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Another NCT class today and luckily my hangover was surprisingly mild. We were given a baby to look after at the start of the day-long session. Luckily it was only a toy one and it couldn’t move, scream or poop, but nice to ease yourself in gently. Our baby had rather browner skin than I was expecting, but my wife said that was normal and can happen quite a lot, so not to worry if that was the case with our real one.
I don’t think I will have too much trouble bonding with my actual baby as I felt very affectionate and protective towards this plastic one. I stroked her head and held her hand and made sure she was properly cradled throughout the day. I didn’t really want to let her go and thought about asking if I could take it home. Or even swap it for our actual baby. Admittedly when we went to lunch I did leave the baby sitting on a window sill on its own for an hour, which I probably wouldn’t do with a real one (maximum thirty minutes unaccompanied on a window sill), but apart from that I was a fairly fastidious father and resisted the overwhelming impulse to throw it to my wife like a rugby ball (again I will wait until the real one is a week old before attempting that). It felt rather nice having a tiny human in my arms, just as I had enjoyed having my friend’s baby on my lap a couple of weeks ago. It’s almost like there is some instinct within us that makes us want to protect babies (though isn’t there also one that makes us want to cave in the skull of any baby that is not our genetic offspring?). I hope the real one will be as nice as this doll one. I mean it will be difficult to tell my child that I preferred a doll to it. And I will tell my child that if it’s the case. I never want to lie to my children. Or hide unpleasant truths from them.
We were asked to fill in a planner of our typical weekend day to then see how disrupted things would be by the arrival of a baby on its own crazy schedule of sleep, feeding and shitting. But as my own schedule is pretty much screwed up and a weekend day is no different to a week day, it was perhaps not so different for us as it might have been for others. I should be getting in from gigs at about the time that the baby is ready for its night time feed. But I did have difficulty seeing what time we would have to do very much work. I had been imagining that I could do writing when the baby slept, but it’s pretty clear that we will have to sleep when the baby is sleeping. And the baby is sleeping most of the time. But then waking up for a bit, just to fuck us up a bit more. Why have we willingly welcomed this little shit bomb into our lives? Why can’t it be quiet and clean as that doll, that I will be raising simultaneously as our child’s sister? That might work quite well as an example to our child, though it will look a bit odd when our kid is 5 and going to school and the doll is still a doll. But I am determined to see this idea through.
We were presented with a few scenarios and asked to think about how we would cope with them. The first one on our pile was of a couple whose baby had died at 10 weeks, which seemed to be throwing us in at the deep end. There’s quite a special atmosphere in the room when you make heavily pregnant women consider the possibility that the child they are carrying might die young. It’s not like these thoughts aren’t in your head along with all the other horrors and things that could go wrong, but I wasn’t sure how we were meant to respond. What do you do, as a parent of a living baby, if some of the people that you barely really know from an NCT class lose their child? I think the last thing that I would want to see is another parent with their living child. Hopefully that’s something that we won’t have to find out about. But it was a weird and unsettling thing to make us contemplate at this stage, but maybe that’s not a bad thing.
Given the next problem was about a dad who liked to go climbing at weekends and resented his wife and baby because he couldn’t do that any more, it was hard to have much sympathy with him, “Miko and Nambaya have just lost their child and you’re in a strop because you are going to have to give up your hobby for a few weeks. You utter prick.” Though, to be fair, those kinds of resentments are things that will have to be dealt with on some level, whereas sudden infant death syndrome is a much less likely occurrence. Again, how lucky are we to live in the 21st Century? My great-grandparents generation would expect at least one or two of their children to die in infancy. They can’t have loved their children any less and yet they presumably had to accept that reality and carried on. Imagine if you told them about the guy annoyed about not being able to go climbing at the weekends. I mean, I’m pretty furious with him (as fictional as he is), so fuck knows what the Victorians would make of him. But to be fair they’d be pretty freaked out at the entitlement and selfishness of us all. “Nearly all your babies will live to adulthood and you still find stuff to complain about."
“Fuck you, Victorians. Stop trying to guilt trip us. You only just thought of stamps and getting rid of slavery so why should we listen to you?"
I am now as angry with the Victorians for their imagined disapproval of my lifestyle as I am with the fictional man who goes climbing at the weekend and resents his baby. But not as much as I resent my baby for wrecking my plan to go out climbing every weekend. I’d never done it before or had any interest in it, but 2015 was the year when all that was going to change. My plastic baby wouldn’t have minded - I could even have taken her with me - but my real one is so self-obsessed and needy that I will never become an Olympic climber, which has been my dream ever since I read about the bloke not allowed to go climbing any more. And yes, part of my dream was to campaign to get climbing on the Olympic roster of sports. But there’s not even time to do that now.
