The prostrate milkmaid
Being a parent is a bit like being on drugs. Instead of salvia or speedballs it happens to be sleep deprivation and adrenaline, but the net result is the same, so although it's a constant stream of highs and lows I'm never quite sure, when I come to explain it to other people, whether it's not just a function of me being stoned out of my mind on caffeine and paternal hormones.
So since it's Father's Day here, I suppose I should say something about the fact that I am one now.
We had a tiny little baby. She's called Clementine. Look:
It's amazing, as you might expect, but also deeply bizarre and extraordinary in ways that had never occurred to me. To see your best friend grow another human being inside them for several months - and then to meet them - is one of the biggest mindfucks I can possibly imagine. It shakes you out of existential complacency, and reminds you that this life we have is fundamentally weird and fascinating.
For those who want details about the actual birth, we have very happy memories of it. We had a room to ourselves with views out over Paris, and seemed to be looked after by a team of interchangeably cute and tiny French nurses with button noses and calm voices. When the final contractions came, they dimmed the lights and to be honest, although there was a degree of shouting with exertion, it was a relatively chilled atmosphere compared to all the worrying beforehand.
In his autobiography, Christopher Hitchens says that when he first gazed on the face of his son, he thought, there's the person that will one day bury me. What a miserable bastard. I thought: Holy fuck, we made a tiny human! You hear so much about how new-born babies are supposed to look ugly and crumpled that I wasn't prepared for how cute and gorgeous she was immediately, with massive eyes staring round her at everything in the room.
What was much harder for Hannah than the birth was the breastfeeding, which it turns out is this whole area of human intellectual inquiry which I never knew existed. The books! The articles! The professional advisers! Our flat has seen a steady stream of government-funded lactation consultants and puéricultrices who approach the subject with knitted brows and scholarly pauses, as though you need a PhD just to get your baps out. The positions have names! Who knew that? They sound like sex positions, and some of them are even more uncomfortable. So far, Hannah has mastered "the Reverse Madonna" and "the Rugbyball", as well another one that we invented ourselves and which I'm calling "the Prostrate Milkmaid" in the hopes that this will find its way into the extensive literature.
Shall we have another photo? Here she is a couple of weekends ago in the park with H and her brother:
You can see here how massive our baby is. Most babies' feet would end roughly where the green stripe is, but Clementine's are poking out of the bottom. It's very peculiar because Hannah and I are normal height, but Clemington Spa is in the 98th percentile for length. I guess she will be a basketball player or a model.
I am back at work now and deep into all the French election nonsense. Writing has dropped off sharply since getting babied up - only temporarily though, I hope - but here's a quick reading update: during my week with Hannah at the maternity hospital I bombed through Nicholson Baker's sex-positive folly House of Holes -- fun and cartoony and right up my street -- and then Hugo's Le Dernier journ d'un condamné, which at first I found way too Romantic and melodramatic, but which I ended up rather enjoying. The chapter where he talks about a nightmare he had, involving an old woman found behind a cupboard in his house at night, reads just like the treatment for a modern Japanese horror movie. Then I finished Peter Hopkirk's stirring history of Anglo-Russian machinations in 19th-century Central Asia, The Great Game, which made me want to read more Kipling, and also a mostly-dull history of France in the 18th century called The Great Nation. Now I'm halfway through GB Edwards's The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (herself_nyc! Have you read this?), which I ordered a couple of weeks back during a fit of interest in Guernsey English, and which is slow but unusual and interesting (somewhat bizarrely, it features in Harold Bloom's famous canon listing).
So since it's Father's Day here, I suppose I should say something about the fact that I am one now.
We had a tiny little baby. She's called Clementine. Look:
It's amazing, as you might expect, but also deeply bizarre and extraordinary in ways that had never occurred to me. To see your best friend grow another human being inside them for several months - and then to meet them - is one of the biggest mindfucks I can possibly imagine. It shakes you out of existential complacency, and reminds you that this life we have is fundamentally weird and fascinating.
For those who want details about the actual birth, we have very happy memories of it. We had a room to ourselves with views out over Paris, and seemed to be looked after by a team of interchangeably cute and tiny French nurses with button noses and calm voices. When the final contractions came, they dimmed the lights and to be honest, although there was a degree of shouting with exertion, it was a relatively chilled atmosphere compared to all the worrying beforehand.
In his autobiography, Christopher Hitchens says that when he first gazed on the face of his son, he thought, there's the person that will one day bury me. What a miserable bastard. I thought: Holy fuck, we made a tiny human! You hear so much about how new-born babies are supposed to look ugly and crumpled that I wasn't prepared for how cute and gorgeous she was immediately, with massive eyes staring round her at everything in the room.
What was much harder for Hannah than the birth was the breastfeeding, which it turns out is this whole area of human intellectual inquiry which I never knew existed. The books! The articles! The professional advisers! Our flat has seen a steady stream of government-funded lactation consultants and puéricultrices who approach the subject with knitted brows and scholarly pauses, as though you need a PhD just to get your baps out. The positions have names! Who knew that? They sound like sex positions, and some of them are even more uncomfortable. So far, Hannah has mastered "the Reverse Madonna" and "the Rugbyball", as well another one that we invented ourselves and which I'm calling "the Prostrate Milkmaid" in the hopes that this will find its way into the extensive literature.
Shall we have another photo? Here she is a couple of weekends ago in the park with H and her brother:
You can see here how massive our baby is. Most babies' feet would end roughly where the green stripe is, but Clementine's are poking out of the bottom. It's very peculiar because Hannah and I are normal height, but Clemington Spa is in the 98th percentile for length. I guess she will be a basketball player or a model.
I am back at work now and deep into all the French election nonsense. Writing has dropped off sharply since getting babied up - only temporarily though, I hope - but here's a quick reading update: during my week with Hannah at the maternity hospital I bombed through Nicholson Baker's sex-positive folly House of Holes -- fun and cartoony and right up my street -- and then Hugo's Le Dernier journ d'un condamné, which at first I found way too Romantic and melodramatic, but which I ended up rather enjoying. The chapter where he talks about a nightmare he had, involving an old woman found behind a cupboard in his house at night, reads just like the treatment for a modern Japanese horror movie. Then I finished Peter Hopkirk's stirring history of Anglo-Russian machinations in 19th-century Central Asia, The Great Game, which made me want to read more Kipling, and also a mostly-dull history of France in the 18th century called The Great Nation. Now I'm halfway through GB Edwards's The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (herself_nyc! Have you read this?), which I ordered a couple of weeks back during a fit of interest in Guernsey English, and which is slow but unusual and interesting (somewhat bizarrely, it features in Harold Bloom's famous canon listing).