First, a warning...
"Nobody will ever tell you this," a new father friend whispered to me, shortly before the birth of my first child. "But just remember – the first few weeks are ABSOLUTE HELL. Prepare yourself for total madness and it won’t seem so bad."
It was the best advice any expectant father could have. The truth is that those first few weeks and months are hell. Your home will look like a bomb site. You'll be surrounded by piles of dirty nappies, filthy clothes and mountains of washing up. You'll be woken up throughout the night by ear-splitting baby cries. You feel as if you'll never get a decent night’s sleep again. Suddenly, the boring job that you’ve wanted to quit for years seems like bliss.
It's enough to make you worry that the rest of your life will be like this. You wonder if you’ll ever have sex with your partner again, or read a book that isn’t made of cloth, let alone actually leave the house. It does get better, honestly. Within a few months you'll have some semblance of your life back. But first there are some things you need to know about…
Sleep deprivation
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A newborn baby will wreak agonies of sleep deprivation unlike anything you've experienced before. Struggling to cope, bleary-eyed, with an around-the-clock baby schedule is a subtle form of torture.
However, babies can't help it – they have small stomachs, and the simple fact is that they get hungry every few hours. This means that your sleep will be regularly disrupted by ear-splitting screams. The volume of these is quite incredible, around 97 decibels, which is roughly as loud as a pneumatic drill. And that is LOUD. This is mildly annoying during the day but absolutely devastating at night. The father of a newborn might go to sleep at 11pm, just after he’s put his baby down after a feed. He’ll be woken up at 2am, go back to sleep at 2.30am only to be awoken again at 5am. He might then try and snatch 90 minutes' sleep before starting his daily routine. If he’s got to leave for work at, say, 7.30am, he's going to feel exhausted before the day's begun.
It’s different from getting up early to do a paper-round when you were a teenager, or dealing with jetlag, or coping with the odd hangover. The profound levels of disorientation can leave you feeling physically nauseous, irritable and muddle-headed. Any dreams you have ever had – sex, money, sporting glory – are quickly eclipsed by endless fantasies about sleep. You think about it all day long. You would happily sacrifice your life's ambition just to snuggle into fresh bed linen and get a decent night’s kip.
Worse still, nobody seems to understand. Friends, if they don’t have children, will be dismissive ("yeah, yeah - you try getting up for an early shift every day and then moan to me about lack of sleep"). Friends with older children will have blanked this terrible period from their memory. Work colleagues will think you’re just a lazy slacker.
For this reason alone, it’s worth booking as much time as possible off work for the early days and weeks. Take the maximum paternal leave you can. If your boss will only give you a week, take another week of holiday, or if you can afford it a week of unpaid leave too. If you have time off work, it’s worth snatching as much rest as you can during the day when your child sleeps. If your baby sleeps all day and is awake all night you can share sleeping shifts (she gets four hours' sleep while you take care of baby, then you have a lie-down while she takes over). Some fathers of the insomniac persuasion might actually grow quite fond of cradling a newborn on the sofa at 4am while watching Argentine stock-car racing on an obscure cable TV channel. But it would take almost superhuman levels of tolerance if this sleep deprivation didn’t soon make you moody and irritable.
When you do go back to work, it’s not really possible to nod off near a screaming child. Invariably this means sleeping in a different room - on the sofa, in the spare bedroom, or on the floor of the "nursery" that you’ve lovingly prepared for your newborn infant. Don’t stay up in the evening unnecessarily. If you put baby down at, say, 7pm, try and get to sleep a couple of hours then. It’s either that or sleepwalking to work each morning.
What can I do?
It’s often asked why men have nipples. They can’t breastfeed so, unless baby is being bottle-fed, fathers often feel that there is nothing useful they can do.
This, I’m afraid, is hogwash. There are, unbelievably, men who continue to live life as if they’re in a 1970s sitcom, slipping out of the house and disappearing to the pub when their child starts crying. The truth is that there are plenty of things all fathers can do that are of huge help to a shattered partner and a helpless child.
In terms of basic things to do with the baby, these might include:
• changing nappies (see below)
• burping the baby (it’s easy, and it can be the start of an important bonding session between you)
• rocking baby to sleep (important because, unlike your breastfeeding partner, you won’t smell of milk and so won’t have a fully-fed baby demanding more)
• reading stories (baby won’t understand a thing, but it’s important to introduce the concept early)
• keeping baby occupied through play (you’re the FUN parent, remember)
• talking to baby (they can't talk back but it gets her familiar with grammar and vocabulary).
Even if the whole baby thing is getting you down, the following easy tasks might provide light relief:
• doing the washing up
• cooking food for your partner and child
• loading up the washing machine and hanging the clean clothes out
• tidying the house now and then
• doing the shopping
• waiting on your partner, hand and foot.
Nappies
You can’t give birth and you can’t breastfeed. There, you’ve lost the two key trump cards in any argument with your wife. You can, however, change nappies. This is truly a man’s realm.
As Robin Williams put it in one memorable routine: "You may have been a lumberjack, you may have been a marine, you may have seen blood and guts. But you have never seen caca like this. It’s incredible stuff: part-toxic waste, part-Velcro™.’
For the first few weeks, nappy-changing becomes an epic ritual, something that requires almost as much peripheral equipment as brain surgery. First of all you’ll need a changing mat - a big one, with lots of padding. You’ll need a clean nappy, along with a few spares just in case baby pees on it. You’ll also need copious amounts of cotton wool, along with a bowl of tepid water and another bowl to dispose of the dirty cotton wool. You’ll need a muslin cloth to pat the baby’s bottom dry. You might need some antiseptic cream to treat nappy rash, and maybe some zinc barrier cream to prevent the nappy rash in the first place. You’ll need a nappy sack to dispose of the nappy if it’s particularly smelly, which it invariably is. Then you’ll need some kitchen roll to mop up the mess. And you’ll probably need a rattle to keep baby amused, because the whole process will have taken the best part of a day to achieve. The whole kit will fit neatly into a medium-sized truck.
Of course, within months, you’ll be able to do exactly the same job in a matter of seconds with one nappy and a single wet wipe. This is because nappy-changing will have brought out the competitive computer-game nerd in you. Ultra-competitive alpha male dads are left challenging each other for nappy-changing duels ("two wet wipes and a changing mat for THAT? What kind of lightweight are you?").
Nappy-changing can become fun, but it's also an investment for the future. Research has shown that the level of secure attachment a child feels for her father is directly linked to the number of nappies he changes in a given week. If dirty nappies are the capital investment and the undying love of a stroppy teenager the dividend, then it figures that the more nappies you change, the more they love you. It’s worth it.
Sex
The last time you may have seen your wife’s nether regions was when she was in the final throes of delivery, howling in agony. An hour or so later you may have seen some health professional busy in the same area with a needle, thread and pair of tweezers.
There are many men who find these twin experiences so horrific that they cannot look at their wives sexually again, and some who believe that men should not attend birth as a result. Thankfully, most of us are rather more mature and rather less Victorian than this. The problem is not with libido, but feasibility.
Many prospective fathers will be luridly fascinated as to whether intercourse is possible during pregnancy, but oddly incurious as to the effect of childbirth on sex. This is just as well, as the answer isn’t always good news. Your partner will have other things to worry about, and sex with you will be way down the list.
Sex will not – at least in the first year – be as bountiful as it was before childbirth. Both of you will be so exhausted and sleep-deprived that sex is low on your list of priorities. There’s also the guaranteed passion-killer of those 97db screams from your newborn. And then there’s the all-important physiological details. It's hardly surprising that you are recommended to wait six weeks before you first try to rekindle your sex life. In the first days and weeks post-childbirth your partner probably won't be in the best of shape. Stitches will be in place, tears and abrasions (ouch) will be healing, and some kind of stretching will have taken place. Rest assured, however, the old fear that many men have of postnatal sex are thankfully unfounded. The vagina is a pretty elastic sheath and, remarkably, dimensions will be restored to pre-birth levels. (Read more about Sex after childbirth.)
Sex is a crucial component of your relationship after childbirth, and it's important to resume it as soon as it's feasible. You need to stop seeing your partner as a glorified nanny - and she needs to stop seeing you as a glorified waiter-cum-hunter-gatherer. Seduction - those old romantic techniques that you probably haven’t put into practice since the early days of your relationship - suddenly becomes necessary again. Any planned sexual congress will probably involve weeks of planning, babysitters, bribery, presents, treats, string quartets and pets removed from the house.
Try to put at least a few hours one night a week to spend quality time together – no television, a nice takeaway, a glass of wine and a DVD – is a good start. Actually having a decent conversation with each other every day, without lapsing into "baby talk", is also crucial. And, if all else fails, cuddling makes a good starting point. After all, you’ll be so busy fantasising about sleep to care about sex too much.
Passing compliments
Your partner has just been through one of the most traumatic times of her life. She has put on weight. She’s not getting much sleep. She feels haggard. She hasn't got much time to care about her appearance. Even if she’s not suffering from postnatal depression, she’ll be going through some pretty low points. Let’s face it, you're not going to get much sex action for a while, so it’s important to have as much physical and emotional contact with your partner as possible. Now, more than any time, is the point to heap praise and reassurance upon her. Cuddle her. Tell her she looks great, even if she looks like a grizzled hobo and hasn't washed in a week.
Everything takes longer
After childbirth, your life seems in constant chaos. You're always on the go, racing around the house, changing nappies, sterilising bottles, waiting on your partner, cooking, cleaning, washing and - just occasionally - getting a chance to bond with baby. If feels as if someone is secretly speeding up the clocks.
You’ll wake up with grand plans. "We're going to take baby for an early morning swim," you declare. "Then we'll take brunch in that charming cafe around the corner from the swimming baths, then we'll walk through the park, visit a friend for tea, drive to the supermarket, and have supper at my mum’s house. Then we'lll drive back, put baby to bed and have a glass of wine before turning in."
The reality is rather more prosaic. The morning and afternoon will whiz by before you've even left the house. Finally, at 3pm, you manage to put your socks on, an achievement which almost has you leaping around the house with joy. The secret is not to over-plan your day, keep it simple or you'll end up feeling frustrated and stressed.
Growing up
Sociologists and cultural commentators have speculated about "middle youth" and "extended adolescence". What this basically means is that people are having children a lot older. Where our grandparents would have been rearing children while scarcely out of their teens, our generation are increasingly waiting until our mid-thirties before becoming parents. Where our forefathers had no chance to enjoy adulthood before the pressures of parenthood arrived, a lot of us end up with around a decade where, frankly, we have no responsibility, no one to account to, and nobody particularly reliant upon us.
Parenthood, to be blunt, is where this ends. Your life acquires focus, discipline and a brain-numbing degree of responsibility. There are, around the world, thousands of fathers who decide that parenthood simply isn’t for them. They opt out, they do a runner. The fathers who stay the course may feel like an unsung hero of modern life, perpetually disappointed that no one has given them a medal.
Just as gay men develop "gaydar", fathers soon acquire the ability to spot a new dad within 20 yards. He’ll be the one suffering from permanent exhaustion mingled with a secretly delighted air of self-satisfaction. You’ll be able to tell from the bags under his eyes, the residue of zinc cream under the fingernails and the stream of baby sick on his combat pants. He’ll be the one who knows exactly how you feel. Go and have a chat with him.
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