Happy now?

Ever since the Boy Child has arrived, it is almost as if everyone I know - alongside a good deal of people I don’t know - has been given a secret instruction to do one of two peculiar things. They either reveal their true identity of worldwide child-raising experts, an identity so far concealed to me, and give me military, punctilious and contradictory instructions on how to narrowly prevent the Boy Child from dying and/or turning into the next Adolf Hitler (due to my obviously bad parenting skills). Or they start mumbling confusedly, clutching at my hands, sometimes even touching my face like I was some sort of thaumaturgic saint, and insist on me conjuring up my full emotional spectrum to explain in excruciating detail why becoming a dad was the HAPPIEST EXPERIENCE in my life. It is easy to deal with the former, all they want is undivided attention and a generous ‘thank you, I’ll bear that in mind next time I change his nappy’. But it is impossible to handle the latter, because they are seeking some form of confirmation, without which it seems their life will become meaningless. Their quest will not stop until I give them what they need to make sense of this bizarre thing we call existence.

The other night, for example, I found myself - in a fairly drunken state - sitting on the pavement with an equally-inebriated pretty young woman whom I barely knew through work, and who insisted on me telling her what exactly had gone through my head the first time I held the Boy Child in my hands. Until then, I had always played by the rules, replying conventionally that I had felt, of course, utter happiness. But since I had had no dinner, and my head was light due to a mixture of bad wine, an unseasonable heatwave and an emotional surge in the wake of my first trip back to Italy since fatherhood, I decided I would tell her the truth: that I did not rank that moment as the happiest in my life. She took it with a mixture of revulsion and pity, like I was suffering from some deadly and contagious disease.

    “But how, frankly, can you say that? Surely this MUST have been the greatest joy of your life!” she insisted.
    “Not really.”
    “But... but... fine, if not the greatest, AT LEAST the second greatest!”

No one in my life had ever asked me “when were you most happy?”, and if they had, I - like most people - would have had no idea what to answer. The first time I had sex? It was pretty boring for all involved. The first time I fell in love? I thought I had indigestion. The day I graduated? I was too hangover to feel anything but a throbbing buzz in my head. Happy? What the hell does happy mean, anyway?

The assumption that the arrival in my lap of the Boy Child should automatically be ranked first amongst the numerous happiness-depicting paintings lined up in some corridor-shaped recess of my brain strikes me as both phenomenally odd and somewhat delusional. If I had a ranking of happy moments, I would probably be a psychopath. Only a psychopath could adopt such a surgical approach to life and emotions. Therefore, I can only conclude that anyone asking me if the Boy Child’s birth was the greatest moment of happiness in my life can only be, by deduction, a psychopath. This realisation about many of my friends has made my social life slightly awkward.

So, what did I really feel when the Boy Child was plonked into my hands? The first thing I felt was a slight weight. 3.2 kg to be precise, with a few extra grams for the nappy and towel he was wrapped in. This was of course the most striking element: he was there, weighing, existing. The physicality of his body brought a sense of reality to what was an experience probably far closer to those I have had under the influence of potent psychedelic drugs. Think about it. My brain had been building up to this moment for months, so when it actually came it was almost like seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time, a weird mixture of extremely familiar and totally foreign. My brain had also been awake (cannot say “active”, but for the most part it was active too) since 7 am the previous day. It was now 12:14 pm, so some 29 hours later. No sleep, hardly any food, 1 G&T. Over the course of 29 hours I had:

- found out the waters had broken and giggled profusely about it with Lady V in a supermarket,
- set up the garden room to be as romantic and welcoming as possible (the birthing pool was in there and for some reason I was sure it would be a water-birth),
- accompanied step by step the accelerating contractions, amazed each time not only at Lady V’s capacity to endure them, but at my own capacity not to faint,
- seen Lady V descend from a state of pained elation to one of agonising terror,
- ridden in the back of a midwife’s dusty Chevrolet to a dawn-wrapped hospital,
- seen Lady V be poked, injected, inspected, interrogated and probed some 245 times
- seen Lady V’s pussy in its full glory, which itself would have been shocking enough, but in these circumstances was utterly terrifying.

This is the factual backdrop of the hours preceding the Boy Child’s birth. What is one supposed to FEEL at this point? There is only one answer to this question, and that is: exhaustion. Complete and utter exhaustion. Were WW1 soldiers scared when they went into battle (not that I am comparing)? Of course not. They were exhausted. That’s it. Exhaustion is an all-consuming feeling, it’s a void, it sucks up every other emotion in its proximity. And that is, in all sincerity, the main memory I have of those first moments.

Then, of course, elation. But it was more about the whole ordeal ending, than about the Boy Child’s arrival. Well, of course, I was elated and in wonder for that too, it goes without saying, but having seen Lady V carved up like a turkey, I was simply overjoyed that she could still talk and somewhat smile (mainly inanely at the Boy Child, who in return gazed at me with the expression of someone wondering if he’s met you before).

And then there was that other, strange feeling, a mixture of the other two, which usually happens after 3 days at Glastonbury under the influence of a lot of different drugs that at this point have created a potent cocktail in your blood stream and sets you a few feet apart from everything that’s happening, like an invisible observer of the world that unfolds beneath your gaze. I felt - pretty much like Lady V had a few hours earlier - like I was high. And yet, I had taken nothing at all. It was a strange, stoned feeling of being elsewhere and seeing things unfold on a screen in front of me. A feeling of detachment and yet engagement.

Yes. It was totally weird. And frankly, do you think the word ‘happy’ could summarise all this? ‘Happy’ like in ‘Happy-meal’? Oh please. The next time someone comes up to me and asks if the Boy Child’s birth was the happiest moment of my life, I think I’ll simply answer ‘no’, and walk away leaving them shacking and wondering whether they should step in front of a bus and put an end to it all.