Further thoughts on paternity

Time goes by faster as you get older, because when you are, say, ten, one year is 10% of your life; when you are thirty, it's 3.3%, and therefore feels like a smaller interval. But if the passage of time normally accelerates at a steady pace as you get older, it jumps to hyper-drive when you have a child. I cannot fathom how almost two months have gone by so quickly.

But parenthood also exaggerates time's other quirk - that the more crammed your schedule is, the faster time seems to go by as you are experiencing it, but the longer the time interval seems in retrospect - a year spent climbing the Himalayas and learning to sky dive will seem longer in memory than one spent watching Friends reruns (I am not passing judgement on the merit of each activity, and I personally would much rather do the latter than the former). Similarly, it feels like these two months have gone by incredibly fast, and to have lasted aeons, at the same time.

In-between these time warps, I have had some further thoughts on parenthood that I jot down below:

What is love?
I touched on the strangeness of missing someone you have only met for a few hours in my first post on paternity, but I have been thinking about it some more. When I think of the love I feel towards other people in my life, such as my parents, my wife or close friends, I notice that this love is either the product of familiarity and affection over a long time, or the evolution of peripheral feelings, such as those of respect or sexual attraction. In contrast, and in my wife's words, my love towards my son is totally unearned.

On the contrary, if I told you that I love to bits a person who completely disregards my own needs and wants, habitually deprives me of sleep, and yells at me whenever I am a minute late in catering to his every whim, and all he gives me in return is the occasional smile, you'd probably refer me to a psychiatrist. (I am not the first to notice this - a book a friend gave my wife classifies motherhood as a particular case of Stockholm syndrome.)

Yet I do of course love my son to bits, inexplicable though this is, and I will gladly be peed, farted and puked on in return for a single smile. It forces one to rethink one's understanding of the concept of love.

Should you have a child?
I wrote on Facebook that you should have a child if you enjoy playing Sims. In addition to fans of the game (and I mean those fans who actually took care of their Sims, not those whose objective in the game was to come up with novel and increasingly convoluted ways to get them killed), there are a few more kinds of person who will love parenthood. You will enjoy the experience if you...

• had Tamagochis that did not die;
• like scatological humour & fart jokes;
• are in dire need of exercise;
• never got used to surviving with fewer than ten hours of sleep, despite everyone's insistence that you totally would when you reached your twenties, and want to do so;
• want to master the art of the micro-nap, or to learn to fall asleep within seconds;
• want to test the strength of your marriage;
• want to finally get your Greek mum/grandmother/other relative to stop fretting about your health (though you won't be 100% successful here);
• think having your wife sleepily trying to unscrew your head in the middle of the night, thinking it's your child she's trying to pick up, is jolly good fun (it is, but only in retrospect).

How much do I really believe in gender equality?

I don't care whether you have won a flinch of bacon at Dunmow, if you have a child, your spouse and you are going to have an argument. Sleep deprivation does that to people. In one such argument, I told my wife that she was failing to appreciate how much I am doing for our son - way more than most men do. She countered that I do not get credit for merely doing my share. As is the case about 25% of the time often the case [ed.], my wife was right: in spite of thinking that I hold men and women truly equal, I was giving myself kudos for assuming shared responsibility for raising our son. But the man assuming 50% of the responsibility ought not to be praiseworthy, it ought to be the default.

Everyone knows we all have biases of which we are unaware. Everyone also slyly adds (though not out loud) "but I less than everyone else". It is rare that our biases are so clearly called out, and shocking when they are.

How can everyone not see that my son is simply the best?

As I've mentioned before, my son is the first grandchild, great-grandchild, nephew, cousin-once-removed &c on my side of the family, and the first of the new generation amongst family friends. As a result, he has been showered with an obscene degree/number of affection, attention and gifts; his pictures on FB have received plenty of likes, smiley faces and hearts (not without side-effects - my mum's old nanny believes digital well-wishers are giving Christopher the evil eye). 

Yet all this attention scarcely seems enough: whenever my son smiles, or coos, or simply is, I am shocked, shocked, to find out that everyone is not looking at him on the verge of tears. Do they not realise just how amazing each smile is? How can they glance at their phones, or cook, or read their books instead, when every smile they miss is a smile they will never get back? And at least family and friends are praising him - what about all those people I pass on the street, or on the boat? How can they fail to even steal a glance? Do they not realise they are in presence of pure awesomeness? How do they just go on about their lives?

You think I am exaggerating, and okay, maybe I am taking some poetic license - but only a little. I pride myself on being very rational but when it comes to my son, I am genuinely constantly surprised that other people do not think he is exactly as amazing and attention-worthy as I think he is, even though I fully understand I shouldn't expect them to.

More to come, as they come.