It’s the seating plan that stings the most. The realisation that, after all the backbreaking toil of packing everything up, strapping your baby to your chest and setting out on a two-and-a-half hour journey, this is who you have been saddled with. Everywhere you look, your interesting childless friends are having interesting conversations with glamorous strangers who somehow aren’t exhausted or coated in saliva. Then you look back to your table. Highchairs. Highchairs everywhere.
You are at a wedding and you are sitting at the baby table. This is your life. Or at least it’s mine. This wasn’t our son’s first wedding – that was a cousin’s ceremony a few months ago, where I sat with my closest family and we centrifuged him around the table in a weird approximation of a Mexican wave so that everyone got to eat at least some of their dinner before it went mouldy – but it was our first wedding at a baby table. And that is an entirely new affair.
Pre-baby, everyone knows where they are with wedding receptions. You sit down. You drink red wine, because everyone else is drinking white wine and you want a whole bottle to yourself. You eat some gussied-up aeroplane food, someone takes a photo of you with a tie wrapped around your head like Rambo and then you wake up the next morning fully dressed. Easy.
With a baby, though, it’s different. You suddenly become the odd one out. People either keep their distance or engage you in long conversations that consist of the phrase, “Look at his chubby little arms!” repeated over and over in infinitesimally different ways. You have to keep wandering off because your baby gets hungry or tired, or because his bum made a noise and you want to be far away from everyone before you check his nappy for poo.
Then you find yourself sitting at a table with three other sets of parents, and they look as fed up about the setup as you. The wine remains steadfastly unopened, because everyone’s worried that someone will roll their eyes into the back of their head and bellow “BAD PARENT!” the moment you pour a glass. So you hunker down, tend to your children and brace yourself for the most tedious couple of hours of your life.
But it isn’t as bad as you thought, because, unlike every other wedding you’ve ever been to, you have actually got something in common with the people you’re sitting with. You don’t have to listen to someone drone on about the intricacies of the supply chain industry. You don’t have to worry about anyone starting a sentence with, “The problem with immigrants …”
You’ve all got babies, and you all love them, so that’s what you talk about. It’s a warm, easy talk about tiredness and shared experiences and new discoveries, because they don’t really know what they’re doing either, because none of us does. Then you mention something that happened recently, and all the other dads laugh knowingly, and that’s it. You’re one of them now. You’re a dad who has been recognised by his peers. And it’s brilliant.
After that, you all go and take your babies out on to the lawn, where you watch them play together and reminisce about what they used to be like, and see glimpses of who they’ll be a few months from now. And suddenly you’ve become a little community, a microclimate inside the reception. Then – finally – someone opens the wine.
I am all for baby tables. I don’t know how I managed at weddings without them.
