My wife’s parents came over from Dublin after we were admitted to hospital. The idea was to land in the hospital, say well done, present us with a colour-appropriate balloon, and accompany us home for tea and cuddles with their first grandchild. In reality, they arrived after we were admitted to hospital, but before labour had begun; a period of time in which we were permitted no visitors and had only limited phone contact.
All of this meant they spent three whole days in our Hackney flat, by themselves, growing increasingly impatient to meet the man of the hour. This distressed us both. My wife hated the thought of her parents fretting by themselves in a strange and unfamiliar land, while I dreaded the prospect of having to explain, over the phone, how our four separate TV remotes worked.
I tried to take my wife’s mind off this by telling her our free home could be the perfect opportunity to make up for her 18th birthday. On that occasion, they came home to discover the place packed with drunk teens dancing to Josh Wink. They still tell this story with some glee 17 years later, with particular emphasis on finding a plant-pot in their garden filled with sick and, some days later, a 4ft inflatable willy in a wardrobe.
However, her parents rose above petty revenge and instead set to sterilising our home like they were the bad government scientists from ET. Her dad erected a new shower and dismantled a small tree that was in our living room, while her mum set about ironing every stitch of fabric, not just shirts and trousers but things you don’t iron. Every pair of boxers I owned was soon flat enough to use as a bookmark, and my socks so resolutely two-dimensional, I had to rub each ankle against itself like a sandwich bag, just to find the hole to put my foot in.
When they eventually welcomed their grandson home, it was after a three-day spree of cleaning that I think of as their final blitz of parental fussing. It was as if they were willing to finally pass on the baton of parenthood, but only after said baton was steeped in Milton sterilising fluid.
I wondered what lifetime of worries and chores we’d let ourselves in for. I had envisaged, with my meagre imagination, a baby, a toddler, maybe even – distantly – a teen. But here was a vision of the far future where, all else being well, we could find ourselves cooped up in our son’s flat 35 years from now, happily ironing pants and de-scaling his toasted-sandwich maker while waiting to meet his own offspring. In that moment, I felt the queasy sense of time passing, as if just thinking about our prospective adult son would hasten his arrival. Admittedly, this was also mixed in with a deep, lazy resentment that my three-day old son had let his hypothetical apartment get as messy as ours.
We passed the boy around for cuddles and took in the sights of our new, clean home.
‘It is a pity, though,’ I said to my mother-in-law, gesturing with studied disapproval at the pristine wardrobe in front of us. ‘You could have fit a perfectly good inflatable willy in there, if you’d thought of it.’
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