My wife gave birth to our daughter, Veera, at the start of December, and it’s been a wild ride so far. Your job in the first few weeks and months, I now realise, is basically to keep your baby alive, which involves submitting yourself, and (in)famously your sleep patterns, to the needs of a lizard brain in a human suit that it has no control over. She feeds, sleeps, pees and poos, and screams in between all of these. More recently, she’s been doing mostly screaming.
Trying to look beyond this very intense period—and the miracle that my daughter is—can be difficult. People with children will tell budding parents that their life is about to permanently change, which is true, but in what way? It depends, I guess. Parenthood—in this case, fatherhood—is a strange initial feeling for me, best described as low-key dread and fear that something will go wrong and I won’t be able to help my daughter, mixed with a profound sense of responsibility. Cometh the hour, cometh the new father, I hope.
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