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| First Month Baby Fear |
And it has nothing to do with whether you like babies as babies. If you happen to regard all other children as squirming, shouty, self-indulgent, over-pampered little gits, then you are probably a normal well-adjusted male. Other people's children can be repulsive. It is only your own that are uncommonly clever, charming and pleasing on the eye. Mothers, more naturally diplomatic, can pretend to like other people's children and even get on with them in extremis. No one expects fathers to do this. No one shows us photos of their awful, dull children. They wouldn't dare.
Here is a strange thing, unearthed by Desmond Morris in his book Babywatching. If you look at something or someone you like, your pupils dilate, even in the brightest of light. If it is something or someone you don't like, your pupils contract. In Morris's experiment, people were shown a beautiful, non-crying baby in the business of being adorable.
Most women, whether or not they had children of their own, showed a marked positive response. Their pupils dilated; they liked the look of the baby. Men who had had children also responded positively. But men who hadn't had children evinced a strong negative response. Some pretended otherwise, but their contracting pupils told their truth: they hated the little bleeder.
Morris's conclusion is intriguing. He says that women come 'ready-primed for maternal behavior', while men must have their instincts activated by going through parenthood themselves. In other words, their vista needs to expand. For men this could be how you define 'growing up'. No wonder so many of us seek to put it off as long as possible.
THE FEAR
And once you have learned to love them, The Fear sets in. This is the monstrous and irrational terror that something unspecifically awful is going to happen to your baby. You have come so far with Junior. You don't want to lose him/her now. Suddenly the world seems a dreadfully hostile place. Around every corner, paedophiles. In the next road, a car that is about to run your child down. In the air, killer microbes. In the food, killer microbes. You look at your neighbors in a new light. The bloke a few doors down the road, who looks a bit odd.
Supposing he is a bit odd? Supposing he is exceptionally odd? Unless you get a grip of yourself, every smiling granny can seem like a serial killer, and before you know it, you are putting grilles on windows and electrifying doorknobs. The Fear does this to people.
As men, of course, we like to think of ourselves as rational beings, and therefore more immune to emotional excesses than the mad women we all seem to live with. If only it were so. Once the small person has crept into your affections you too will the lurking terror in your stomach, or wherever terror chooses to lurk in your anatomy. And then it stays there. The Fear mutates regularly. It never leaves. Here's a rough timetable of the misery to come:
First six months: cot death. This is much rarer than it used to be, thanks to recent and well-distributed advice on how to avoid it (essentially this boils down to making sure your child sleeps on its back and doesn't overheat). But a few babies still die unexplained deaths before the age of six months, and probably always will. As a result, all parents live in constant fear of this happening. Bear in mind that it almost certainly won't, although this is unlikely to stop either of you from going in to check that Junior is still alive 15 minutes after you last checked. All that time and effort spent getting your baby to sleep, and then you go in and check and inadvertently wake him/her up. It's The Fear, you know. To find out more, you can check out First Month Baby Fear.