Muristek
Reminding myself how little I knew as a first-time parent is strangely comforting
The second baby should be easier. But my memory of the first is so bad that I need a few crib sheets
For the first time in a long time, I’ve been reading my own columns from the start. The impetus came when a friend reached out to say he’d started doing so, on account of his imminent fatherhood. Going over the early articles might, he said, give him a sense of things to come. I was cheered by this, because I am extremely vain, but also slightly embarrassed since he’d worked out to do this before I had, now that I face the prospect of another baby and a startling lack of memory about how it should be cared for.
I simply can’t remember much about the early days of fatherhood, because I wrote about the experiences of rearing an actual baby while I was rearing an actual baby. It’s a time in one’s life where memory undergoes a dark age. Stress, sleep deprivation and the constant buffeting of immediate, short-term goals means there are entire months that might only be retrieved from my brain via hypnosis.
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