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I stood at the end of the bed with one of my partner’s feet braced against my chest. We had made a careful plan, but failed to consult the baby about to be born.
Hours before, Elena’s waters had broken, and now we were in hospital. My role was simple: don’t get in the way, and remain calm. Privately, my veins churned with adrenaline and cortisol, and every subversion of my expectations felt disorienting. The midwife fumbled the cannula, blew a vein. There was too much epidural; Elena couldn’t feel her contractions. A doctor breezed in, eyed the clock, announced matter-of-factly that she would soon need to perform an episiotomy. This was not the plan. Elena shuddered, drove her heel into my ribs, let out a guttural cry, and our child slipped into the room, amaranth skin and dark hair lacquered in shimmering crimson, like a rainbow spread over oil.
It never occurred to me that I would be crying. Outwardly, I tried to project composure and encouragement, but inwardly, my experience of birth – as little more than a bystander, I do not make any claims about my own usefulness – was deeply moving, mysterious and strangely childlike. There was a flood of lucid colours and emotions that prickled through me, all familiar yet all somehow new.
The days that followed the birth were a fever dream. The postnatal unit at Homerton hospital is like a broiler chicken farm: windowless, impossibly hot, lit like an interrogation room. Dozens of beds stretch in every direction, each separated by a thin blue curtain. Day and night, the babies’ cries overlap in dissonant chords. The effect is like being marooned for 48 hours in a rush-hour tube carriage of commuters all listening to kawaii metal on speakerphone.
When we make it home, the baby is like a strange Mesopotamian idol passed reverentially between us, routinely erupting in tears, and we are feeble initiates, half-naked and bleary-eyed, fumbling our way through the rituals that are supposed to soothe her. She seems to drift in and out of the spirit world, anchored to us by the rhythm of crying and feeding, bursting into consciousness for seconds at a time, her enormous blue eyes widening in awe, searching fearlessly for the shapes of her parents looming over her, before falling back into a dream.
To be a father throughout all this is an exercise in humility. During Elena’s pregnancy, I cooked and cleaned, walked the dog, bought the snacks, bathed the dog, blew up the birthing ball, sent the dog to live with my mum – but each of these minor accomplishments is like delivering pizza to the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider.
Our child is six months old now. She is our gentle potato; a cackling truckle of Parmigiano. When she cries, I hurl her in the air and catch her like a wriggling piglet, and she gasps and beams. Each morning she demands to be sat in front of the washing machine to watch it slosh and churn. Other things fixate her: the pilling of my tracksuit bottoms, the smooth prismatic surface of a geode, the red cherries printed on a mug from Ibiza nightclub Pacha.
In the daytime, she babbles and coos around the same house with relentless curiosity, energy crackling through her limbs, and in the evening, she fights the tide of sleep rushing over her, punching the air and crying tears of frustration, clinging to the last minutes of the day. I hold her in my arms every night, rocking her until she falls asleep, singing the same old song. The days are somehow interminably long and incredibly short. Weeks pass in which nothing is done except looking at the baby, feeding the baby, looking at the baby.
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‘Having a child can transform you in ways you cannot imagine’ (Getty/iStock)
My partner seems to run to a different rhythm, half of her mind entwined with the child, never fully resting. I admire the connection Elena shares with her. We alternate sleeping in different rooms, but even when I am with the baby, and Elena is next door, she wakes at every faint wheeze from her tiny lungs. The burden carried by her feels impossibly large, and my own ability to mitigate it will never be enough.
In her book Matrescence, Lucy Jones details the dramatic, unexpected metamorphosis she underwent through having a child. “I knew nothing about the emotional and psychological transition that follows birth,” she writes. “I had no idea that something was happening to my brain – that it was literally changing shape. I had no idea what was coming – the anxiety, the life-exploding romance, the guilt, the transcendence, the terror, the psychedelia, the loss of control, the rupture of the self.”
Women are lurched at speed through a dramatic series of physical and psychological adaptations. For many of my friends, who have adapted to competitive careers and arrive at motherhood late in life, this change seems harder to navigate. It is probably made even worse by a lack of understanding and reciprocity from men, whose contribution to childcare is usually low and very rarely equal. Even in progressive countries such as Sweden, men’s share of parental leave sits at around 30 per cent despite generous policies that include 90 non-transferable days for fathers. I suspect I participate in childcare more than most, but I would not describe it as equal, even when I am present. There are things I do well (bedtime) and things I cannot do at all (breastfeeding). I focus on trying to support Elena, whose bond seems deep and intuitive.
‘Men’s testosterone levels reduce by 10-30 per cent – a shift that is thought to facilitate nurturing’
Men do not undergo the same kind of metamorphosis that women do, but there is one large change that takes place. Men’s testosterone levels reduce by 10-30 per cent– a shift that is thought to facilitate nurturing. A 30 per cent drop in testosterone levels is very large – comparable to the amount that men can actually raise their testosterone levels through resistance training. When I began lifting weights years ago, I found the psychological difference to be so dramatic that it was as if my entire personality had altered. Testosterone has a wide spectrum of effects on men, with pronounced impacts on confidence and mood. As much as a quarter of new fathers can experience postpartum depression, which is thought to be linked to a decline in the hormone.
I notice that London feels like a different city – dangerous, dirty, hostile. Elena is more vulnerable too, and when I work from home I find myself feeling anxious if she has left the house without me. We talk about moving house, leaving the city, leaving the country. Something has shifted in both of us.
I do not think you can reason your way to having a child. It is not something that our culture incentivises or rewards. There are many good reasons, on paper, not to have children, and there are even more good reasons to delay it. For me, the will was strong, but for many other men it is not. As a father, the best advertisement I can offer is that having a child can transform you in ways you cannot imagine. Fatherhood is a deep pool to swim in, and it is an adventure that feels boundless and rewarding; that somehow both constrains and expands your world.
It is the most meaningful thing I have ever done. We are old parents, at the edge of our fertility, who have barely made it to a home and a baby. In the small hours, when she rests peacefully and I am wired and sleep deprived, I watch her chest rise and fall silently, and I am filled with wonder and love.
