Parental Discretion Advised
Some younger friends have just had a baby so I tried to offer some helpful advice, but nothing about parenthood has seemed run-of-the-mill to me – even the conception was unusual.
We were on the IVF program, so that meant that while my partner was in the bedroom stabbing herself in the stomach with a hypodermic, I was in the next room making love to a plastic jar. Not that it was unromantic, as the jar was see-through. I thought a movie would put me in the mood, but what to watch? The Towering Inferno? Deep Impact? I settled on Gone in Sixty Seconds. I then tried a little appropriate music: some Plastic Bertrand, followed by Clapton doing ‘Slow Hand’, and then ‘Message in a Bottle’. Bingo! One small human was now growing inside another human.
Planning was our forte; we even knew the sex of our child, so we could plan what colour to paint the bedroom before the baby was born. Prenatal classes were the ultimate planning, though: ‘We will have the baby in this position, with this music, on this day.’ The reality is, you can’t plan for chaos.
The baby was to be induced, which, I imagined, would consist of a doctor positioned at my partner’s nether regions with a lollipop, saying, ‘Who’s a pretty baby?’ It turned out to be a gel, and for us the gel actually worked in reverse. My partner had intense contractions, really close together, followed by nothing, not even dilation.
Then they told us the baby’s heartbeat was fading. Everything changed very fast, even the language. One moment ‘we’ were having a baby – the next, ‘she’ was having a caesarean. All that breathing, shoulder rubbing, caring and calming suddenly meant nothing to us. To prepare for a birth, you go to prenatal classes; to prepare for a caesarean, you should go to the dentist, because it’s an extraction.
My partner was calm in the operating theatre because she was chock-a-block full of drugs, and I wanted the name of her dealer. The doctor set up a small screen over her stomach, like a tiny magic show. He showed me there was nothing up his sleeves and then proceeded to saw the lady in half. Next, he placed both hands on her stomach and pushed down, followed by one of the strangest noises I’ve ever heard; it sounded like a fat bloke farting in a bath full of molasses. Then the doctor made our baby appear out of nowhere – it really was magic. Ironically, the first sound my child heard was me saying the magic word, with ‘I don’t fuckin’ believe it!’
Then I became a handbag hubby, a Mr Mom. My partner was earning the bread, and I was buttering it, putting hundreds and thousands on it, and feeding it to our kids. For many men, this may have called into question their masculinity and self-worth, but I held my head high and told myself I was doing an important job looking after the kids. That was until the day of the ladder.
I was cramming a hard-earnt cigarette in the winter chill of the backyard when a commotion inside caught my attention. Being a seasoned smoker, I had become adept at interpreting muffled noises from within the house. This time, the muffled noise didn’t sound like playing, or a tantrum, or crying. It sounded like panic.
I rushed inside to find my partner on the bed cradling my son and a metal ladder. He had inserted his finger in the small hole in the ladder’s plastic rim and it had got stuck. I resisted my instinct to make fun of him and instead said, ‘I’ll put some soap on it.’
‘Tried that,’ my partner replied.
‘Maybe we could...’ was all I managed before my voice was drowned out by the sound of a siren.
‘You didn’t ring an ambulance, did you?’
‘No, I rang the fire brigade and they’re bringing an ambulance with them.’
Two fire engines and an ambulance rolled up to our little house, and out jumped the confident, masculine and fully employed firemen. As they leapt into action, I couldn't help thinking of all the houses burning and all the cats that needed rescuing.
‘Do you have some tin snips?’ asked a fireman.
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’ll get them from my partner’s toolbox’. Right next to my newly removed ball sack.
Then they cut my son’s finger free and went on their way with a wave, leaving the boy with a teddy bear wearing a fireman’s outfit, and his sheepish-looking dad. I’m not sure they noticed me as they left, because I was about two centimetres tall by that time. That day, I didn’t feel like Mr Mom, I felt like Mrs Dad.
The biggest mindfuck for me has been the reality that there is someone else in the world who is more important than I am (a difficult concept for an actor to grasp) and the concept of ‘unconditional love’. Even if your child turns out to be a serial killer, you’ll be saying:
‘At least he didn’t kill anyone we knew.’
So, the only advice I can confidently offer to new parents is ... hold on tight!
Matt Quartermaine is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian. With Matt Parkinson, Tim Smith and Andrew Goodone, he produces ‘The Chat’, a weekly podcast in which four grown men in comfortable chairs spill their guts. Click here to download it for free at iTunes.
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