The Idiot’s Guide To Fatherhood

One of the better lines from the ensemble cast schmaltz-fest that was Ron Howard’s Parenthood, originally enunciated – if that’s the word – by Keanu Reeves as Tod, is paraphrased here:
“You need a license to drive a car or buy a gun, dude, but any asshole can become a father.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Bob Geldof elsewhere in this issue:
“Morons can bring up a fuckin’ child, in fact they do! I’ve never understood this How To Bring Up A Child stream of literature; it’s fuckin’ easy…”
In other words, the rule is, there ain’t no rules. However, should you become one of us assholes Keanu was talking about, there are Things Nobody Tells You, so sit down, shut up, pin back your ears and don’t say the raving old greybeards at HP convalescent home never warned you…

Sexual Intercourse
Forget it. Once a woman has pushed a human baby’s head out of her vulva (and why our ancestors bestowed upon the female genitalia a word that better behoves a Ukrainian river is a whole other story), she will not be disposed to letting anything bigger than her gynaecologist’s rubber-clad digits back in there for a good six months.
To make matters worse, newborn babies are jealous gods, if not outright passion killers, and have a tendency to monopolise the mother’s attentions beyond the point of exhaustion and into a grey-faced area where notions of conjugal callisthenics possess about as much allure as a vomit omelette.
The new father with (insert rabbit ears) special needs (extract rabbit ears) is therefore advised to (a) reserve himself a private spot – the car, or inside the coal scuttle, or Lester Burnham’s favourite, the shower – in which to practise the act Joyce almost called one-handed adultery, (b) set up a tab at his local brothel, or (c) adopt the Zen warrior monk approach and let the baby gravy back up all the way to the brain, a practise some reckon brings about a state of spiritual omnipotence and physical empowerment, but which anybody who’s tried it will tell you is more likely to result in hair-trigger hysteria and premature dementia.

The Fear
It starts with a feeling like a stone in the gut, except it’s a stone that grows in direct ratio to the creature you’ve sired. No matter how devil-may-care, bon vivant or hedonistic-existentialist you may have considered yourself before your sperm fused with a hospitable egg, the fathering of a child brings on an acute case of the neurotic-apocalyptic screaming heebie-jeebies. Martin Amis went through it. Thom Yorke went through it. Sean Penn went through it too. In those dim dark newborn mornings, the breezes of careless drunken summers are blown away, revealing a planet infested with infinite horrors threatening the head of your first-born. Nuclear war. Global Warming. Carbon monoxide emissions. Political instability in the Middle East. Political stability in the American west. Serial killers. Plagues. Pandemics. Big Brotherly social control systems. The state of your bank account. Career prospects, or lack thereof. The good news is, The Fear wears off after a couple of years and you return to the status of irresponsible wastrel and inebriate, unless of course you decide to try for Number Two, in which case the whole wretched cycle starts all over again.

Sleep Deprivation
Mother nature, canny old cow that she is, afflicts new mothers with a sort of natural amnesiac endorphin that obliterates memories of how severe the pain of child-birthing really is, so that the mother may eventually rekindle the will to reproduce again, thus ensuring the ongoing propagation of the species.
There is no known male equivalent. Fathers who have walked their beloved up and down the labour ward will evermore be afflicted with nightmarish flashbacks of their wife, girlfriend or sperm receptacle (let us refrain from using that execrable PC term ‘partner’ here) howling her head off or leaving permanent teeth indentations on her knuckles.
However, fathers who consider themselves nu-man enough to participate in feeding duties as soon as the little mite is off the tit – if indeed it was ever on it – will find that tri-nightly bottle-suckling sessions incur such a state of sleep deprivation that the first eight months of the child’s life will in retrospect acquire a hazy, waking-dream like quality akin to a mild but not very benign acid trip.

The average night’ s schedule goes something like this:
2.15am.
You are woken by (i) junior’s nails-on-blackboard caterwauling or (ii) its mother’s elbow in your ribs alerting you to same.
2.20am.
Cue much shuffling about in somnambulant pyjamas trying to quiet the beetroot-faced creature while the kettle boils or the bottle warmer warms.
2.30am:
Repeated attempts to decant tepid milk from the bottle down the baby’s throat while blearily trying to make sense of vintage episodes of the Twilight Zone, sadistic Japanese game shows or whatever else occupies the graveyard slot on insomnia TV.
3.15am.
The baby falls asleep, mid-feed.
3.20am.
The baby wakes up afflicted with colic.
3.20 – 4.20am.
You walk the child back and forth across the kitchen floor, or place it beside the spin dryer, or take it for a jaunt in the car in an attempt to get it to stop wailing and go to sleep, all the time making soothing noises that progressively come to resemble groans of despair.
4.30am.
The baby spews up a combination of gastric acids and sour curdled milk.
4.31am.
The baby resumes bawling for more food.
4.40am.
Repeat the feeding and walking process. The baby falls asleep, milk formula drooling from the side of its mouth. You place it in its cot and tiptoe back to bed.
5.00am.
The baby expels a foul green bowel movement and begins crying all over again.
5.01am.
You change the infant’s nappy. Stimulated by the activity, it takes this as its cue to wake up all over again, feeling a tad peckish after its brief nap.
5.05am.
Nervous breakdown.

Repeat ad infinitum.

Social Circles
There’s a reason why all your buddies come round with cigars and brandy the night you become a father. Once mother and child come home, you’ll be saying goodbye to Danny the Dirtbird, Eddie the Speed Dealer and Joey the Car-Jacker. You will have nothing more in common with these people. Furthermore, you will not want your children exposed to them. Further-furthermore, you’ll secretly be ashamed of how square you’ve become, reluctant to participate in just-for-old-times-sake nights on the town for fear of fading after the third pint.
However, by the same token, you’ll be better advised to dine with grave-robbers or war criminals than other parents, particularly 30-something first timers, a more obnoxious breed than their younger counterparts, mainly because the hatching of their offspring was all the longer planned for, and when it did happen miraculously dispelled the encroaching fear of dying barren and alone, dribbling down their shirts and sleeping on rubber sheets in some ghastly fluorescent-lit convalescent home. In such cases, junior usually inherits the full brunt of mummy and daddy’s thwarted-ambition, and is packed off to private schools where they teach Lithuanian to four year olds. The kid, having understandably if erroneously reached the conclusion that it is the centre of the universe, duly behaves like a member of Motley Crue.
On the rare nights the parents of such little beasts do see fit to socialise, having located a babysitter with an IQ high enough to stimulate junior’s frontal lobe until bedtime, they’ll be incapable of carrying on a conversation without reference to the consistency of the child’s bowel movements, or repeating snippets of its inane gobbledegook with the kind of reverence usually reserved for Wildean discourse. Dinner, drinks or a film will further be punctuated by several dozen calls home on the mobile to check that the babysitter hasn’t pegged the kid to the clothesline or gagged its precocious little gob with masking tape.

Christmas/ Birthday Presents
Under-10s require only two things to keep them amused: muck and water. The price you pay for some sophisticated new hunk of Japanese gadgetry is directly proportional to the time your kids will spend playing with the box it came in. As for the over-10s, just bite the bullet and hand over the credit card.

School
Remember all those authority issues you never resolved but nevertheless thought you were done with the day the Christian Brothers expelled you for wearing that Too Drunk To F**K Dead Kennedys t-shirt? Well, they’re about to come back to haunt you, threefold. Welcome to the wonderful world of PTA meetings. Car-pooling. Cake sales. Parent-teacher summits. Sheepish meetings with the Principal on account of your offspring having beaten up the kid in the next seat and stolen his lunch money. Then there’s the homework. The infinite Borges-ian variables of Irish grammar. French verbs. Sets and sub-sets. Except this time it’s not your neck on the line, it’s that of your doe-eyed young, who prevail upon you to bail them out of the pit of unknowable mysteries of decimal point placement.

Brain Rot
All fathers, regardless of age, creed or class, eventually turn into Ozzy Osbourne: bewildered, harmless, slow behemoths, outflanked and outwitted by their speedier, smart aleckier progeny, shambling around bandy-legged and perpendicularly-haired at daybreak to tend to the exercise requirements of pets whose acquisition they vociferously lobbied against in the first place, and crawling into the darkest and most inaccessible corners of the house in order to dispose of steaming dog or cat turds.

Teenagers
For the first 12 years of their lives, children think their fathers are god. The morning they turn 13, they convert to atheism.

Daughters’ Boyfriends
Buy a chainsaw.

Sons’ Girlfriends
Back off, old man.

How To Know When You’re Done With Parenting
When they prise the inheritance from your cold, dead hand.