A version of this column featured in the June issue of Pregnancy, Baby & You magazine. My next column will be in the September 2008 issue…
I am a hoarder of useless stuff. It’s a guy thing. I will use any excuse to buy myself a book, a CD or a DVD. And I will shamelessly dub my random, space-eating collection as a “library” to dignify and justify its presence in our ever-shrinking home. At the first sign of pregnancy, I sniffed a book-buying opportunity.
My first few taps on Amazon, however, were unsuccessful at best. I typed in “Father”. Up came “My Father was a Serial Killer.” It didn’t sound helpful. I tried “Dad”. The Pocket Idiot's Guide popped up. An idiot? Me? Must be some other dad. Trying "daddy", I found a question on screen: "Did you mean 'dada'?" I didn't know if did, so I clicked on. Dada, it seems, referred to a bunch of mad artsy types who influenced the surrealists. All very nice but advice on Provider Panic from "starving", goateed, Bohemian trustafarians was really the last thing I needed.
As a last resort, I turned to the books I already had, starting with The Big One. Turning to the New Testament I thumbed the pages for a word of consolation from Joseph. Surely the earthly father of Christ could lend a hand? Not a word. Literally. In the whole of the New Testament, Joseph doesn’t utter a single peep. The message for new dads seems to be: keep your lip buttoned and just get on with it. But then, perhaps Joseph isn’t the best role model either. After all, it is one of the new dad’s responsibilities to make sure that mum and baby have a peaceful and restful environment after the birth. Yet within minutes Ol’ Joe had the place swarming with shepherds and wise men.
Towards the end of the third trimester, a friend had loaned me a copy of Ernest Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Now, I’d never read any Hemmingway before. All I knew about him was that his nickname was Papa. Appropriate, I thought. Until I encountered, towards the end of the book, a scene featuring a Caesarean section that would not have been out of place in the recent Sweeney Todd movie. Did it give me nightmares? Only when I was asleep.
All this is to make light of my trouble finding a serious, non-patronising book to help me through impending fatherhood. And this ”making light” is part of the trouble. Why is it that men can’t/won’t approach a subject seriously without making gags about it? Even in my pre-natal NCT class, when we were asked to split into groups (male and female groups) to discuss different aspects of the imminent event, the women’s heads were always huddled together deep in debate while we were roaring our heads off with laughter. If it’s not yet known as Chandler Syndrome – named for the pathologically emotionally stunted (but in a nice way) gag-cracker Chandler Bing out of Friends – then it damn well should be.
Is it an expected response? Are we playing up to the GSOH clause in all those lonely-hearts ads? “Don’t care if he looks like an even porkier, melted version of Adrian Chiles but GSOH essential”. Or are we just trying to mask the fact that we are terrified? No bad thing, this, being terrified. In fact, it’s because we’re terrified that we’re looking for a book in the first place. And round and round it goes.
Help, for me, was at hand in one of the many books my wife Karen ploughed through during the pregnancy. So much so that she remains a Delphic oracle on the subject? “Colic? Just rub coal and jam on the soles of her feet. Simple.” Yeah, right. But the book that stood out was Miriam Stoppard’s Conception, Pregnancy & Birth. I remembered Stoppard from TV in my childhood, and she proved to be a reliable advisor, stopping in the narrative from time to time to address the dad in a direct and non-patronising way, with no gags. Good old Mizza Stoppo, that's what I say.
And so, having been unable to find satisfaction in the dad books field, I started my blog to educate other would-be fathers in the ways of parenthood with hard information presented in a concise and frank fashion revealing all the mysteries once and for all. Well… no, actually, it's just a stream of daft gags and nice pics. But it does keep me cheerful. And keeping cheerful makes me a better dad. Maybe old Saint Joe was right: just shut up and get on with it.
Tuesday 15 July 2008
Monday 14 July 2008
Pregnancy, Baby & You magazine
A version of the following appeared in the June issue of Pregnancy, Baby & You magazine in the My Story section. The July issue is on sale now...
“No kids?” other couples would ask. “No kids,” we’d reply, cool as cucumbers, non-plussed, unconcerned. If it happened, it happened, that was our attitude. And as the years passed, five, six, seven of them, people just stopped asking. Yet our easy-going attitude held true: until, that is, we went to the doctor, just to make sure.
It was only when we were told that we couldn’t have children that our minds became focused. In fact, after that, having a child was all we could think of.
We wanted a baby. That much we now knew. And we found out that one in seven couples, according to NHS Direct, experience the need for assisted conception. With IVF, there is an average success record of 15 percent. In our case, the Doctor handed us this statistic sharp end first: we had an 85 percent chance of failure. The numbers were bamboozling.
The words, which should have made sense of the numbers, only served to complicate matters further. First came “motility”. This new word, combined with plain old “low”, denoted that my sperm didn’t move very well. Combined with Karen’s age – we were just north of the “optimal” 39 mark, our chances of success now shrunk to “around” two percent. Sad-eyed shrugs and impeccable bedside manner did little to help either.
Action was the only solution. Go ahead with the procedure, give it one go, as futile as it is, and, if we make it to 80, we won’t look back and regret that we never tried. And so, pretending that everything was normal, we carried on planning our big, annual Christmas party.
Some friends showed up and announced their pregnancy. We fought a raging internal battle to be truly and genuinely happy for them. A battle, I’m pleased to say, that we won. To have added bitterness to despair would have been to dig a whole too deep to ever have clambered out of again.
After Christmas, the numbers and the words turned into a blizzard. Hycosy (a detailed examination of the womb); Progesterone injections (seven of them);
A fibroid – one of them, benign, as it turned out.
Our friends would ask: “How’s all it going?” We’d pause. In that pause we’d review the feelings of alienation, of invasion, of inadequacy at being unable to partake in the simple animal imperative of reproduction. “Oh, fine,” we’d reply, “fine…”
My mate Pete May, a West Ham nut, often says of being a West Ham supporter: “The despair I can handle: it’s the hope that kills me.” And indeed, the despair threw us together. And we stuck, tighter than ever before. Long walks, tears and talks of the unthinkable dominated that winter. I quoted Pete on one of our long rambling walks. “But there has to be hope,” said Karen. “Without hope, there’s…” At this point we turned a corner and slap bang in front of us was a pub. Its name? The Hope. We both laughed: there was Hope after all. “If we ever have a baby girl,” said Karen, “we’ll call her Hope…”
Another number came next: two. The number of eggs taken from Karen for fertilisation. Two is a low yield. But the word used by the nurse to describe them gave us hope: “magnificent”. Magnificent eggs. We dreamt immediately of twins – I know now that we both did – but at the time we each took a deep breath and looked the other way. Having been made to stare down the barrel of a scant chance for so long, this flake of good news was almost overwhelming amongst all the pain.
A funny thing, pain. If I asked you to describe your last toothache in precise and vivid detail, you couldn’t do it. Go on, try. Sore? Inadequate, isn’t it. Agony? Still doesn’t cover it. Anyway, now that it’s better, it doesn’t seem to matter, does it? Our IVF story is the same. The idea of the pain of IVF and potential childlessness haunts us still. But the news that one of the eggs had “taken”, that Karen – that we – were pregnant, delivered in an anonymous room in a corner of south east London, wiped all the months of pain away in a moment.
Are we grateful? Too small a word. But it’s impossible to live a life at such a high emotional pitch. We said we’d never complain if she woke us up in the middle of the night… but of course, we do. Besides, the pressure on Isobella to live up to the hefty billing of Miracle Baby is just too much for any person. But sometimes – the first time I fed her, the first time she waved, when she started laughing and then began to crawl – that miraculous feeling surges through us like delirium.
It turns out that Karen was right: There is Hope. Isobella Hope Scott-Goulding. She’s 10 months old now. And we still can’t believe she’s here.
“No kids?” other couples would ask. “No kids,” we’d reply, cool as cucumbers, non-plussed, unconcerned. If it happened, it happened, that was our attitude. And as the years passed, five, six, seven of them, people just stopped asking. Yet our easy-going attitude held true: until, that is, we went to the doctor, just to make sure.
It was only when we were told that we couldn’t have children that our minds became focused. In fact, after that, having a child was all we could think of.
We wanted a baby. That much we now knew. And we found out that one in seven couples, according to NHS Direct, experience the need for assisted conception. With IVF, there is an average success record of 15 percent. In our case, the Doctor handed us this statistic sharp end first: we had an 85 percent chance of failure. The numbers were bamboozling.
The words, which should have made sense of the numbers, only served to complicate matters further. First came “motility”. This new word, combined with plain old “low”, denoted that my sperm didn’t move very well. Combined with Karen’s age – we were just north of the “optimal” 39 mark, our chances of success now shrunk to “around” two percent. Sad-eyed shrugs and impeccable bedside manner did little to help either.
Action was the only solution. Go ahead with the procedure, give it one go, as futile as it is, and, if we make it to 80, we won’t look back and regret that we never tried. And so, pretending that everything was normal, we carried on planning our big, annual Christmas party.
Some friends showed up and announced their pregnancy. We fought a raging internal battle to be truly and genuinely happy for them. A battle, I’m pleased to say, that we won. To have added bitterness to despair would have been to dig a whole too deep to ever have clambered out of again.
After Christmas, the numbers and the words turned into a blizzard. Hycosy (a detailed examination of the womb); Progesterone injections (seven of them);
A fibroid – one of them, benign, as it turned out.
Our friends would ask: “How’s all it going?” We’d pause. In that pause we’d review the feelings of alienation, of invasion, of inadequacy at being unable to partake in the simple animal imperative of reproduction. “Oh, fine,” we’d reply, “fine…”
My mate Pete May, a West Ham nut, often says of being a West Ham supporter: “The despair I can handle: it’s the hope that kills me.” And indeed, the despair threw us together. And we stuck, tighter than ever before. Long walks, tears and talks of the unthinkable dominated that winter. I quoted Pete on one of our long rambling walks. “But there has to be hope,” said Karen. “Without hope, there’s…” At this point we turned a corner and slap bang in front of us was a pub. Its name? The Hope. We both laughed: there was Hope after all. “If we ever have a baby girl,” said Karen, “we’ll call her Hope…”
Another number came next: two. The number of eggs taken from Karen for fertilisation. Two is a low yield. But the word used by the nurse to describe them gave us hope: “magnificent”. Magnificent eggs. We dreamt immediately of twins – I know now that we both did – but at the time we each took a deep breath and looked the other way. Having been made to stare down the barrel of a scant chance for so long, this flake of good news was almost overwhelming amongst all the pain.
A funny thing, pain. If I asked you to describe your last toothache in precise and vivid detail, you couldn’t do it. Go on, try. Sore? Inadequate, isn’t it. Agony? Still doesn’t cover it. Anyway, now that it’s better, it doesn’t seem to matter, does it? Our IVF story is the same. The idea of the pain of IVF and potential childlessness haunts us still. But the news that one of the eggs had “taken”, that Karen – that we – were pregnant, delivered in an anonymous room in a corner of south east London, wiped all the months of pain away in a moment.
Are we grateful? Too small a word. But it’s impossible to live a life at such a high emotional pitch. We said we’d never complain if she woke us up in the middle of the night… but of course, we do. Besides, the pressure on Isobella to live up to the hefty billing of Miracle Baby is just too much for any person. But sometimes – the first time I fed her, the first time she waved, when she started laughing and then began to crawl – that miraculous feeling surges through us like delirium.
It turns out that Karen was right: There is Hope. Isobella Hope Scott-Goulding. She’s 10 months old now. And we still can’t believe she’s here.
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