If you’re reading this on Saturday morning, there’s a good chance you’re hungover. I, meanwhile, am not. I mean, I feel like I’m hungover. I feel like I’ve been solidly hungover for the past 10 months; one of those hangovers where your motor skills barely function, and you keep breaking off mid-sentence to stare into the distance, and you find yourself perpetually slathered in a thick mix of food, sick and poo. But I’m not actually hungover.
This is a surprise. Before our son was born, I expected to be hungover all the time. I’d seen the bragging Facebook posts of new parents who’d taken their babies to the pub three days after the birth. I’d read all the #wineoclock tweets by parents who needed to unwind after a long day at the coalface. I’d even been to a few events where I was the only man in a sea of new mums who’d been let off the leash for the night, and who all got so ferociously drunk so terrifyingly quickly that I can’t quite believe everyone made it out alive.
But I need to come to terms with the fact that I cannot juggle parenting and alcohol. I’ve tried. I’ve tried taking my son out for lunch with friends, and having one civilised drink, and it’s never ended well. It hasn’t ended catastrophically – I haven’t got so drunk that I traded him for a VHS recorder, or stowed him away behind the bar in lieu of a credit card, or just left the place without him like some sort of ham-faced dipstick – but it does make everything a little bit harder.
The only way I can competently parent is to be on red alert at all times. A moving baby automatically adds a million variables into any situation so, wherever I go, I need to be bolt upright and aware of all the exits. I need to scan my surroundings for danger and anticipate accidents before they happen. I need to be, in essence, a cross between James Bond and the world’s most risk-averse meerkat. And even the smallest drop of alcohol can turn this into an uphill slog. You get tired. You get grouchy. If you think changing a full nappy is hellish, try doing it on a moving train in the early stages of a mild daytime hangover. It is God’s most perfect advertisement for sobriety.
I think it might be time to stop pretending that I’m still good at drinking. I’ve just been on a friend’s stag weekend, and the anticipation was that I’d turn into one of those mums from one of those events; grabbing the opportunity to temporarily not be a parent with such uncontrollable vigour that voices get raised and glasses get smashed and the evening ends sat in a puddle of unknown liquid wondering where your other shoe’s gone.
That didn’t happen, though. Parenting has worn me out so much that I fell asleep in my hotel room the instant I checked in and missed the first night of revelry, then spent the second night constantly looking for a convenient excuse to go back to bed. Getting drunk seemed like such a waste of time and effort. Why do that, when I could sleep?
I think this is the new normal. This baby has already cost me my waistline and my hairline and my ability to walk anywhere without talking to myself in a creepy sing-song voice. Compared with that, not drinking is a drop in the ocean. We had fun, booze, but it’s over. You see, I’ve met someone new and he’s pretty great.
