, midwives may very well be the closest thing we have to superheroes.

* * *

I want to write a story now about anti-gestationists who believe babies come into being at the moment of birth and reject all this so-called scientific propaganda about foetal development.

* * *

To a regular SF viewer, a newborn baby looks like a none-too-convincing special effect. It's greyish-purple, it moves strangely, it's connected to a human being via a disturbingly organic-looking conduit, and looks unlike anything you've ever seen before. I remember finding the birth sequence in Children of Men oddly unrealistic, and feeling that it let down the rest of the film. I've a suspicion it matched what I saw on Sunday evening, pretty much frame by frame.

* * *

Incredible though midwives are, maternity wards are horrible places, full of hormonal panic and routinely violated privacy. B. and R. were kept in until Wednesday to be given antibiotics for a potential (and, as it turned out, mythical) infection. I was leaving them at 9pm, spending hours sorting stuff out at home and snatching a few hours' sleep before returning, if I managed it, for 9am. B. was having things far worse. The night they came home was an enormous relief.

* * *

Newborn babies are tiny vortices of need. Insofar as they have a personality at all, it relates to how their very basic needs -- for food, for sleep, for cleanliness, for warmth, for comfort -- stack up against one another. R. is particularly fond of comfort. I'm currently giving thanks daily for the invention of baby slings. (Not that our were bought -- they're six-metre by half-metre rectangles of stretchy fabric tied in a pattern designed by a genius.) It's thanks to them that I still have hands to call my own.

* * *

Yesterday was my and B.'s tenth wedding anniversary. To my utter astonishment, we actually managed to drive to a (not terribly good) restaurant, swallow a (not terribly good) meal and make it back home without R. regaining consciousness. He was blissed out on breast milk, and sleeping like... well, a baby I suppose.

* * *

I realise, of course, that this must be terribly dull for you, dear reader, unless you a) care about the individuals concerned, or b) fall into that demographic bracket which hasn't yet been through all itself this but has an active interest in doing so one day.

I'm not intending to turn this into a baby blog, as that would be a massive gear-shift and I doubt I'd be very good at it. (The blogging, that is, although now you mention it I'm far from confident of being any good at fatherhood either.) It does seem likely that there won't be much space for other things in my mind for a while yet, though. When there is, I'll do my best to mention them.