My wife, conservatively, is 95% skull. Seriously, if you ever see us in the street together, ask if you can tap her on the forehead. It’s astonishing. It’s like her entire head is solid bone all the way from front to back. It’s like tapping antimatter. And don’t get me started on her colossal hands.
I should concede – admittedly at her behest – that I might be exaggerating a bit. As I write this, my son has been home for seven days. Thanks to his continued abstinence when it comes to sleeping alone, I’d estimate that I’ve already held him in my arms for 92 and a half hours. And if I’m holding him, that means I’m looking at him; usually either in dumb adoration or concern because there’s a minuscule chance that his airway could be blocked.
And if I’m not holding him, I’m dreaming about him. So far I’ve had dreams in which he’s spoken. I’ve had dreams in which I’ve thrown him in the air. I think I’ve had a dream about him being a supermarket checkout assistant. My sporadic sleeping sessions now tend to come in three stages. One: going to sleep. Two: dreaming about the baby. Three: waking up cradling a pillow and then frantically rifling through the duvet because I can’t remember where I put him and I’m worried about being arrested. I’m not really getting a lot of sleep right now.
Anyway, my point is that this tiny baby has dominated my life to such a ridiculous extent that normal-sized adults have now become legitimately weird to me. This is why my wife’s (actually quite small) head suddenly looks and feels like it’s been carved out of osmium, and why the other day I tried to hold her hand by sliding my thumb into her palm and waiting for her to grab it. Christ knows what I’d do if we spent any time naked together; at this rate I’d be worried that I’d involuntarily pick her up by the ankles and clean her bum out with a wetwipe.
That last scenario almost definitely won’t happen, though, because we’re barely spending any time together at all. We’ve found ourselves entangled in a morass of unsociably patterned sleeping shifts. At night, I hold the baby while she grabs a couple of hours’ sleep, then we swap, then we swap, then we swap, then we swap, then the sun comes up and we sleepwalk through the day like a couple of grumpy zombies until bedtime, then we start again. It’s wrecking our sense of intimacy but, on the plus side, I think I’ve watched everything on Netflix now. This lack of marital togetherness is perhaps the hardest aspect of parenthood to cope with. We used to take on the world as one, but now we’re just a tag-team; calling the other one up from the subs bench with a grunt whenever we’re about to keel over.
The fact that we haven’t murdered each other yet is little short of a miracle, especially given that my method of dealing with tiredness (snippy sarcasm) is directly at odds with hers (irrational sensitivity to snippy sarcasm). And yet, somehow, we appear to be pulling it off. This might be because I’m so completely dazzled by how effortlessly she’s taken to parenthood. Or it might be because we both possess an innate understanding that, deep down, this baby is worth every last drop of our effort.
Then again, it might just be because we never see each other. That’s what I’m banking on, at least – otherwise I wouldn’t have gone on about her humungous skull so much. Nobody tell her about that, for God’s sake.
@stuheritage
