The first rule of being a dad is that you’ve got it easy. Without question, compared with the mother of your child, your life is an absolute breeze. You didn’t have to haul a giant foetus around for the best part of a year, or feel it speedbag against your bladder every night. Your role during childbirth wasn’t to writhe in agony while a human being tore through your skin; no, it was to limply wring your hands and pull a concerned face from a polite distance. Then, after the birth, you didn’t find yourself exclusively and relentlessly catering to the unpredictable whims of a tiny pink dictator who refuses even to smile at you; no, you went back to work. Where there are adult conversations, and nice lunches, and people who understand that vomiting down your top six times a day is considered poor etiquette.
You’ve got it easy. As a dad, someone always has it worse than you. No matter how tired or anxious or robbed of your identity you might feel, you need to remember that someone always has it worse than you. Always.
OK, not always. Because I am fat and my wife is not, and it’s making me furious. Since our son was born, my wife and I have shared the exact same coping strategy: we have both started eating a lot. Mealtimes inevitably involve one of us holding the baby and watching our dinner get gradually colder and colder, so we’ve taken to irresponsible snacking instead. The only way we can fend off successive bouts of exhausted collapse is by indiscriminately vacuuming up truckloads of sugary crap. Biscuits. Chocolate. Ice-cream. Cakes. Fizzy drinks. Whatever it takes to power us through the next hump of tiredness, we’ll gulp it down it without a second thought.
And it has worked, because we are awake. I mean, our skin is dreadful and we can’t concentrate on anything, and neither of us can stop twitching, but we are awake. And that’s an acceptable trade-off. We’re doing what needs to be done. Parenthood has made us fat, but that’s fine. At least we get to be fat together.
Except we’re not fat. Only one of us is fat. Nobody had warned me that breastfeeding is by far the best diet ever invented. Since the birth, my wife’s weight loss has been so spectacular that I’m beginning to suspect she’s given up our baby for adoption and replaced him with a liposuction machine hidden inside a massive novelty sausage. She’s plummeted through several dress sizes since he was born. Her wedding ring keeps sliding off her finger. No matter what she eats, she keeps getting thinner. It’s incredible.
But I’m getting bigger and bigger. You could feasibly set up a convincing “before and after” photo to demonstrate my weight gain, where me from a year ago plays “before” and the waterlogged corpse of an obese Russian oligarch plays “after”. I can’t fit into most of my trousers any more. I’ve accepted that there will constantly be an inch-wide band of flesh at the bottom of all my T-shirts. I am perpetually one big fart away from destroying whatever underwear I’ve haphazardly shoehorned myself into.
And this is a problem, because I’ve foolishly agreed to take my top off for work in a few weeks. I really don’t want to be the cause of a nationwide vomiting spree, so it’s time for a drastic lifestyle change. I need to eat less rubbish, but I also need to be able to stay awake for a full working day. Any ideas? I hear meth’s quite cheap.
