Dispatches from a Domestic Front

And just like that, I have a two-month-old baby.

From her birth-day, poured as if from a pan of batter into the crib (although I can assure you that was not the experience at the time)

to one who could go — and sleep — anywhere

to this bright spark who craves attention and entertainment (here looking at me at her grandparents’ house).

What is it like?  It is a complete rethinking and re-experiencing of the passing of time.  It is giving up the ego and going with the flow.  It has, I realised yesterday, taken me ten weeks to unwind from my paid employment.  That’s one week for every year I’ve been working there, plus an extra week.  The recession of the minutiae of employment has allowed for the minutiae of baby-care to come to the fore.  Come mid-October, I shall have to juggle both.  I do not quite know how I am going to do this, other than that it will be different from anything I’ve done before.

I have been thinking this week about the dynamics of shared parenting.  The señor and I undertook this dynastic enterprise with the understanding that all decisions would be made together.  This reflected, we hoped, the character of our relationship as it was prior to the baby’s birth, and seemed best suited to the fact that we would likely be equally involved in work and childcare together.  Even though I would eventually work more hours, I would also (we hoped) be feeding the baby, so the balance of power was fairly even.  In this fashion, the baby would have two primary caregivers, rather than a more traditional model in which one parent (or “mother”) assumes responsibility for the day-to-day parenting, and the other parent works fulltime.

This is working well, but it has some interesting consequences too.  We live in a household of cheerful banter and frequent disagreement.  Until now this has largely been over politics and aesthetics.  Furious arguments have been rare (although the one about interpreting The Mummy 3 was as angry as it was unexpected).  When the differences of opinion are occurring over baby care, however, the stakes are much higher.  We have realised, perhaps with irony rather than chagrin, that the primal desire to protect the baby from that which threatens her is most frequently activated against each other.  And since there is no sole primary caregiver to whom the final say defaults, there is often the risk that simple decisions turn into negotiating the Paris peace accord.

This is often as funny as it is exhausting, except when it’s not.

I will draw a veil over the more strident disagreements and tell you instead the story of the foldover booties.  Let me start by saying I concede the señor has the moral high ground in this.  He is, I observe, driven by the concern that the baby not be too hot or too cold.  (Keeping the room at the right temperature for newborn puppies has, I will add, nothing on keeping a baby at the correct temperature).  Every hair on the back of his hands is now a draft sensor; the condensation on his skin a temperature gauge.  I cannot confess parity in any specific focus of the baby’s wellbeing, perhaps because my care largely defaults to the pragmatic, close contact task of being the village dairy.  In a context straight out of my doll-packed childhood, however, I am obsessed with coordinating what the baby is wearing.  She must look sharp and, regrettably, one of chief concerns about going back to work is sometimes that the señor will not uphold this care to the extent that I think necessary, when his turn to look after her fulltime succeeds mine.

This brings us to the matter of the foldover booties themselves.  They are knitted, have two tiny embroidered roses atop each foot (pink, in this case, although the mythical blue roses are also available for other-gendered babies), tie tightly (and thus stay on securely) and have a moss-stitch foldover that gives the impression of a little shoe.  They are, for those who care about such things, adorable.  The decorative stitch on the foldover is of course lost, or rather, the less-decorative reverse displayed, if the bootie is not worn correctly.

A feature of baby clothes is that, unless all-in-one, they ride up.  Even the best fitted nappies are bulky and the baby’s arms and legs slim in relation to their torso.  The general business of lifting baby and putting her down means that leggings or trousers worn over booties will often expose the baby’s ankle — hence the usual high-riding nature of baby socks or booties.  The exposed ankle of a baby is of course susceptible to draughts.

Thus it was recently that I dressed the baby in the foldover booties as part of an outfit of carefully-executed coordination.  And thus it was that the señor, fearing the effect of draughts on that centimetre of ankle exposed to the air as the baby’s leggings rode up, unfolded the decorative stitched bootie-top.  And thus it was that I, throughout a busy morning of entertaining visitors and entertaining the baby, folded down the bootie-tops (and adjusted the leggings too; I am not completely cruel) each time I held the baby.  And thus it was that the señor, taking the baby, folded them back up.

This is as much as a metaphor for the experience of shared parenting, I think, as it is a true story.  It is no doubt exacerbated by the baby’s limited agency and communicative range (when she is older, she can choose her own footwear and wear it how she wishes, if I can bear to let her).  I cannot take pride in my tenacity on this particular issue, but it is how I have been acting.  What can one say?  Love is a battlefield.

I think this would be much harder if we did not already draw a certain amount of our relationship’s energy from disagreement.  Since I come from a work environment in which battles are necessarily harder-hitting and more pitched, home is a safe space in which to have out all kinds of irritants that must elsewhere be stoically borne.  But the stakes are high when our daughter is the catalyst and we are learning quickly, I think, to pull back from accelerating into what might not easily be taken back, disputes over both the trivial and the serious.  It is a working reminder that, in practice, compromise is not a form of consensus so much as it is giving both partners an equal go at having their way.

I would say, therefore, that having a baby could be described as business as usual, relationship-wise, but a hundred times more intense.  The realisation that we would, if pushed, go to war with each other for what we thought was best for the baby (bootie-battles not included) was quite sobering.  What would this be like in a domestic situation where the balance were already tipped in one partner’s favour, if that one were more belligerent, wealthier or had some other kind of greater capital in the relationship?  The scenario of which one hears, in which a baby is born in order to save a relationship already faltering, must surely be fraught.  As for us, I feel in some ways that this is what higher education is for: the ability to see a situation from all sides, to stand outside one’s own point of view even as one defends it with determination (and even evidence) but also to concede graciously for the sake of a higher goal if the argument is not in one’s favour.  In the home, however, the Socratic method is rather more short on time than in the academy.  The baby is hungry; the baby is windy; the baby needs changing; the baby is sleepy.  This beloved, bright-eyed, longed-for face is our arbiter, our fundamental, the great disperser of all our petty claims to sovereignty.  Moreover, she’s nice and warm and she looks plenty sharp.

Tagged as: baby