Adrenalin and the novelty of it all keep you going at the start. You surprise yourself; a new gear of competence seems to kick in. Parenthood is like any emergency: human beings somehow rise to it. Although you feel atrocious, you manage to do everything that is required of you. You have no energy for anything else, such as work or a social life, but that's normal. As Libby Purves says, 'for a few months after a birth, nobody should expect much beyond survival and the odd quiet in in front of the television.' (Television? Pah! She had it easy.)
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| Baby Blues Depression After Pregnancy |
But this resilience is a scarce resource. Once used up, it does not come back. Waking up even once in the night when your baby is a year old may take more out of you than waking three times a night nine months before. You are like a rubber band which has lost its boing. It gets worse with a second child, even though by then you know what you are doing and can avoid making the same imbecilic mistakes you made last time. But the resilience has gone. These days, one bad night can take me three days to get over. And if there's another bad night in those three days ...
HARVEY: The big thing I didn't reckon on was the continuing loss of sleep. Not just in the baby years, but all the years afterwards. It would seem to me, as a trained biologist, that small children share a large part of their DNA with the cockerel. As a teenager I vividly recall marveling at my father's ability to rise at some ungodly hour every morning and appear in my bedroom with a cup of tea. After two children of my own, I now know how he managed it. Year after year of early rising - and my brother and I were the reason for it.
The Blues, The Love, The Fear
Have we talked about 'emotional rollercoasters' yet? Everyone does. At the end of the day people who write parenthood books love a cliche. So do parents: when your brain keeps sputtering and conking out at random, you don't really want to be looking for flesh new ways of saying 'emotional rollercoaster'. Especially as it describes rather succinctly what both fathers and mothers go through during pregnancy, the birth and the first few months thereafter.
Pregnancy is the queue for the emotional roller-coaster. You stand around for ages, eating junk food and becoming increasingly bad-tempered. 'Everyone has to queue,' says your partner soothingly. At last you get on the ride (the contractions). It starts slowly, creaking up that long, steep slope. It seems to take forever. You are locked in; you cannot escape. Halfway through your ascent, the engineers down below change shifts.
But just as you were on the verge of giving up hope, you reach the top of the slope. There is a moment of silence. A sharp chill in the air. An overwhelming sense of impending doom. You hear the first screams from other passengers. (Or is that you?) And then the descent into hell. Up and down, in and out, over and over and over again.
Your wallet falls out of your pocket. It's money you will never see again. You think you might throw up.
Why on earth did you eat curry last night? You knew you would be going on the emotional rollercoaster today. But up it surges, like a bilious tsunami, out of your mouth and straight onto the back of the head of the person sitting in front. Who is also you, by some unpleasant relativistic coincidence. Your partner looks at you in disgust, wondering why she chose you and not 1,750 other men who had far better credentials.
There, sadly, the analogy fails. Real rollercoasters only last a minute or so, and many people envy them so much they want to go straight back on again. Whereas only an idiot would contemplate a second ride on the emotional rollercoaster. At least for a couple of years, or until Junior starts school.
And that is assuming they can ever get off the bloody thing. Some emotional rollercoasters seem to go on indefinitely. Up and down, in and out, over and over and over again. Who would have thought that one man could throw up that many times? To find out more, you can check out Baby Blues Depression After Pregnancy.