the Progenitor

64 days… and counting…

All of the above have particular yet indefinable aromas. All of the above were recalled today when our post/maintenance man (and general Doer of Stuff) applied a bit of WD40 to the office shredder, in an ailing attempt to stave off its inevitable demise… “bits of wood” was more of a secondary association… and all of these things (sheds, bikes, bits of wood, WD40 (but not usually office shredders)) are generally associated with grandad-ness. That is, grandads of my time… grandads of twenty years ago and more… which does, of course, include my grandad, in the days of my youth.

Other grandad-y things are woodworking, strong tea and whistling – incessant tuneless whistling directly outside my bedroom window, which happened to look directly out onto the conservatory/workshop/dog-run… many a homework session was disrupted by many infuriating tuneless minutes of the Grandad Whistle! Dear of him…

I speak of grandads “of old”… of the aforementioned two or more decades ago… but have all grandads been the same going back to the dawn of time, and will it always be so into the infinite reaches of the future? Perhaps, in some respects, they have and it will. Only once “bikes” were “flint axes,” and in the future “bits of wood” will be “stabilised portions of reformed spacetime substrate”… or something.

The Tuneless Grandad Whistle, however, will live forever!

66 days… and counting…

It’s funny how the human psyche works…

 On the Saturday morning just gone, I was speaking to Jo about how I’m not one of those naturally happy people… and about how I want our child to look at me and think that I’m not just a good dad, but a happy dad… and then, I think I can assuredly say that, for the rest of the weekend, I was, for most of the time, happy.

 I could go into the various things that we did – that we had a generally pretty “chilled out” weekend, that we played quite a bit of The Sims (see post on my other blog), etc – but I truly believe that just saying I wanted to be happier… made me happier! I didn’t actively make some sort of Positive Affirmation, offer up some kind of prayer or whatever, but I simply – almost unconsciously – sent the thoughts into the universe…

 Et voila!

 I do have a tendency to worry, to over-analyse and to think rather too much about all the troublesome things which might happen, and so on and so forth… and for this reason, I don’t want to say too much more, in an effort to prevent lapsing into a loop of worrisome self-analysis. I will, however, just say this…

 Worry is about the future.

 Happiness is about the present.

 I can be a happy dad if I choose to be happy one day at a time.

Last night I dreamt I had kids – a girl and a boy of about thirteen/fourteen and another girl of about six… I don’t recall their names… I can’t remember much of the details of the dream, but when I woke I missed them – my children… my dream children. Such an odd sensation. I felt so… parental… so protective of these children I’ve not actually had… not in this lifetime… not yet…

Is the universe sending me some sort of message? A foretelling of things to come? Or snapshots of an alternative timeline where Jo and I had kids shortly after we got together? I did feel the age I am now in the dream, so maybe the latter… and, as much as one is able to accurately recall, to pin down, to categorise, the fleeting, ephemeral emotions of one’s unconscious meanderings, I did feel like they were my kids… but not my kids. Like this was a test, a kind of sojourn into what it would be like to be a parent…

It felt good!

I felt proud – in my dream… overflowing with love… like I would do anything to protect these beautiful children of mine…

Thank you, universe…

I’m looking forward to the future…

I don’t know how I will feel when I am immersed in it all – when I am plunged, during those first few weeks, into this strange new world of sleepless nights and nappies, and… sleepless nights and nappies… but… there are some rather surprising things I am looking forward to! Such as… (the changing of) nappies! Now don’t explode with laughter, all you parents out there, all you people who have already been through it all, once, twice, many times before – don’t guffaw and chuckle and say out loud to this here page, “Oh you just wait and see, my friend! You just wait and see, you over-optimistic dad-to-be, when you first experience the nauseating horror of stumbling around in those hours of the morning you didn’t even know existed, and it feels like your whole world is poo and stink and noise, and you feel like you will never ever get any kind of a semblance of a ‘normal’ life back again”…

Yes, yes, I know all that…

(Well, in theory)

I know at times I will feel so immensely tired, stressed, depressed, traumatised, horrified and wondering whether we’ve just made some huge mistake… but for now… when I remove myself from the practicalities, from thinking too much about it… there is a part of me that is actually looking forward to… changing nappies!

Yes, I can’t deny it! It’s there! How will I “perform” at this menial, smelly, thankless task? How will I rise to this challenge?

And furthermore…

How will I “perform” at getting my baby to sleep? And getting them to eat? And bathing them? And helping them to release their first smile, their first laugh, take their first step, utter their first word?

God, I’m terrified… but God, I’m excited!

Oh and…

Getting my hands on that stylish, three-wheeled, hi-tech pram we’ve got our eyes on, wheeling it along those country paths and cornering like a demon!

Raymond made a good point this morning. By which I mean to say, Raymond Barone from Everybody Loves Raymond. He complained about how much homework his kids got. Raymond being Raymond, his primary complaint was with having to help his kids with so much homework, but he did, in the end, step up to the plate (as it were) and express, at a parents and teachers meeting, that he thought that having so much work to do was likely to make the kids lose the joy of learning and left little room for “mere” curiosity… Actually that’s not quite what he said, but it’s kind of what was implied… more or less…

Anyway, my point is…

I am admittedly not yet in a position to be able to judge whether or not children are getting an inordinate amount of homework, and programmes like Everybody Loves Raymond obviously give an American perspective (and being what one might classify as a “light-hearted sitcom,” not necessarily a particularly accurate one), but… there is no doubt that Western society is more goal and target focused these days… and inevitably this has trickled down into education (which, by the way, I have some indirect experience of, having a dad who is, as it were, in the business of educating)… and while we are meeting goals and targets and “fulfilling the curriculum”… where is the curiosity? Where is the exploration and play? In the midst of all the doing… where is the thinking and the wondering?

And I’m not just talking about schools, by the way.

Just bought a baby gym, a baby bath and a bouncing/vibrating cradle, all for about £8!

Do you think we’re paying too much for things?

“…sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast…”
(The White Queen, Alice Through the Looking Glass)

Children don’t believe in something because it makes sense. They don’t believe in something because they have done a scientific analysis of the facts and deduced that it is likely to be true. They believe in something because they believe in it. They believe in something because they want to believe in it… because no one has given them a good enough reason why it isn’t true. Which seems fair enough to me. Is there really any difference between believing in God and believing in fairies? Or Father Christmas? Or magic?

Children have a pretty good idea about faith. Priests and vicars and rabbis and so on spend their whole lives trying to explain to grown-ups what it means to have it and what to do if you lose it… but why not just ask a child?

Scientific implausibility is no barrier to a child’s view on the world. Even if there is the remotest chance that something is true… then why not believe it is true? Who’s to tell you that you are definitely, incontrovertibly wrong?

With a child on the way, maybe I should start thinking more like one…

So with that in mind…

What can I believe today?

A few weeks ago, thinking perhaps I ought to start reading a bit about this whole parenting lark, I picked up a book on establishing a good sleeping routine for your child. It seemed straightforward and easy to read, so I thought it would be worth giving it a go - you never know, I thought, I might actually learn something useful. I determined, however, that I would read it alongside the latest Stephen Baxter or whatever, so I didn’t feel like I was back at uni doing the Childhood Development module of my Psychology degree… but flip me if it wasn’t as dry as a Rich Tea biscuit which had had all the moisture sucked out of it by some kind of moisture-draining vampire! Not surprisingly then, I only managed to get through a dozen or so pages before I was utterly overwhelmed by the book’s brain-desiccating properties. I gave up. And I vowed henceforth that I wasn’t going to read another book on parenting unless it was fun and entertaining, as well as educational. I mean, parenting is meant to be a joy, not just a scientific experiment, right?

Then I spotted Stephen Giles’ book at the library, on a tableful of other books on parenting and things. I was taken in by its witty title, the snappy little semi-rhyming sub-heading (”From nappy mess to happiness in one year”) and its humorous cover pic of the eyes of a befuddled dad (presumably those of Giles) peering over a smiling, gurgling (so it appeared) baby… not to mention the fact that it was just over a hundred pages long… That’s the book on parenting for me! - I thought; so I checked it out and started to consume its wise and witty words straightaway.

In accordance with my aforementioned vow, You’re the Daddy was, from the off, primarily entertaining. Giles’ voice is similar to another favoured non-fiction author of mine, Danny Wallace - so it was a bit like reading another book by Danny Wallace, which just happened to be about surviving the first twelve months of fatherhood. It was chatty, informal, anecdotal, and although, in the spirit of honesty and frankness, Giles speaks about the frustrating, stressful and downright horrifying aspects of being a new dad, amidst his relating of its incomparable joys, there is nothing in what he says or the way he says it that led me down the path of o-my-god-what-have-we-done-we’ve-made-a-terrible-mistake… and things. In fact… as my reading of the book progressed, there were times when I just wanted to say to the author, “Just quit your moaning and get on with it!”

Now obviously I’m not a parent yet, and every parent that has ever existed would probably say to me that I can’t possibly know what it will be like until I start travelling down that path, but there are aspects of this book that have been oddly reassuring in perhaps unintentional ways. I mean, I know I’m a bit odd and deal with some parts of life (alright, probably most parts) a bit (or maybe a lot) differently to other folk, so I don’t want to be too harsh on the man, but just by way of a few examples…

1. EARNING A LIVING… Stephen Giles works from home, as a writer, and frequently speaks of finding it immensely difficult to establish a working routine around the baby… but if one is fortunate enough to be in this kind of position, doesn’t it make sense to learn to be flexible and adaptable, to work when the baby is asleep, and to not expect the baby to sleep at specific times of the day and only work during these times?

2. FAMILY… I know I see my family relatively rarely, but Giles & Co seem to experience (endure!) an inordinate amount of family visits in the first year of the baby’s life - visiting and being visited - to which I’d be tempted just to say… keep the rellies away! Obviously family are important and people will want to visit, but for at least the first few months, it seems to me that parents/baby need to be established as the number one priority.

3. DAY TRIPS… Giles seems a little obsessed with taking the baby out on trips to the park, heritage sites, bookshops (bookshops!), etc… which is all well and good, but they rarely seem to have the desired result… and he seems to constantly forget to pack essentials, like nappies… to which I might say… do months-old babies really care about castles, ducks and bookshelves? Wouldn’t they be equally/more happy sitting on a blanket in the garden, playing with colourful toys and listening to music?

There are other similar things, but like I said, I don’t want to be too harsh on the man… and I am a bit different… I’ve never had as much of a need for sociability as most other people… I don’t see my family that much (which I think ties in with the sociability thing)… and although I don’t work from home, I have a bit of a - *ahem* - “different” attitude to work (ambition? Missing the “cut and thrust” of the office? Does not compute…)… so like I said, this book has been reassuring in ways it probably didn’t intend - I can’t imagine worrying or fretting about some of the things Stephen Giles worried and fretted about; and I can’t imagine some of his issues being issues for me at all… which can only be a good thing!