Matt Rudd - William’s Progress

Before leaving for the hospital, I managed to get the seat into the car in a relatively non-lethal way. It took twenty-five minutes and an awful lot of swearing, but I did it. As long as I put it in when the car was on the road, not the drive, it was safe. But when I got to the hospital, they wouldn’t let us carry Jacob out in our arms – against health and safety regulations. So I had to unravel the seat, bring it into the hospital, put Jacob in it, take it and him back to the car and then tell the hardcore hospital traffic warden to back off because, even though I was in a ten-minute loading bay, I was dealing with baby seats as well as a baby and would be more than ten minutes. The traffic warden backed off.

Putting a baby-filled baby seat into a car is much harder than putting an empty seat in. Eventually, I gave up. I told Isabel, sitting in considerable pain in the front seat, that all was well, smiled at Jacob, cursed the fact that Alex’s flowers had to be brought down to the car in two separate journeys, then drove all the way home at no more than four miles per hour so that OUR BABY WOULD NOT DIE.

Ahhh, home. Start of the babymoon. We are all alive. We are all at home. None of us appear to have contracted a hospital superbug. Although I can no longer get away with watching DVDs or drinking beer, I am feeling very, very happy – as happy as someone who thought everyone was going to die and then found out they weren’t. As long as I don’t make Isabel laugh at all in the next two weeks (her stitches forbid it) and as long as we never want to drive anywhere ever again with Jacob, we will be fine.

Well, that was interesting. I think I slept about nine minutes in total. In one-minute bursts. Jacob was in a crib next to the bed. He didn’t like that, so Isabel brought him into the bed. Co-sleeping, they call it. By the time I came to bed (very late, after trying to recover from eight hours of constant waitering), Isabel was fast asleep and Jacob was in the middle of the bed stretched out in a star shape.

He looked very, very small. Easily squashable. Isabel says that a parent, so long as he or she is sober, is perfectly in tune with his or her baby and wouldn’t squash it in a million years. She’s read that in a book. But in the small hours, with Jacob snuffling away next to me, a half-remembered horror story about a giant panda squashing its offspring creeps into my head. I think it was a panda, but it could have been a Glaswegian. No, it was definitely a giant panda.

So I lay there trying to work out if giant pandas aren’t comparable because they are animals, not half as intelligent as humans, and they have the sort of fur that would easily suffocate their offspring. Or if they are comparable because even if they aren’t as intelligent, they’re probably more in tune with their instincts than we are. And one of their instincts is bound to be, ‘Don’t crush your offspring.’

Every time I succeeded in rationalising the giant-panda issue and began to nod off, Jacob would emit what sounded an awful lot like a final death rattle. Then he would stop breathing. I would pull up the blind so the streetlight would illuminate his face. I would peer at him closely, listening for signs of life. There would be none. Was he going blue? Were his tiny lungs packing in? Should I not be reacting? React, man, react! This child, this poor helpless child, is dying of some rare and undetected condition and you’re not reacting! And then a millisecond before I started shaking Isabel awake, he would make another gurgling noise, as if back from the brink, and carry on breathing.

An hour of giant-panda analysis would pass before I felt even remotely calm enough to nod off again.

Another death rattle.

And repeat.

Until 6 a.m. when he wakes up and looks at me. Or looks in my general direction. I put my finger into his wrinkly little hand for reassurance and he grips it tightly. I know in that moment that I will do anything for Jacob for ever…sleep permitting.

7 a.m. Breakfast in bed for Isabel, who is in a lot of pain but pretending that she isn’t to make me feel better. I ask her if she can remember anything about the sleeping habits of giant pandas and she starts laughing and then shouts at me for making her laugh, which was the last thing I was trying to do, what with her liable to split open at any second. Which I tell her and that makes her laugh again and so I get shouted at again. As punishment, I spend the day slogging around getting this and that for Isabel. Another night of total sleep deprivation.

‘This is why Ali and I never had kids,’ says Johnson, my second-best friend, when he phones to apologise for not sending flowers – even though Ali actually had.

‘I thought it was because you didn’t want to risk having a girl because girls are manipulative and controlling and you have enough of that in your life already?’

‘Yes, that as well. But mainly because you don’t sleep for years and you become a domestic slave. I’m delighted for you , of course. You ignored my advice about marriage and now you’ve ignored my advice about procreation. You have no one to blame but yourself, and I shall enjoy seeing you fall to pieces over the next few months. Pub tonight?’

‘No.’

‘Thought as much.’

The problem now is that I’m so tired, I’m worried that if I do manage to nod off, I’ll sleep so deeply that I wouldn’t have any anti-child-crushing instinct. Isabel says this is nonsense. I point out the case of the panda. She says this is nonsense: I am not a giant panda. On the plus side, she and Jacob are sleeping brilliantly and I only have two more weeks of paternity leave before I, too, can sleep brilliantly, back at my desk.

I love Jacob. I really do. But he’s so very, very small and fragile. Because of the whole stomach-slicing style of birth, Isabel can’t carry him around easily. So I have to. Every time I take him up or down the stairs, I have resolved in my mind that if I slip, I will cushion him, rather than put my own arms out to break the fall. I may kill myself, but Jacob will survive. This is what I am prepared to do.

At lunch, which I have made because Isabel still can’t do very much in the way of chores and because she seems to spend most of the day breast-feeding, I sit watching my pasta get cold because I am holding Jacob. Every time I put him down, he cries.

‘He needs a feed,’ I say hopefully.

‘I fed him five minutes ago. I’ll take him in a second. And anyway, you can hold him with one hand and eat with the other.’ Isabel is way ahead of the curve on this whole parenting thing. Despite being sore, tired, pale and red-nippled, she is already putting things into perspective, behaving rationally, becoming supermum.

‘No, I can’t. I might drop him.’ I’m not quite there yet.

‘No, you won’t. Just relax.’

So I relax, take a mouthful of pasta and Jacob’s head lolls unexpectedly, striking the edge of the table. It takes ten minutes for him to stop crying. It takes ten hours for me to stop freaking out at my own stupid stupidity. Isabel says it’s only a little bump. I say he could have been killed. And even if it is only a little bump, he still has a bruise.

And the health visitor is coming tomorrow.

The health visit is compulsory. Society does not allow people to vanish into domestic anonymity without first double-checking that they are not doing horrible things to their newborn children.

This is unfortunate because the bruise looks epic this morning. It looks like I’ve punched him. I look like a heroin addict because I haven’t slept for three nights. We will be flagged as an abusive family. Jacob will be taken away from us and raised by horribly strict foster parents who, at least, will never try to stuff their faces with pasta while holding an eight-day-old infant. Years from now, Jacob and I will be reunited, perhaps on a television show presented by Esther Rantzen. And I will try to explain that I hadn’t meant to bang his head on the table, I just hadn’t realised how floppy a newborn child’s head could be. And the crowd will boo. And Jacob will tell Esther how, despite his strict Christian upbringing, he finds it hard to forgive me.