

G.W. Alexander

Published by The Style Merchants Pty Limited at Smashwords.

Copyright 2019 The Style Merchants Pty Limited.

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ISBN 978-0-9874531-2-9

# Contents

Step 1 – Sorting stuff out

Agreeing on things

Things like...

Who said anything about money?

God help me, I'm an atheist

Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!

Where you want to live

That's women's work...

The great childcare debate

How many should we have?

Step 2 – While she's pregnant

Age: there are numbers involved

No sex please, I'm pregnant

'Morning' sickness and other ailments

The boobs

Ultrasounds, tests, gynaecologists, obstetricians...

Baby classes

Arranging a stable home, not a stable

Money, and lots of it

Step 3 – Childbireeeeeeaaaaaaah!

The birth plan

via vagina or 'ave Caesar'?

The event – blessed is he who expecteth little

In hospital

Step 4 – Your brave new world

It's life Jim, but not as we know it

Giving up stuff

Your new routine

Crying/screaming

Circumcision

Looking after baby

Routine, routine and more of it

Post-natal depression (hers and yours)

Worry

Surviving on one income

Sleep, or the lack of it

Sex, or the lack of it

Step 5 – After year one...

Yes, that is light you can see at the end of the tunnel

Tell 'em you love 'em

Keeping them busy

Having trouble creating number two, or three...

What about IVF?

Step 6 – And after that...

Keeping your cool under pressure

Being consistent

Making sure your children aren't jerks

Letting them work it out

Show me some discipline, I'll show you mine

Many people without kids don't like kids

"Honey? I want a divorce"

Surviving the monogamy

Avoiding becoming another chore

Conclusion – So why do it at all?

You mean it's not all about me?

Love

There's more to life than...

Someone to keep you company when you're old

Your partner

It's not all about 'happiness'

# Preface – What happened?

I'm 45 and I've got three children aged six, four and two, and there's rarely a day goes by when I don't find myself asking 'WHAT THE F*** WAS I THINKING?'

There's no doubt about it: being a parent of young children is a right pain and changes your personality without you even noticing. This was brought home to me recently, when, thanks to my mother-in-law volunteering to babysit overnight, my wife and I spent the night in a hotel to celebrate our wedding anniversary.

After a few hours of the kind of sex neither of us had experienced in years, we looked at each other and said "Hello, who are you?" Even a few hours away from the children had taken us right back to the life we had before they came along: living in an apartment in the inner city, going out all the time, partying, and having sex five or six times a week (yes, just imagine).

That life had been a distant memory ever since our first daughter came along. Actually, before that, ever since my wife and I got back from our honeymoon and we discovered that she was pregnant.

After spending years in mortal fear of getting anyone pregnant, that's a moment men secretly dread isn't it?

Her: "Darling, I've got something to tell you."

You (opening beer): "Oh yes? What's that?"

Her: "I'm pregnant."

Two words, but they're like a thousand gongs being hit at once. Don't muck about though, you must come up with the appropriate response immediately.

"Wow, that's... fantastic babe. Come here!"

Meanwhile, your guts are churning and you're thinking, "Oh God, I'm really in the shit now."

Well that was my experience anyway, and I was married and expecting it. I soon got used to the idea though, and now look at me, although my wife knows that if she wants to put the wind up me, all she has to say is "Honey, I've got something to tell you..."

Some people might say that this book is unrelentingly negative about the whole experience of having children. I disagree. If you're reading this book, this question is possibly academic for you by now, but it seems to be a hot topic among people these days, and it's worth asking yourself why you're having kids.

From the perspective of the twenty- or thirty-something man-about-town who's footloose and fancy-free and can do whatever he wants whenever he wants, having children is akin to volunteering to live in a prison cell with a bunch of amoral sociopaths who'll suck you dry, treat you with contempt when they realise you don't know everything after all, and abandon you to your fate when you're too old to wipe your own bum.

If, on the other hand, you're discovering that all your mates are getting married and buying houses and having children, sooner or later it'll be just you down at the pub with a bunch of blokes ten years your junior, who have awful music taste and hang around with girls in impossibly short skirts who think of you as "the creepy old guy who's always eyeing my boobs." For reasons unknown, men reach a certain age and decide that it's probably time they got hitched and did the whole family thing, so they often marry the next girl who comes along.

So, for those of you out there who are contemplating, or are finding yourselves forced to contemplate, the concept of being allowed to roger only one (yes, one) woman for the rest of your life, as well as being surrounded by small imitations of yourself that make all your own flaws really obvious to you and everyone else, this little book attempts to give you a few tips I picked up as I bumbled down the path of fatherhood, barking my shins along the way.

Like all parenting advice books, it's subject to fashion, so it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. This year the experts are telling women to breastfeed on a rigid schedule, the next they'll be saying do it on demand, or don't do it at all. Experts will strenuously argue the merits of whatever the current trend is, but a lot of this stuff is subjective, and it can be hard work for you and your partner deciding what is the right approach for you. I don't claim to be an expert in child-rearing. I wrote this book because I noticed that there were lots of books for women about pregnancy, childbirth, childrearing, etc, etc, but sweet-FA for the men. What's more, the ones that were out there seemed to talk about practical things like how to change nappies and what happens in the womb in the third trimester. No-one seemed very interested in what changes in _your life_ as a man. Given that becoming a father is a pretty common experience this seemed odd to me.

I can't say I looked that hard mind you, there might be hundreds of books for men out there, but hey, I'm a man: apparently we don't ask for directions.

I'd also like to note that this book refers only to heterosexual couples, purely because they're the majority of parents. All the discussions in this book can be taken to apply to same-sex couples as well, and if you're in a same-sex relationship and contemplating or already experiencing parenthood, I offer you my respect (for what it's worth) and wish you the best of luck, I imagine it's a much tougher parenting gig.

# Chapter 1 – Sorting stuff out

It might seem obvious, but becoming a parent really is a life-changing experience, in that it changes your day-to-day existence fundamentally and permanently. Once you've had children your relationship with your partner becomes the single most important thing in your life (if it wasn't already). A lot of this book is about how to keep your relationship healthy when it's put under the many pressures of child-rearing. Whether you're married or not makes little difference, because once you have children you'll be sharing the parenting duties with their mother for the rest of your life, unmarried, married, separated, divorced, re-married, whatever, so it's important to go into it with your eyes wide open.

Once you've gotten over the shock/horror/joy/elation of being told you're going to be a father, you've still got a few months to get your act together and sort out some of the basics of what your new life as parents will be like. There are a few things you and your partner need to agree on, and surprisingly enough, what the two of you talk about before she gives birth goes a long way to determining what happens after the little bloody bundle comes out screaming from between her legs (you don't have think about that yet, don't dwell on the image).

## Agreeing on things

It's important to be on the same page once you do something as stupid as committing yourself to life-long responsibilities with someone by having children with them. This means talking about your relationship (well, at least once anyway), which is a great opportunity to take your partner out to dinner to discuss your future together as parents. So what exactly do you talk about?

The Catholics have a thing called 'marriage school', which is a weekend that couples who are planning to get married are supposed to attend. Sound ludicrous to you? Spending a weekend with your partner at a religious camp, being instructed by priests who've never had a relationship with a member of the opposite sex about how to have a successful lifetime of marriage.

Not being a Catholic, I've never been to one of these weekends (thank you Lord), but I can see the point of it, because apparently they force you and your wife to confront the sorts of issues that will come up once you're married, especially once you have children. Issues such as your attitude to money, religion, schools, where you want to live, who'll work, childcare, how many children you want or can afford, how much sex you think is enough and which position is your favourite (okay, maybe they don't ask that last one).

Now, would you rather be forced to deal with this stuff in a group situation with a bunch of other couples and a priest on a religious camp, or over a series of romantic dinners with your partner over a bottle of wine?

Tough call that. Let's take a quick look at the issues.

## Who said anything about money?

It's said that "when poverty comes in the door, love flies out the window" and this is never more true than when you have children who depend on you. The man who can't feed his children is in his own personal hell and will do anything to escape.

Money is the fuel that keeps a family moving. It's bad enough being broke on your own, but with kids it doesn't bear thinking about, and the quickest way to go broke is by spending more than you earn. This all comes down to your attitudes to money.

Some people prefer to spend money as soon as they earn it: buy stuff they don't need on credit cards with interest-free, no down-payment terms; gamble on the pokies or the horses or on the net; spend it on drugs or booze, or travel or food. I did these things for years (except for the interest-free, no down-payment stuff—waaay too dangerous). There's no shortage of things to spend your money on, and there are plenty of people trying to take your money off you with clever marketing ploys and sly fees.

So what sort of spender are you? And what sort of spender is your partner? Have you ever tried saving money and watching the cash pile up in a bank account? If you both have the attitude that money's there to be spent, then you'll probably have trouble saving for things like a house. If one of you enjoys saving more than the other, then you're going to have a fight sooner or later over that ("Bloody hell, I saved $3,000 and you blew it on a plasma screen TV?").

Even if you both enjoy saving money, it's worth talking about this before it becomes an issue. This way you both know what to expect.

## God help me, I'm an atheist

Having spent nine years in the choir and brass band of an Anglican school, I've had to spend many hours in church. Despite this, or maybe because of it, I'm now an atheist who knows the Bible stories fairly well and can sing most of the tunes in the hymn book.

Whatever religion or non-religion you are may not make much difference to your relationship, but when you have children, sooner or later it's likely to become an issue. If you're Christian, do you have them christened and if so in which church? If you're of different religions, which one do you raise your children in? Do you bother with religion at all?

Even if this means little or nothing to you, there's a fair chance it will be important to one or more of your parents. Before you can say "Holy Pentateuch of the Cosmogony, Batman" you can find yourself embroiled in a major religious war, with both sides bringing down heavy artillery.

So, this is something it might be sensible to discuss in advance. A lot of people get their kids baptised or inducted into whatever religion they're associated with shortly after they're born. This gets it out of the way and might well be a good idea, because while you can put it off for a few years, when the question of schooling comes up it's likely to cause some issues unless you're both die-hard advocates for the public school system. My answer to the dilemma was to avoid getting the children baptised at all. Genius! This worked fine until the first one had to go to school. Then we discovered that—in Australia at least—most of the non-public education system is tied to the churches and you have few options. The best school by a country-mile in our neighbourhood was a Catholic school, and to get in, our children had to be baptised as Catholics.

I don't want to put the boot into the public school system (I went to one for five years), which is excellent in some places, but to be frank it's not so crash-hot in others. If you decide that's not for you and you can afford something else, then you either go to the top end, to the ultra-expensive private schools (which are mostly church-based schools with a non-denominational approach to parents with money), or you opt for the mid-range schools which are mostly run by the Catholics, the Presbyterians, the Seventh-Day Adventists, or some other religion.

I had been strongly against getting my kids baptised in the Catholic church until, in a rare moment of clarity (and time pressure), I realised that my impression of that church was mostly based on a set of fairly illogical, irrational and emotional ideas and childhood experiences (such as the kids from the Catholic school spitting on me on the train station when I was a kid). We all know that the Catholic Church has _plenty_ of issues, but you don't necessarily have to be involved in those just because you baptise your children.

Whatever, the point here is that once you have children, religion can become an issue for your family, whether you believe in God or not. Discuss.

## Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!

I used to hate this line from Pink Floyd's _The Wall_ , because it seemed to sum up what would happen to you if you didn't pay attention at school: "We don't need no education", well clearly you do. Score zero out of ten for my appreciation of irony on that one.

With all the paedophilia accusations that have emerged in recent years against teachers and priests all over the world, that lyric has taken on a new meaning. Fortunately, that never happened to me, although my sixth-class teacher ended up in prison for molesting kids. On the face of it he was the best teacher in the place: he had a train set running around the wall of the classroom, and he'd throw tennis balls at the kids who weren't paying attention, how cool is that?

We'll get onto schools a bit later, because they're not important until you've got through about four or five years of other pain. The main reason for raising it here is that it's worth discussing expectations: if she went to the Presbyterian Ladies College, she'll probably want her daughter to go there too. If she went to the local high school, you never know, she might still want her daughter to go to the Presbyterian Ladies College. You might have an opinion too.

## Where you want to live

When I got my wife pregnant the first time, we were renting a flat in inner-city Sydney. We quickly realised that a rental flat up three flights of stairs, with three security doors, in a pretty rough part of town was possibly not the most practical place to have a baby. We looked at what we could afford to buy in Sydney, and at that stage we reckoned we could manage a mortgage of $500,000 (this was in 2006 mind you, that amount wouldn't even buy you a garage now).

After looking at three derelict dumps (one of which had no kitchen) we gave up, and, having spent six months doing long-distance pregnant renovating, moved to the Central Coast. So, instead of getting up at 8am, and taking a 10-minute bus ride to town, I now had to wake up at 5.30am to catch the train to town, two hours each way, getting home at 7pm. Lifestyle change anyone? Then throw in a new-born child and stir.

Discussing where you want to live and what you can afford is important, preferably before you see the results of planting your seed in the fertile soil of her womb. If you're expecting to live in a big house with a pool and a garden, but she wants to be only ten minutes from town, then you're going to need either a lot of money or the ability to compromise. Is she prepared to move to another town/state/country if you're promoted? Are you if she does? How big a mortgage do you think you can afford? Tough questions.

## That's women's work...

These days everyone's got a career. Women have been told for over a generation now that "they can have it all", meaning a career and a family. This not-unreasonable agenda has been hijacked by the business world, who now have a much bigger pool of workers to choose from as a result, half of which they can get away with paying one-third less simply because they're female.

In the process, the value attached to the career of 'mother' has been downgraded to the point that it's much despised in Western society, the implication being that if you're not working fifty or sixty hours a week for some corporation or other so you can buy more stuff, then you're not making any useful contribution to society.

Make no mistake, raising children is a FULL-TIME UNPAID JOB. I reckon this is a factor in why many people put their kids into childcare as soon as they can. Either they desperately need the money, or the job of parenting is too hard, or it's perceived as worthless because it has no immediate monetary value. Or perhaps we're just soft. Imagine being one of your ancestors, say in the time of Henry the 8th, or 50BC? What would it have been like raising kids then? None of us would have been able to take it.

Raising children is an immensely fulfilling job, despite the lack of pay. It's one of the only jobs around that has a genuine point to it, but you can make a good case that spoon-feeding a six-month old baby doesn't provide the same intellectual stimulus as working in the marketing department of a bank or the like. That's probably true, but is the work you do really personally rewarding?

Looking after small children is a tough, exhausting and financially unrewarding job that provides huge personal satisfaction. The person who gets to be the breadwinner doesn't have to deal with the kids all day, and trust me, no matter how bad your job is, it's easier than looking after small children all day; what's more you're being paid to do it. On the flip side, they miss out on the millions of tiny rewards you get from spending time with babies and small children.

Giving up a career to do this kind of work is a big ask, and it's dangerous to assume that your wife will be willing to do it. It's a good idea to discuss who's going to work and who's going to stay home. If your wife's a corporate lawyer who earns three times what you do, then you might want to swallow your pride and volunteer, and if your mates give you a hard time, tell them to be grateful they're seeing you at all—they don't know what they're missing out on.

## The great childcare debate

As noted above, money is important, but it's also important to work out the best-value arrangement as a family. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), in Australian families where one parent earns the average wage and the other two-thirds of it (typically the woman), the cost of childcare is 32% of the family's income (<https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=NCC>). The practical effect of this is that about a third of parents who put their children into childcare so both parents can work actually pay more in childcare fees than one of the parents earns. Another 15-odd per cent barely break even. This is partly because wages for women are (disgracefully) lower than for men. Yes, she gets back into the workforce before losing viability, and starts contributing to her superannuation again, and yes, childcare is not her cost but one shared between both parents, but however you slice it, it's still pretty expensive. In effect, nearly half the people using childcare can't afford it, and in some cases are actually going out backwards paying someone to mind their children so they can stay in the workforce.

So is childcare worth it? It depends on your finances. It's not always cost-effective to put your kid into childcare so you can go back to work. If you can afford it, it's ideal to have one of you at home with them during the early period. If it can be the mother, great, especially if they're breastfeeding. We do know that the first three years are very important in your child's development: the more time you can spend directly connecting with your child in those years the better. Sure, in countries like Denmark childcare is basically compulsory from as early as possible, but their system is rather different (and much better funded) than the Australian version.

Besides, it's worth asking what is childcare anyway? Is your child going to receive the same attention they would from you or your wife? Maybe, there are plenty of first-rate childcare workers out there, but no matter how dedicated they are, they still get paid sod-all to do a tough job looking after other people's kids. The women at the pre-school who have looked after all of my children, two days a week for two years, are the most patient and caring souls I've ever met, but how they do it is a mystery to me. I don't know about you, but I can't stand other people's kids—I have enough trouble liking my own—the prospect of having to care for a bunch of other people's snivelling, shitting, germ-ridden, whining kids day after day for minimum wage is my idea of hell. Of course it might not be yours, I expect the women who work in the pre-school must feel rather differently or they wouldn't be there.

If you're under major financial pressure you may have no option, but you can always ask yourself questions like "do we need to live in this expensive house?", "do we really need a second car?" or "what's more important now: what we want or what our child needs?". These are tough questions. They force you to look hard at yourself, and none of us enjoy doing that much.

If you have no option but to use childcare, consider that there's a distinction between childcare and pre-school. A pre-school, which your child will be able to go to from about age three, has a curriculum of sorts and a structured learning programme designed to prepare your child for school – they're not just day-care centres. Pre-school workers must be degree-qualified, the days tend to be shorter and at least one long-term study of 3,000 Australian children ( _Effective Early Education Experiences - E4Kids_ ) found that pre-schools offered "significantly higher quality" than long day-care centres (although many of those also offer pre-school programmes). Of course, pre-schools are generally more expensive, and only start at age three, which leaves you back at square one with one of you out of the workforce for three years.

So what's your attitude to childcare? Do you expect your wife to stay home and bring up the children? Does she expect you to do it? Is there a way you can share it? Either way, for how many years? How does she feel about that? How do you? Do you both just want to outsource the whole thing? Can you afford to? Is there any wine left in that bottle?

## How many should we have?

This is three questions really: How many children do you want? How many can you afford? How many can you realistically have before your wife's biological clock (and yours boyo, more on that later) runs out? It's nice to have a brother or sister, but there are plenty of happy people who are single children.

My father was a practically-minded engineer who had four children, and when I asked him how many he thought was a good number, he said "One is good, two is better, three is useful, because if one dies the other two will still have a sibling." As I said, practical. He ended up having three girls before he got me, so I'm glad about his (somewhat old-fashioned now) dictum which was "I need an heir to carry on the family name" or I wouldn't be here.

These days, some people consider abstract things like over-population and depletion of the Earth's resources when deciding whether to have more children. Under the One Child Policy in China they had to consider whether they could feed two children from one rice ration by starving themselves. In France in the 1920s the government encouraged everyone to have more children to keep up with Germany's booming population, so they could recruit a big enough army if they got invaded again (fat lot of good that did them in 1940, and no doubt encouraging to all those French mothers raising cannon-fodder).

No matter what external stimuli (baby bonuses included) are around at the time, "how many" is a question you may revisit several times. After the first child you'll be saying "To think that a year ago I said I wanted six children—what was I on?" Then after the initial nightmare wears off a bit, around 12-to-18 months, you'll start thinking, "Hmmm, another one would be handy, then we wouldn't have to be this little bastard's sole playmate from 5 am to 7 pm every day."

A few years ago I played a reunion gig with a band I'd been in two decades before. Discussing this concept with the keyboard player Dave, who had two kids, he said "We stopped at two because we didn't want to be outnumbered."

I thought that was brilliant, then promptly got my wife pregnant again with number three.

# Chapter 2 – While she's pregnant

All sorts of things change when a woman is pregnant, in her body and in her mind, and there's always the nagging worry at the back of her mind: is the child going to be okay?

## Age: there are numbers involved

We're told that women have a 'biological clock' (more of a time-bomb really) ticking away, and that by the time they reach 40-odd, it's starting to look pretty bleak on the children front. This is real, despite modern medicine enabling some women in their 50s to have kids. It's not just a case of it being harder for them to get pregnant, there's also a much higher risk that if they do the child won't survive (miscarriage) or it will have health issues (e.g. spina bifida and countless other nasties).

What you may not know, or may not want to believe as a man, is that the same applies to you. Yes, the older you become, the less likely you are to knock a woman up and the more likely you are to produce some sort of genetic defect if you do. As you grow older and drink more booze, your sperm mutate, getting slower (and weirder) every year. So you've got a biological clock too, it's just not ticking quite as loudly in the media.

This whole clock thing is a recent concept, because until the Pill came along in the 1970s, women in Australia didn't have much of a say in birth control ("Let's have sex" "No, I don't want to get pregnant" "Not my problem" "It will be nine months from now..."). This meant that girls often gave birth in their teens or twenties, whether they wanted to or not. With the advent of the Pill, the choice of when to become pregnant passed to the woman for The First Time In All Of Human History. This naturally has led to women delaying having children while they have a life and build a career, so the average birth age of mothers is increasing. One result of this is that the risks associated with gestation and birth can be higher for these women because they're older when they conceive. Take the most common chromosomal abnormality, Down Syndrome: at age 20, the chance is 1 in 1,441, by 30 it's 1 in 959, at 40 it's 1 in 84 (my source is Wikipedia, your doctor might have more accurate figures).

Nowadays, women in Australia can have a series of ultrasound tests throughout their pregnancy that check various aspects of the child's growth, such as the thickness of a certain spot on the back of its neck. These give indicators of whether there's anything 'going wrong' and report it all with detailed statistics. Gone are the days of "Oh my God, she's pregnant" then wait nine months and see what comes out. Now we know all manner of things about the child _in utero_ , its gender being the most obvious.

You need to be prepared for the results of these tests, and have some idea about what you'll do if the numbers don't turn out right. What I'm talking about here is: 'If the child is going to have some sort of crippling disability from birth and might live only a short while, or live a long time but with a serious handicap, do we decide to go through with the whole shooting match, or abort it and try again?'

Did that sentence make you wince? It should have, because this is the ultimate tough question. Bear in mind that a child with a physical or mental disability, while still as adorable and precious as any other, is going to be much harder work and may have a lot more difficulties in its lifetime, especially after you die. Some parents also struggle with a sense of despair and take it out on the child. A friend of mine wrote a doctoral thesis on the high incidence of child abuse among kids with disabilities, and it's well-documented by the Australian Institute of Family Studies (<https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/bibliography/children-disabilities-and-child-abuse-and-neglect>). It's almost as if these parents are saying "Why me?"

So, if tests show there's likely to be a problem, at least you have a choice. One of the best things about living in a modern civilised society (excepting some states of the USA) is that you, or more importantly, the woman you get pregnant, can choose whether or not to bring the child into this world. If you're a Right-to-Lifer, the answer is obvious, but then, you're probably not reading this book. If you are, all power to you and good luck with all the kids you produce by having sex without birth control.

Having a choice is much better than living in a country where you have no choice at all. But choice implies a decision, and making a decision requires you to take responsibility for it. What's more it's a decision both of you have to agree on.

If you haven't had any kids yet and your pregnant wife is 43 and the medical evidence isn't good, you might be tempted to say "Well, it's the only child we're going to have." It might be rough, but it might also be worth it. This is a decision only the two of you can make.

So if you can, try to have your children before your partner turns 40. After that, you start getting an exponential increase in the probability of bad things. According to our gynaecologist, if the mother is 35, the chance of spina bifida for instance (damage to the spine and spinal cord) is going to be around 1 in 6,000 depending on how healthy she is. At 37 this goes to 1 in 2,500 and by 40 it's approaching 1 in 700. I don't like those odds much at all. This varies with the woman of course, but you get the idea: if your wife's in her 30s don't muck about, it might take you years to get her pregnant.

While we're talking odds and statistics, you're going to see a lot of these, things like "In the USA, about one in every 33 babies (about 3%) is born with a birth defect." As with all statistics, the numbers can be made to say just about anything, so if you're evaluating the odds, you might want to get some professional advice from a gynaecologist.

## No sex please, I'm pregnant

A pregnant woman is understandably nervous. She's been told she can't drink or smoke, and thanks to you she's now 100% responsible for another life. Furthermore, all sorts of weird and uncomfortable things start happening to her body, so she's likely to be come a bit tactile-defensive, which has immediate effects on your sex life.

It might sound stupid to say that you need to talk about sex, but it's one of the first things to be seriously challenged by pregnancy, childbirth and children. All three of these things bugger up your sex life in varying degrees, but from the perspective of where you were before, it's basically a catastrophe. It's one of life's great ironies that the thing you enjoy so much leads to a situation where you can't have it.

Some women feel really sexy when they're pregnant and love having sex; others feel fat and ugly and can't stand you even looking at them, and this can vary from one day to the next. You'll just have to wing it and try to be as understanding as possible.

The availability of 'pregnant porn' on the internet attests that some men are really turned on by pregnant women, while others find pregnant women completely unattractive. Whether it's because of the change in her shape, the idea of the thing growing inside her ("There's something growing inside her? Alien!"), or the idea that they might 'hurt the baby' with their massive appendage if they have sex with her, something turns some men off.

If this happens to you, best not let your wife get the slightest inkling of it. If you have to pretend she's the sexiest thing you've ever seen, do it, because if she gets the idea that you don't find her attractive anymore that will have devastating short and probably long-term effects on her and your happiness. She might also suspect you of having an affair, and she might be right. If you can't find it in yourself to have sex with your pregnant wife, work extra hard to make her feel attractive. Tell her she's beautiful. Buy her flowers or something.

## 'Morning' sickness and other ailments

I've heard the experience of morning sickness described as "like being hungover 24 hours a day, every day", which is something I can really relate to. Why they call it 'morning sickness' I don't know, because while the obvious sign—throwing up— might happen in the morning sometimes, the overall sense of feeling UTTER CRAP seems to be continuous for a lot of women, while others don't get it at all.

There's sod-all you can do about it, except to remember that she's feeling the equivalent of a savage hangover and do as many things around the house as you can so she doesn't have to do them. Things like cooking dinner, cleaning the house, washing the clothes, hanging them out, bringing them in, folding them and putting them away... all the 'women's work' that never ends that she usually does without you noticing.

If you already have children this is far worse, because every night you'll also have to get them fed, bathed, dressed, clean their teeth, read them a story, put them to bed, put them back into bed, sing them a lullaby and then yell at them for ten minutes until they twig that you're serious about the going-to-bed thing, all single-handed.

## The boobs

One thing you can definitely expect is that a). her breasts will grow about three or four cup sizes (I'm not kidding) and that b). you won't be allowed to touch them much, because they'll be too sensitive. There's that irony again.

Take photos and videos while you can if that's your thing. If she breast-feeds the child, you can forget about breasts as part of what little sex you have, except as a damned-fine decoration which you'll miss like hell when they shrink.

Yep, once she stops breast-feeding, they'll come back down and there's a strong probability that they'll end up smaller than they were in the first place.

## Ultrasounds, tests, gynaecologists, obstetricians...

I mentioned ultrasounds earlier in this chapter, and there are lots of these medical visits throughout the nine months. Fortunately, you may only have to go to a few of them. Your wife on the other hand, has to go to half a dozen of them, and in some cases she has to climb up on a table and open her legs to some complete stranger—90% of the time a man—so he can have a good look and a poke around deep in the sacred grove with a cold steel speculum.

Imagine if you had to have an in-depth anal probe, conducted by a 60-year-old German nurse, every six weeks for nine months, and you're starting to appreciate the potential degree of personal invasion we're talking about here.

Funnily enough, after having to give it all up to male doctors, women can become a bit coy about letting you anywhere near the object of your desires. Even if there's no damage from the actual birth, she may declare herself off-limits for a distressingly long time.

As for ultrasounds, the big danger here is the 'Do you want to know the gender of the child?' question. Men are always expected to go to the ultrasound test now, so before you go, you might want to decide (together) whether or not you want to be told the child's gender.

Spare a moment to think about what your reaction is going to be if you're desperate for a boy and it's a girl (or vice versa). The guaranteed way to make your partner feel like garbage is to be disappointed at the gender of the person she's creating; let's not forget it's _your_ _sperm_ that determines the gender of the child, so it's your responsibility either way.

## Baby classes

This is something you will be expected to attend, and with good reason, because there's a lot to learn and you're in kindergarten. The first ante-natal class I attended went from 9am to 2pm on a Saturday, which seemed reasonable until I arrived with a shocking hangover after being out till all hours at after-work drinks the night before.

Suffice it to say it was five hours of refined torture. Not content to drive into us how few of the 1,440 minutes in each day would be left to us after the child arrived, the teacher had us doing group activities, where we had to role-play certain events with other fathers-to-be. I generally role-playing games, but this one was not fun.

Having said that, baby classes are essential to give you some idea of how different your life is going to be for a few months. Otherwise you'd sail into to it with a host of false expectations and end up shipwrecked in a sea of sleeplessness and screaming... or you could have the experience of a work colleague of mine, whose child slept soundly for twelve hours every night from the day they brought her home.

Bastard.

## Arranging a stable home, not a stable

You want your home to be just that—a home—on the day you bring the child into it for the first time. You don't want to have a ladder in the hall where you haven't quite finished the painting, or still be waiting for the plumber to come in and connect the water in the new bathroom.

In particular, you want to have the baby's room ready. One of the few genuinely tense moments my wife and I had during the lead-up to the birth of our first child was when we attempted to set up the cot together. Words were exchanged ("Do you think I don't know how to use a f***ing Allen key?") and eventually she sensibly abandoned me to the task, enabling me to get the cot all lovely and tightened up, only to realise I'd left the bottom out.

If you find yourself forced to renovate (or worse, move) during the nine month lead-up (and chances are you will, the nesting instinct is real), try to make sure it's all done and dusted well before the big day. Sound obvious? I know one couple who spent months driving for an hour-and-a-half each Friday night to the house they planned to move to, so they could put in a new kitchen, new floor, new doors and re-paint the entire house. They slept on an air mattress and worked long hours every weekend to get it all done, then the child decided to come early, two weeks before the kitchen arrived.

Okay, I admit it, that was me and my wife.

##  Money, and lots of it

Things for the child can cost you about five or six grand before it's even born, even if you buy lots of stuff second-hand or on special. Now some people would spend that sort of cash on a cinema-style sound system or an engine supercharger and not think twice, but to me, five grand is a lot of dosh. If you take tax and super into consideration, to have $5,000 to spend, you need to earn about $10,000. That's a nice simple equation to work with: whatever it costs, you need to earn double.

But there's only a few things you need to buy new: anything the child will sleep on for example. If you haven't got much cash you can get a lot stuff from friends, relatives, on E-bay, at baby markets or from trading sites such as Freecycle. There are plenty of people out there wanting to offload cots ("As new, slightly chewed"), hi-chairs ("Some stains"), car seats ("Never been in an accident"), boxes of clothes ("Assorted sizes 000 to 0") and everything else they've bought and no longer need because their kids have grown out of them.

One indispensable device is the 'Baby Bjorn', an ingenious set of straps that enables you to attach the child to your front and walk around with it. It's even better than walking a dog: I've been chatted up by more hot women in supermarkets when I had a child strapped to my front ("Oh isn't she gorgeous?") than at any other time. Clearly there's something extremely attractive and non-threatening about a man who's carrying a baby on his chest. Hmmm, maybe it's just the child?

Anyway, if you have brothers or sisters with families, they'll be thrusting stuff on you so they can clear out their garage. If you have any sense of frugality you'll accept this and applaud every dollar saved. Either way, expect to blow many thousands of dollars on all manner of stuff, from prams to potties, bibs to baby monitors, nappies to night-lights. You name it, someone is trying to sell it all to you brand new and at top-dollar, but there's no need to buy everything new and from 'premium baby brands'.

# Chapter 3 – Childbireeeeeeaaaaaaah!

I don't think I've ever been as nervous or felt as useless as I did when our first child was born. In the days leading up to it my wife was slightly apprehensive, but it was all taken out of her hands when her blood pressure dropped and she had to get to hospital in a hurry, picking me up from work on the way. Neither of us had a clue what to expect really, and we hadn't really considered what they call a birth plan.

## The birth plan

These days mothers are almost required to have a birth plan, in which (from a position of zero experience the first time) they decide how they'd like their child to come into the world: "in a pool", "at home", "naturally - with no anaesthetic", etc. This is all very nice, and perfectly valid for lots of people, but like many plans, some of them don't survive contact with the enemy.

In _Absolutely Fabulous_ , mid-labour, Edina decides that her all-natural birth plan is a load of bollocks and asks the nurse for an epidural anaesthetic, only to be told:

Nurse: "I'm sorry madam, that window of opportunity has now closed."

Edina: "WELL OPEN THE F***ING WINDOW!!!!"

Once the baby starts coming, they hook your woman up to a machine that measures the contractions. I remember sitting holding my wife's hands and watching this machine behind her. It had a red digital readout that sat at zero and, when a contraction started, wound up through the numbers showing the speed and intensity of the contraction. When it got to the point that it was going from zero to 200 in a few seconds—and she'd crushed all the bones in my hand—I thought to myself "This is utterly daft, we have all this modern medicine, let's use it."

Shortly after that the anaesthetist came in and stuck a needle in her spine and all the agony went away. That was great because it was medically possible in her case, but in lots of cases it isn't and the woman just has to suffer through it, sometimes for days. Unbelievably, when I asked what I could do to help over the next few hours while things got moving, the nurse said "Go to the pub". Good advice which I took. Three schooners calmed me down wonderfully.

There's a lot of pressure on women these days to have a 'natural birth'. Whether it's fear of anaesthesia, mistrust of the medical system, New Age concepts eschewing modern medicine, the belief that you're somehow not a 'real' woman if you can't do it unassisted, or just the idea that the woman doesn't want to be treated as a patient in hospital, there's pressure out there. There's a debate going on right now in women's forums online, newspapers, baby books, hell, in discussions around the coffee table about what the best method is. The website mybirth.com.au is just one place that has plenty of arguments in favour of the non-interventionist approach. In the end though, I reckon the best method, which will depend entirely on your woman's individual circumstances, is the one your gynaecologist recommends – they're the expert.

To me, 'natural' means a hell of a lot of agony, for hours (sometimes days) on end. I sometimes wonder whether the women you find in mothers' groups who say "Oh I did it all-natural and it was fine" are just one-upping themselves to justify the world of torture they endured, the whole time kicking themselves for not choosing a better birth plan. Let's be absolutely clear: I'm not mocking women who go through labour without pain killers, I certainly wouldn't want to do it—the screams you hear in a birthing ward could just as easily be coming from a torture cell in Abu Graibh—but we don't do major surgery like amputations without anaesthetic, so why births? Is it really a _minor_ medical event?

Births are complicated, and in some cases it isn't medically safe to have an anaesthetic, so obviously we have to listen to the obstetrician at the time and take his or her advice. If you've gone non-medical and are using a midwife, defer to them. I guess my point here is that if anaesthetic is an option available to your partner (and it might not be), then try to make sure she knows that _she has the right to use it_ and she won't be deemed weak or somehow a failure for doing so.

It's her body, she should decide.

## via vagina or 'ave Caesar'?

This leads to the next question: can't we cut the little bugger out and treat it as a surgical operation? These days, if you live in a Western country, the answer increasingly is "Yes we can", but there's also the question "Should we? What's best for the child and the mother?"

There are plenty of cases in which women have to have an emergency Caesarean section because things aren't working. The name supposedly comes from a law Julius Caesar passed to prevent the population shrinking, requiring that all women who were dying in childbirth be cut open and the child removed. No anaesthetics in those days. No survivors among the mothers either. Brutal.

Nowadays people are often electing to have a Caesarean, because, unlike in ancient Rome, they're reasonably confident they'll survive it. A lot of people are up in arms about this, saying that it can create health issues for the baby, such as breathing complications, difficulties latching onto the breast, the crossing of anaesthetics to the child during the birth, and missing out on picking up important microbes in the birth canal that leads to allergies later in life. It also takes the mother significantly longer to recover from a Caesarean because it's a major surgical operation. These are all fair enough, and excellent reasons for your woman to give birth vaginally if she can, and she wants to.

Some benefits of Caesareans, on the other hand, are that the woman gets to keep her vagina intact (very important for both of you), doesn't destroy her pelvic floor with all that pushing (ditto) and gets a small scar that, if done properly, is nearly invisible within a year or two. Lots of births actually have to be done this way if both mother and child are to survive, so if that's you, thank science for modern medicine and be thankful you weren't born in any previous century or another country with no medical system.

There's another aspect to natural birth that doesn't receive much publicity, and that's the _episiotomy_. Lovely word isn't it? Comes from the Greek _epision_ meaning "pubic region". This is where, if the mother is having trouble getting the child out, the surgeon or midwife creates a bit of room by making a surgical incision of the perineum and the back of the vaginal wall.

Okay, unclench your teeth. This isn't always required by any means, but if it is needed it takes a while to heal, and can create some fairly major physical and mental trauma for the mother. A friend of mine witnessing this at the birth of his first daughter, told me that his wife "looked like a side of raw beef". We can only hope he didn't tell her that at the time. Another fellow I used to play rugby with met his wife in the army, where he earned brownie points by shining her boots for her. At the birth of their first child, watching them sew up her episiotomy wound, he said to the nurse "Can you whack in a couple more stitches to tighten her up a bit?" He was lucky to escape _that_ ward in one piece.

There are devices you can buy to stretch the vagina in the weeks before birth to try to prevent the need for this sort of thing. It's not clear whether they work or not, but if I were a woman, I'd do anything to avoid being cut like that. You probably won't have much say in any of this. Unless there are medical complications that absolutely require a Caesarean, this decision will be up to your wife and you'll rightly be expected to back whatever decision she makes one-hundred percent. So again, if the gynaecologist or the obstetrician recommend a Caesarean for medical reasons then take them seriously. These people do this for a living after all.

## The event – blessed is he who expecteth little

Whatever plan you make, you may find your wife being rushed to hospital for an emergency Caesarean anyway. Nothing about birth is predictable: you can find yourself in hospital two days ahead of schedule because her blood pressure has gone through the roof, or the child is in the wrong position, or has decided to come early, or any number of other things. By the same token the 'big day' might pass with nothing happening for days or weeks, while she gets bigger and bigger.

Here's an example a colleague of mine experienced. His wife was scheduled for a planned Caesar, required because of some technical aspect to do with breach position she was experiencing that made a conventional birth too risky for both her and the baby. It had been put to him that without this operation, either the child or mother would most likely die, so there wasn't much choice in the matter.

Two days before the scheduled date though, the child decided she'd had enough of her mother's womb and chose to make her presence felt at 10pm. He found himself in the operating theatre at 11pm and tells me could hear the nurses whispering "Where the hell is he? Why isn't he answering his mobile?" He eventually realised that they couldn't raise either the obstetrician or the surgeon.

An hour and a half later the doctors finally showed up, and things got going at about 1am. He reckoned they'd both been out on the turps, because from where he was sitting beside his wife's head, the operation appeared to be a bloody shambles. When his daughter was finally delivered, they gave her to him and sat him in the kitchen of the birthing ward for two hours. He tells me that those two hours were totally surreal because he had his new-born daughter in his arms, while all around him there was a chorus of horrific screams coming from nearby wards as other women gave birth naturally. All rather weird for him, and a good example of how little control you have over anything.

## In hospital

Several women have told me that, apart from the pain, one of the worst aspects of their post-birth hospital experiences has been the maternity ward, in particular the nurses. Of course there are many absolutely first-class nurses out there who are sympathetic, kind, gentle, and give useful advice; but there often seems to be at least one in the ward with the bedside manner of a Gestapo-trained Doberman. Admittedly my survey covers only two hospitals, but it's a start.

One of the most difficult things for a first-time mother is all the conflicting advice. When the tiny child won't sleep or won't take the breast, or does pretty much anything, a first-time mother (and father) tends to panic, mainly because you don't have a CLUE what you're doing. The immediacy of a baby can be utterly terrifying: it's there, it's alive, it's your responsibility now, 86,400 seconds of every day for the foreseeable future. Even learning how to hold it to give it a bath makes you feel like you've got twenty thumbs.

The first few days for a new mother are often a bewildering nightmare of pain and sleeplessness, coupled with massive anxiety for the child's welfare and no idea of how to manage it. Amidst all this you've got relatives and friends turning up with flowers and stuffed bears, standing around staring at her while she's not looking her best, and on top of that, attack-nurses coming in at all hours saying "No, no, no, you're doing it all wrong, that's not how you do it, you do it _this_ way," when only five minutes before, another nurse was telling her to do whatever it was _another_ way.

It's all rather unpleasant for your wife, and after a day of it she's likely to start saying "Get me out of this hellhole". Unless there have been major complications you'll find yourself out two or three days after the birth anyway, which is better than in China, where Chairman Mao once said "Having children isn't hard, women do it all the time, they should be up and back out working in the fields the next day." Asshole, what would he know about it?

Where were we? Ah, hospital. The combination of total isolation with a child that sometimes won't sleep or won't take the breast (Incoming! Nurse approaching!) plus rip-and-tear birth or major surgery of one kind or another to recover from, not to mention infections, can make your wife feel pretty darn poorly. There's only so much power the 'miracle' of birth and the tiny fingers can make up for, so your company is invaluable.

John, a good friend of mine who has no children (and no intention of having any) once said "Miracle? What's so bloody miraculous? It happens every minute of every day all over the world." Having not witnessed his own flesh and blood emerge into the world through his wife's vagina, he doesn't have a personal perspective on this of course. He has a good point, but personally, I think it's pretty miraculous myself – a whole person made out of a sperm and an egg (and a hell of a lot of work by the mother) from what, for plenty of men, amounts to little more than a few minutes of intense pleasure?

# Chapter 4 – Your brave new world

Assuming your partner didn't decide to give birth at home in the bath or the pool or something, the trip home from hospital with your first baby is pretty surreal. If you're an idiot like me and fitted the baby capsule the wrong way around, just getting out of the hospital car park can be quite stressful. The knowledge that you have a new person in the back might make you a little more cautious on the road than usual too. This knowledge of new responsibility takes quite a bit of getting used to.

## It's life Jim, but not as we know it

The gulf between 'before', when it was all notionally theoretical and based on meaningless self-help books like this one, and 'after' when you're actually a parent, is massive. And fantastic. The knowledge that you have a whole new world of experiences ahead of you and a million things to learn is pretty challenging, but in a positive way. For the first time in your life you're genuinely responsible for someone other than yourself. If you've grown up in a society focussed almost exclusively on the individual and his or her right to have a good time, it's pretty confronting. It's also a great feeling. You feel that you have some genuine purpose, and even if that purpose might be ultimately pointless, it's _your_ purpose, no one else's, they can't take that way from you.

Most of all though, you feel like a man. You've proven to the whole world that you're not a limp-dick, you're not a no-hoper who'll never get any sex and you're not sterile. You're a father, like your father before you and his father before him and so on _ad infinitum_ , you've become part of the continuing history of the human race. As they say in Team America, "FUCK YEAH!!!!"

Before we continue, let's enjoy that again for a moment:

"FUUUUUUUCCKKKK YEEEEAAAAHHHH!!!"

How to celebrate? Some people buy a cigar (if you can find one), some go to the pub and party with their mates. It's an important moment. It's a major event, so it's worth making a big deal of it. It's possibly the last chance you'll have for quite a while.

## Giving up stuff

Your purpose in life is now completely changed and so is your day-to-day experience of life. The free-and-easy "What'll we do this weekend?" ethos you might have been used to, now has to cater to a small bundle that demands a routine of regular feeding and sleeping, so your freedom of action is savagely curtailed. This is particularly so in the first three months, after which it backs off a notch.

Both you and your woman will have to give up lots of things you used to do. Sorry, it's unavoidable. You may not think you personally need to give up much, because at this stage you're still deluding yourself that she's the only one who can really look after the kid. This is a dangerous attitude, she'll expect you to make as many sacrifices as her, and fair enough.

Get ready to stop playing sport, going out, playing music, working on your motorbike, watching TV, even reading for heaven's sake. Whatever it is you used to do with your free time is basically over because _you don't have any free time anymore_. When I took a week's leave shortly before my daughter's first birthday I had visions of relaxing at the beach, going to the cricket, taking my wife out to dinner, lying in a hammock reading the latest Jack Reacher novel. Boy was I disappointed.

I've overheard couples in cafes in Newtown in Sydney's inner-West (King St has not one, but _two_ knitting cafes now, I'm not kidding, and this is the street referenced in the Lemonheads song 'Drug Buddy' for heaven's sake) with new babies saying "Oh we're not changing anything, the baby will just have to fit in with our routine." Suckers, they'll force the kid on everyone for a few weeks, then the invitations will start drying up when their child-free friends realise how hideous it is having someone else's new-born around all the time.

Giving stuff up is one of the hardest things about having children. There's an old saying that you need to "choose any two of career, health or family, because you can't have all three", so if your career is important to you, your health or your family are going to suffer; if you devote yourself to your family, your career may suffer, etc. How to ensure you don't become just a life-support system? My friends and I have discovered that making long-term plans is the best way to ensure you see each other: if something's been planned for six months it's harder to justify cancelling it at the last minute.

## Your new routine

If our experience was anything to go by, the first six weeks is pretty hellish for the mother. For many it's a case of getting up numerous times during the night either to feed the baby, burp the baby, sing the baby to sleep, pat the baby to sleep, walk-the-baby-around-for-an-hour to sleep, and so on.

During the day it's much the same, except it's try to breastfeed the baby or try to make a breast pump work, or mix formula and sterilise bottles, change the baby, walk the baby, try desperately to do the washing and prepare dinner while the baby's asleep, then try to clean the whole mess up before husband/wife gets home to the pig-sty. In short, it's a full-on 24x7 job in which the parent is, in effect, a slave to the child's needs.

This gets pretty wearing on the mother, especially when her sleep will have become random patterns of an hour asleep—baby crying—an hour awake, two hours asleep—baby crying—an hour-and-a-half awake, an hour trying to go back to sleep, an hour-and-a-half asleep, then "Oh look, the sun's coming up—baby's crying—time to get up. OUCH that episiotomy scar hurts!"

The wonder of a new-born baby goes some way to mitigating the negatives of all of this, but don't expect your wife to be radiant with the joys of new motherhood when the baby's been screaming all night and neither of you have the faintest idea why, or more importantly, how to make it stop.

## Crying/screaming

Babies usually cry or scream for one or more of four reasons:

"I'm wet, change my nappy you idiot!"

"I'm hungry/thirsty, shove that boob in my mouth, a man's not a camel."

"I'm tired, stop shoving that boob in my face and put me to bed."

"I'm in pain, you gave me too much milk and you forgot to burp me, what are you people, bloody amateurs?"

Other sources of irritation might include, but are not limited to:

"I'm hot!"

"I'm cold!"

"I was born three weeks early and I'm pretty pissed about that!"

"You just dropped me on my head, you numbskull!"

"This bath water is boiling—you tested the temperature with your elbow—when was the last time anyone sucked your elbow because it's such a hyper-sensitive spot?"

Lots of people really never work out why their baby is crying. Others reckon that they have a slightly different type of cry for each type of discomfort (well the first four anyway) and that's about 1% helpful when it's 3am and you weren't paying much attention.

Everyone's an amateur the first time, then you forget most of it the second time. So go easy on yourself, no-one else has the faintest idea what they're doing either, whatever they tell you.

## Circumcision

We don't circumcise girls in Australia (why the hell would you do it anywhere?) but we still do some of the boys, so if you have one you'll be faced with the question of whether or not to circumcise him. There are lots of arguments about this too. Many doctors say it's cruel and unnecessary; others argue that it improves penile health and reduces the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases, including AIDS.

When our son was born we were all set to have it done, mainly because I'd had it done and we were pretty convinced by the 'for' arguments. Then the gynaecologist had a chat with us and changed our minds, saying that in the modern world it wasn't necessary and was really a hangover from the Second World War.

Huh?

As far as I can tell, circumcision originated in the Middle East many centuries ago where there's a reason for doing it: lots of sand and very little water. If you've got sand under your foreskin and it's two days to the nearest oasis, you're going to feel every bump of that camel ride. On the other hand, if you have access to a bath every day you can peel that sucker back and wash the dirt out, so it's not really necessary to cut that skin off.

I remember when I was twelve, my grandfather telling me about the un-circumcised soldiers in Egypt in 1941, lining up at the doctor's tent to be cut because they couldn't handle the constant sand-grinder operating in their pants anymore. The ones who came back from the war and had sons didn't hesitate to say "Circumcise him!" because they had experienced first-hand what could happen in an environment where you can't wash. This apparently is one source of the trend (along with various uptight people trying to suppress masturbation). Religion also plays a role. Judaism for example, requires circumcision (there's that sand thing again), while others such as Catholicism don't appear to have a strong opinion. I don't think it makes a lot of difference either way, but I gather that circumcision can reduce your enjoyment of sex by de-sensitising your penis over time.

Some women seem to prefer the 'cut' variety, but that's not necessarily a good argument for doing it either. We ended up not doing it, so at some stage in the next few years I'm going to have to have a little chat (more likely a series of them) with the boy about 'keeping it clean'.

## Looking after baby

When you've got your first new-born there's an understandable tendency to be over-protective and over-attentive:

Man: "I can't hear her breathing through the baby monitor! Quick, she's choking!"

Charges into baby room to find child sleeping peacefully (at last).

Woman: "Hmmm, did you switch the baby monitor on when you put her to bed?"

It's easy to find yourself doing things like playing with them in the bath for an hour, lying on the floor beside them making stupid noises and dangling things in front of them, and so on. There's no problem with this of course, but I found I was expecting my first child at age 9 months to understand things like the fluid dynamics of water in plastic cups. Ludicrous. I only really realised this when I got to the second child and had some point of comparison. While I'm not suggesting for a moment that neglecting a child is anything but utterly wrong, you don't need to go to the opposite extreme and play with them during their every waking minute. You'll have to spend time doing stuff around the house, and during that time they're quite happy just to _be_ , as long as they're warm, fed, have something to look at and touch and are conscious that you're around because they can hear your voice. If they get distressed they'll let you know soon enough. Talking to them is important though, it seems to be universally agreed that the more you talk to your kids the better they'll understand language and hence the better they'll do in school, so that's a good reason just to jabber on if ever you needed one.

If you need evidence of the difference, see this article in The Economist (<https://www.economist.com/babbage/2014/02/20/smart-talk>) which notes that "The number of words a child hears in early life will affect their academic success and IQ in later life. By three, children from professional families hear 30 million more words than children on welfare."

Once they start crawling (around age one, don't hold your breath), if the place is baby-proof, they can charge around and discover everything themselves. Of course you've moved the paint stripper and the chainsaw out of the floor-level cupboard haven't you?

Child-minding is extremely taxing, especially with a hangover. Being something of a night-owl, I found the worst times to be early mornings. Our children were all early risers, so to make it through the 5am-to-8am stretch when it was my turn to get up, I'd chuck the child into a chest pouch or backpack and take it for a walk, whatever the weather conditions. This passed the time, got me some exercise and beat the hell out of sitting on the lounge-room floor building endless block towers and listening to stuffed bears playing grotesque electronic renditions of Mozart, and assorted nursery rhymes which _you_ know, but which mean nothing to the child.

I now find myself waking at 5.30 everyday whether I want to or not, so I've been re-programmed by my children. Probably in lots of other ways as well that I haven't noticed yet.

## Routine, routine and more of it

Lots of baby books talk about the importance of getting into a routine, by which they mean doing things in the same order at the same time every day, especially meals and baths. They're right: the more routine you have the easier everything becomes because you don't have to think about it, you just do it. When you're in a zombie-esque state from insomnia this is important.

It also helps your child understand what's going on and what to expect. If your daughter knows that you're going to feed her, bathe her, read her a story then put her to bed, when these things happen in that order she knows it's time to fall asleep. If you're completely random and don't give them these cues they don't know what to do, so they cry, and you don't want that.

Another huge area of argument is how to deal with crying and poor sleeping. There seems to be an entire industry devoted to this question, with the usual range of conflicting advice, but one pretty obvious tip worked for us: when they cry at night or need to be changed, keep the lights off (or very dim), don't talk to them, and don't take them into your bed. You want them to stay half-asleep and go back to their cot without a murmur (good luck with that). This is just an opinion, but I reckon that once you let them into your own bed you're finished – they'll be crawling in there for years afterwards – one family I know has a five-year-old son who still invades their bed every night. Of course the opposite theory says you should have them in your bed all the time. That probably works too, but we never tried it: in our house our bed is just for the two of us.

They're crying? Our approach was to check the nappy, cuddle and rock them, sing, pat and shssssh them (for half an hour or more if necessary), then close the door and leave them to yell for a while; in most cases (not all by any means) they went to sleep soon after. Not everyone agrees with that approach, you'll have to experiment with what works for you. If it gets dire, you can always approach a family health organisation like Tresillian for advice (tresillian.org.au).

## Post-natal depression (hers and yours)

In Australia, in the first six months after a birth, your wife will either go to a local Baby Health clinic, or a nurse will visit her periodically to check up on the child and the mother. A lot of the questions the nurse asks try to identify whether the mother is suffering from post-natal depression (PND). This is a genuine illness that can render some mothers utterly helpless in the face of the demanding tyrant they've brought into the world.

When _you_ head off to work on the first day back after paternity leave, the sound of the door closing signals the start of the first of many LLLOOONNNNNGGGG days for your wife with the responsibility of looking after a child, which is something she knows sod-all about because she's never done it before. While you step back into your familiar work environment and are surrounded by adult company, she's stuck at home, alone, not earning, dependent on you and glued to the child. It can quickly get pretty bloody miserable and terrifying, and can lead to a sense of helplessness and major depression.

If your partner was previously in any kind of high-pressure corporate job where she was used to dealing with tight deadlines, presenting sales pitches, managing staff (or managers) and all the rest of the daily BS, chances are she's going to struggle with the idea that her whole life now revolves around the child in front of her. Hell, if she worked in a sandwich shop she's going to struggle. Of course, it's a high-pressure job looking after a child, but in a totally different way: you don't get much positive feedback, there's no pay, no prospects of promotion, no adult intellectual challenges, no conversation. It's a big jolt. She's facing the loss of financial independence, loss of any time for herself, loss of her freedom to go anywhere anytime. All of this is replaced with being a life support system for a completely helpless child 24x7. I don't know about you, but that would make me pretty damned depressed.

A mother who has post-natal depression is going to struggle to give the child the nurturing it needs. As with other forms of depression, she'll most likely also struggle to drag herself out of her state of despair. It's a serious mental condition, and there's always the possibility that your child may be better off being cared for by you, a nanny, a grandparent or someone who is a constant presence who _isn't_ depressed. That smacks of the Stolen Generation and it's a very tough call to make, as taking the child away from its mother may make things worse for both of them. So if you think she's suffering PND don't muck about, get some professional advice. You can speak to the Baby Health nurse and make a start at panda.org.au and beyondblue.org.au

Keeping a close eye on your wife to see how she's coping is critical, for you too—your life will rapidly become a misery if she suffers from PND. Lots of women suffer from it, and men too not surprisingly, so there shouldn't be a stigma associated with it (although there is of course). Plenty of men have a personal crisis when they become a father. Whether it's the new responsibility, the sense of financial burden, the understanding of what their life is now going to be like, there can be a lot of pressure on men, and lots of them get depressed by it. They might start drinking more, staying late at the office to avoid the changed home environment, feel overwhelmed or trapped, irritable, helpless, angry and disconnected from their family and friends. The idea that "Oh she'll be alright, it's only a baby after all" is dangerously naïve. There's no shortage of cases where the mother or father has smothered or otherwise 'accidentally' killed their child because they simply couldn't cope with it.

Don't let that happen to you. Look out for signs that she's struggling, or that you're struggling. Examples of this include crying at odd times, a sense of despair, extremes of emotion, or most importantly, a lack of interest in the child and a reluctance to want to hold it. It's worth keeping one eye on her and one on yourself during the first six months – if you're the unobservant or forgetful type like me, consider putting an entry in your diary or your phone every week to remind you.

And remind her every day of what a great job she's doing, and how important and difficult her role as a mother is. People seem to have the misbegotten idea that mothering involves sitting around doing nothing all day. Nothing could be further from the truth: try it yourself for a day and see how you handle it.

## Worry

A mate of mine suggested that I mention the new role of 'worry' in your life. I hadn't given much thought to this but of course he's right: whether you're conscious of it or not, you worry about your children a lot. Are they going to make it out of the womb alive? Is my wife going to survive the birth? Is the child going to die mysteriously of SIDS or one of a thousand other possible causes? When they start walking are they going to fall down the stairs or get mauled by a dog?

The list is endless, and women seem to do a lot more worrying than men, or is it just that they talk about it more? It's almost an involuntary hobby for some people, it keeps their mind in a fever pitch, but there's no doubt you start doing it too. Ultimately there's only so much you can do protect your kids, and being a lawn-mower parent smoothing the path isn't doing them any favours, they need to learn by making mistakes, just like you did. I suspect you just have to let your kids scrape through and keep a vigilant eye out for the really dumb errors that _you_ can make, like dropping them on their head when you're taking them out of the pram to put them in the shopping trolley (yep, I've done it twice).

## Surviving on one income

Let's say you've had the money discussion, in a theoretical sense, before the birth. Now you have to deal with it in reality. If you were optimistic and decided "It's okay, I'll work overtime to make up the difference," you're now realising that this really isn't a viable option, especially if you're responsible for operating heavy machinery.

If you can manage to keep your kid out of childcare, great; if not, don't go bankrupt trying to keep one parent at home. On the other hand, try to avoid a situation in which she goes back to work while you stay at home against your will to mind the child and end up feeling stuck. This will just lead to resentment, the relationship-killer.

Many men find the idea of being a stay-at-home Dad the ultimate emasculation, but the ones I know who've done it—because their wife earns more than they do, or has PND for example—are _without exception_ happy about the decision. They have the chance to spend time with their children in their formative years, instead of being "out working late, making another man rich" (thank you Ian Moss). Most of them still work part-time and have flexible time and fulfilling lives. I've not met one yet who said "Gee I wish I'd spent those early years working."

Discussing these things un-emotively when you're both exhausted is bloody hard, which is why it's worth having this discussion before you have the child.

## Sleep, or the lack of it

You know those days when you've had to turn up to work after being out on the town until 2am? Days that stretch out in an endless desert of exhausted hangover? No? Well you're about to find out. Expect the first six weeks to be like that every day, perhaps with less hangover, depending on how much you self-medicate every night with booze. Heck, what's six weeks? It's only thirty working days after all. Could be worse.

Things to remember when you're this tired include:

if you're driving, you're the equivalent of having a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 in terms of ability

at work you need to concentrate really hard or you'll make stupid and avoidable mistakes, plus you're likely to be rather short-tempered

opportunities for a cat nap, wherever or however, are gold—don't pass any up.

Oh yes, expect the nocturnal interruptions to go for a few years.

## Sex, or the lack of it

Many couples experience a major dip in their sex lives after having kids. There's rarely an opportunity, and by the end of each day your wife will almost certainly be exhausted, and there's no turn-off like exhaustion. Unfortunately you just have to adapt. If you haven't needed to take care of this yourself for years because your wildcat lover has been molesting you, you may have to start spanking the monkey again.

If you're using porn to supplant the lack of sex, remember that it can be addictive: the more you use it the more inured to it you can become, so you need more extreme versions, and sex with your wife may start to seem mundane by comparison. This is a dangerous situation for your long-term happiness.

Surveys have shown that the most avid consumers of porn are men between 35 and 50 who are married with children (surprise!). One fellow I met recently said he _prefers_ watching porn to dancing the mattress polka with his wife, and that's tragic for everyone. So blow the froth off now and again if you need to, but keep some lead in your pencil for when your wife really does want to do it. If you can't deliver when she wants you, she'll start worrying that you don't find her attractive anymore, then she'll stop initiating any kind of sex and you'll be worse off than you were before. Worst-case, she'll look elsewhere (yes, infidelity is not limited to men, shocking isn't it?).

Things will improve with time, you just have to be patient.

# Chapter 5 – After year one...

The first year with the first child is tough. It gets tougher each time you have another child, because you have to go through that first year again while also looking after other kids who are probably two (pretty hellish) or three (even worse). Three children isn't three times as hard as one, it's three cubed.

Cheer up, once they reach about four or five they're past the worst of the yelling and screaming and can even do things themselves: make their own breakfast, have a shower and dress themselves afterwards, clean up their room and make their own beds. Incredible, but true.

As they get a bit older, your house starts to look less like the Baghdad Toys 'r' Us store after a cruise missile strike, and more like somewhere you'd want to live. You can also find the odd bit of time for yourself occasionally, and experience brief moments of total silence when all your kids are sitting quietly reading books or building block towers.

## Yes, that is light you can see at the end of the tunnel

When you're neck-deep in the baby zone it can feel like it's never going to end, but there genuinely will come a night when the child sleeps through for eight hours, even if you don't; there will come a day when you can get them from dinner time to bedtime without anyone losing it and screaming the house down; you will have many glorious moments where you and your wife laugh your heads off at something your child has just said or done.

You'll also take them swimming at the beach, fishing in the river, walking in the bush, teach them how to climb at the playground, dance with them in the kitchen (my eldest's current favourite is 'Rock the Casbah'), wrestle with them on the bed and be amazed over and over again at the way they develop from blobs into little humans.

## Tell 'em you love 'em

Fathers are particularly guilty of not telling their children that they love them. "I love you"—it's not that hard, and what son or daughter doesn't want to hear his father say those words?

A solid and decent man I know, let's call him Richard, said to me recently that his parents never told him that they loved him. "There was affection in the house," he said, "but no one ever actually said the words. It left me feeling pretty empty." He ended up with a massive gambling habit that ruined his life and took him years to overcome. Maybe not the sole cause, but words aren't little things when they come from your parents.

As a father, the importance of letting your daughters and sons know that you think they're wonderful can't be overstated. An immensely talented artist I know was called 'Birdbrain' by her father for years, simply because she was a very spirited second child and he couldn't stay calm enough to handle her. She responded to this name-calling by spending years thinking she was stupid, and also by deciding to be major pain-in-the-ass to her father as a teenager, including going out with a series of inappropriate men that he was convinced she chose just to piss him off. Whether she did or not doesn't matter, their relationship was bent out of shape by a relatively small (but consistent) piece of verbal abuse that he then spent years trying to un-say. He even took up hang-gliding at age 50 because she was interested in it, so he could spend some time with her.

In his book _Scar Tissue_ , Anthony Kiedis, lead singer of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, talks about his dad. By his description, Dad was basically a drug-dealing drifter who got a girl pregnant, pissed off, then turned up every now and again, off his head, and took the boy out for a good time. Kiedis idolised him, then, when he was old enough, developed a massive smack habit and a few years later, after almost destroying his band, ended up shooting up speedballs with a dirty needle under a bridge in LA with a bunch of bums and gangbangers he'd never met. This was the inspiration for his lyrics in their big hit 'Under the bridge', but what a way to get there.

Never underestimate your power to screw your kids up. A British psychologist, Oliver James, wrote a book about this that's worth reading ( _They fuck you up,_ selfishcapitalist.com), in which he points out that you're never the same parent to all of your children—you behave differently to each of them—and that you're highly likely to repeat whatever your parents did to you. He got the title from the first line of a Philip Larkin poem called 'This be the verse' in which the poet recommends not having any children yourself for this very reason.

Kids are sensitive, they need your love of them to be unconditional and to be re-affirmed constantly. Hell, we can all remember being a child. Do you recall the things that made you upset? The things that made you happy? Most of it came down to how much respect your parents gave you as a person, and how much affection they gave you.

So, tell your kids you love them. You don't have to praise them or tell them they're brilliant at something when they're not, just saying the words "I love you" often is enough. Try to make a genuine emotional connection. And while you're at it, tell your wife the same thing.

## Keeping them busy

It might sound old-school, but we didn't let our children watch anything on TV or on a computer until they were two years old, and then we kept it to a minimum. Now they're older we still limit screen time of all kinds. The television (and the iPad) is an incredibly effective nanny, if all you want a nanny to do is keep your children occupied and quiet, but it so isn't great for your kids' brains.

There are any number of studies out there about the potentially harmful effects of television on small minds, but the one that really stuck in my mind was by Dr Allan Kanner of the Wright Institute of Child Psychology. He found that by the time an American child is three years old, it can recognise an average of 100 brand logos.

Do you really want your child to have that sort of talent when you're forced to take them with you to do the shopping? We've all seen the harassed parent standing in the aisle of the supermarket or toy store while the child has a spasm on the floor, red-faced and screaming "I WANT A <insert name of toy/sweet here>". By not letting our kids watch commercial TV, and only letting them watch half an hour of a DVD once a day we've managed to avoid that fate, so far at least. The flipside is that they're so starved of TV that they'll watch it for hours given the slightest opportunity. Tricky.

As a kid growing up in the 1970s, my family didn't have a TV until I was nine, when our cousins got a colour one and gave us their old black and white. At that point I had a lot of catching up to do on things like Merry Melodies, Get Smart, Doctor Who, The Goodies and so on, that everyone at school had been raving about. The result of not having a TV (or an X-Box) was that I spent those years of my childhood running around in the local creek playing commandos with my friends, making model aircraft and strangely enough, reading: I scoured my Dad's bookshelves and read Ian Fleming's _Casino Royale_ when I was eight, and while I didn't understand much of what was going on in the story, I learnt a lot of new words. Of course, my parents had created my whole interest in books by reading to me every night before I went to bed: I knew where stories came from.

Commercial television won't teach your kids how to read, or make them any friends, but it will teach them exceptional brand recognition skills. Advertising people understand that the best time to hook someone on a brand is when they're young and their minds are Play-Doh that can be freely moulded. If you wonder why a lot of people today seem obsessed with the pursuit of a materialistic high, based on buying consumer goods on credit, look no further than the television they watched as kids: they were programmed into it, just as surely as the Chinese students who rounded up and shot their teachers in the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Little Red Book, or Nickelodeon with ads every three minutes? Could be argued that they're just different flavours of indoctrination. Same goes for computer games and apps that play tunes strongly reminiscent of the music on poker machines – familiarise them early.

Of course, not relying on television or an iPad to act as a nanny for you means you have to work a lot harder (or hire a nanny). You have to get down on the floor with your kids and play games, you have to read books to them, let them 'help' you cook dinner or change the washer on the tap, take them out to the playground, and whatever else you can think of to pass the time. Hard work, but it all pays off in the end: there's nothing more satisfying than watching your child entertaining her or himself with something you were doing together a few days before.

## Having trouble creating number two, or three...

This section is in here for those men who agree to have more than one child, then discover that they can't get their partner pregnant. We can probably assume you know the basics—if not, there's no shortage of guides out there—but there can be a big gap between having sex and actually getting pregnant. Some couples seem to do it without any difficulty at all, while others struggle with outrageously expensive IVF treatments for years and never succeed. Clearly it's not as simple as it looks. And it's not her fault either.

Some people just wake up one morning and decide "it's time we got pregnant". Some of them even feel the need to tell their friends about it "Oh yes, we're trying for a baby." As if we want to know? We have to think about you having sex now? Most men I know don't talk about sex that much, or at all, until they're "trying for a child", and that isn't sexy, whatever position you're doing it in. And this is the point. I've known several couples who've 'decided' they're going to get pregnant and have wound up a year later with no foetus and their sex life in tatters. Why? Because they've put pressure on themselves, and without even realising it, they've changed the entire point of having sex into some deterministic life goal: "Marry ideal life partner by 32, tick!" "Have first child by 35, tick!"

Good plan, but sex and expectations don't mix. Everyone I know who's taken this approach and hasn't got lucky very quickly has ended up bitter and turned off sex: the woman thinks she's a failure for not conceiving, and the bloke thinks he's impotent because he can't impregnate his wife. The result is that enthusiasm for sex disappears; it becomes a chore and therefore no fun anymore. Consider Jamie and Liz, a couple I know who 'tried' for a year. Jamie is a muso who is almost perpetually stoned. Ever since high school he's been a pot-head of the first order and could be relied on to turn up late or not at all to every event. He and his girlfriend were peas in a pod and seemed to have a pretty funky kind of life, with plenty of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll keeping it all kicking along. Then one night at a party Jamie announced that they were planning on getting pregnant, so Liz had insisted that he give up booze, fags and dope, at least until he got her pregnant. She'd read somewhere that these things reduce the chance of conceiving by messing with the sperm count, so "if you want any sex, hop on the temperance wagon boy." She was right of course (see  https://healthengine.com.au/info/how-tobacco-alcohol-and-drugs-affect-sperm).

Jamie though, was fully expecting to turn up the following week and say "Hooray, she's pregnant, pack me the next cone," but it didn't turn out that way. Six months later, after suffering savage withdrawal from abandoning all three of his chemical crutches at once, he said to us one night, "God help me, the only time I ever get any sex at all now is when she's ovulating." Ben Elton wrote a truly agonising—and no doubt heavily autobiographical—depiction of how grim this is in his book _Misconception_.

A few weeks later Jamie told us he was thinking of breaking up with Liz. Thankfully at this point they realised their error, gave up 'trying' and went back to taking drugs and 'bonking for the fun of it'. Lo and behold, she had one in the oven within a few months. Now they're happily married with three completely normal kids and they've even managed to give up the fags.

Okay that's only one story, and not an argument in favour of conceiving while smashed off your face, but the point is not to concentrate on getting pregnant, concentrate on having the best sex you've ever had. Once you actually succeed in your aim and make your woman pregnant, your sex life will be, to all intents and purposes, over for a while, and by the time you get it back you'll both be older, less fit and you'll have much less time for it. Her body may have changed internally (children make things move around) and she may well have a different attitude to sex, seeing as she now knows first-hand what the practical consequences are.

## What about IVF?

You can find out all about the technicalities of in-vitro fertilisation online at IVF Australia (ivf.com.au _)_ , but what it can be reduced to is that it's an expensive, sometimes painful, drawn-out process, with numerous consultations and sometimes invasive procedures for the woman, with no guarantee of success. Those who do succeed often end up with twins, because the doctors implant multiple eggs just in case one of them doesn't make it.

This is clearly a big topic and if you're considering IVF you need expert advice, but one thing to think about is how do you prepare for the bitter disappointment if things don't work out? Perhaps one way is to put a limit on it: "We can afford to try this three/four/however many times, and if it hasn't worked after that we're going to have to get on with our lives without kids."

This is tough if you're intent on having a big family. It's something you'll need to mourn and it'll take a while to get over it. One woman I know who tried many times and never succeeded has never really recovered from it. She loves children, but every encounter with them is bittersweet for her because none of them are hers. There are support organisations out there to help with this who can provide counsellors, so if you find yourself in this situation you might want to call them.

# Chapter 6 – And after that...

It's usually the small things that push you over the edge, such as the extra thirty seconds you have to wait when, half-an-hour before bedtime, you finally give in and put a DVD on. The legal warning, anti-pirating video and production credits at the start of _The Wiggles_ or _Pepa Pig_ seem to stretch on for two years, mainly because you know that the moment the show comes on you'll be able to have a few minutes to do something without a small child demanding something from you.

## Keeping your cool under pressure

I generally find it impossible to keep my cool around my kids, especially in public. Forget the Blitz, "Keep calm and carry on" could be the mantra for parents with small children, because the moment you lose your temper, everything goes to hell. Do it often enough and your children start mimicking you and become temperamental little shits who yell back at you.

Few things are more exasperating than hearing the language and tone you used on them yesterday when they were misbehaving, being thrown in your teeth. My father reckoned that if kids are yelling, fighting or whining you should just ignore it unless they're going to hurt themselves or each other. This isn't practical in public of course, but you can't hit them either, so finding a way to keep them under control in public is important.

## Being consistent

Threats of withholding all possibility of nice things generally works for me, but the hardest thing is being _consistent_. Apparently forming a strong emotional bond that doesn't rely on threats is the trick long-term. This takes real in-the-trenches close attention to all your interactions with the child, so you don't lose your temper and instead respond in a sensible way that you know they'll respond positively to. Sounds obvious enough, but it's bloody hard to do in practice because of the immense patience required. One and two-year olds don't process logic in any way we understand, they're working on a different level that requires you to re-program your own mind to think like them. Many of the behaviours your parents taught you (and you're now passing on) they haven't absorbed yet, so expecting them to understand the rules is unrealistic. A strong emotional bond sounds good though, I'm working on it. What will help you achieve it is consistency.

Children LOVE consistency and routine. They get really confused about what the rules are if they aren't applied consistently: "I got away with this yesterday, what's the problem today?" Answer: Daddy has a hangover today and is in a really foul mood. If it helps, print your rules out on sheets of paper and stick them up around the house. The kids can't read, but it might help you to remember and apply the rules yourself in moments of crisis.

Being a parent is very confronting to your sense of self: it's a massive personal challenge. If you can keep your cool when you have three kids all yelling at you, and bring the situation under control by being cool and calm and getting a laugh out of it, then you can consider yourself Ice Man and give yourself a pat on the back. If you can avoid yelling back, you're demonstrating the kind of self-control you want them to have when they grow up.

And if you really can't keep your cool, under no circumstances take your family camping in a caravan park.

##  Making sure your children aren't jerks

In her book _Gulag_ about the Soviet labour camps, historian Annie Applebaum devotes a chapter to the children who were born in these hideous places. Taken away from their mothers, they were kept in filthy cots day and night, fed and changed once a day and left to cry at the ceiling the rest of the time. Deprived of any kind of maternal comfort, these children never grasped the first thing a baby usually works out: that it can trust its parents.

When they grew up, these kids were totally incapable of trusting anyone, had no sense of morality or sympathy for anyone else, and would do whatever it took to make sure they got what they needed. This made them the perfect recruits for the Russian mafia that basically ran these labour camps – the sort of charming people you can see in the movie _Eastern Promises_.

Why does every society have murderers, rapists, child molesters and the rest? It's not just genetics, although that accounts for some of it, it's how these people's parents raised them. Hitler thought it was all about genetics, and he was a fine example of why it isn't. His parents were a shambles who laid the groundwork in his childhood for mental illness on a grand scale: his father was a disciplinarian who belted him, while his mother doted on him completely. Not a lot of parental consistency there.

We've seen it before and since and we'll see it again. Lunatics like Josef Stalin and Mao-Tse Tung, who between them murdered around 60 million people, were both abused or neglected by their fathers. These are the most extreme examples available, but Ivan Milat's dad was a heavy drinker who beat his wife, while his mother beat the kids. Once you have children, you have a responsibility to them and everyone else to bring them up responsibly. Neglect them or abuse them and you never know what kind of monster you might be thrusting upon the world. If your parents were horrible to you, do you want to repeat their mistakes with your own kids?

## Letting them work it out

Your children deserve the chance to decide for themselves what they want to be or do when they grow up, and it's our job as parents to give them the opportunity to work out what that is. If we fail to achieve what we wanted in our own lives, is it fair to take it out on our kids by forcing them to be over-achievers, or expecting them to succeed in the same thing we failed at?

Consider the US television shows where the mothers get their four-year-old daughters all dressed up and in full make-up and put them in beauty pageants. How many of those mothers had to do the same thing when they were kids? Even if they didn't, what sort of message are they sending their daughters? "No sweetheart, you won't be a doctor or a teacher or a policewoman, what's important is that you look nice and smile sweetly. Now get out there and win goddamnit!"

Of course you're going introduce your children to the things you're interested in, that'll happen by default, but if they show no interest in your 'thing' you have to just let it go. I'd love it if one of my kids turned out to be a great singer/songwriter, but I'm not going to push them to be that.

In his book _Harpo Speaks!_ Harpo Marx writes about one of his sons who decided early on that when he grew up he was going to be a mechanic and have a garage called 'Lou's Garage'.

"But your name's not Lou," says Harpo.

"Doesn't matter, that's what a garage should be called," replies the boy.

So instead of forcing their kids into a life in show business (like Harpo's mother had), Harpo and his wife let them decide what they wanted to do. This particular son left school at 15, became an apprentice mechanic, opened his own garage ( _Lou's_ of course), got married and had three kids and was happy as a pig in mud.

## Show me some discipline, I'll show you mine

This leads to the question of discipline: how do you do it?

Small children can keep you in a state of almost continual confrontation that varies wildly from one minute to the next. Coping with this without losing your temper (or your mind) is not easy. I once asked my father what his single most useful piece of advice was about dealing with children. He said "viable threats".

There's a lot of wisdom in those two words, because it doesn't matter what the threat is as long as it meets two criteria: one, the child will really care a lot about it happening (whatever 'it' is); and two, you have to be willing and able to carry it out. Whether your threat is: withholding TV-watching or iPad rights, or being smacked on the bottom, it has to meet those criteria. If the threat is weak the child won't care, and if you don't follow through they'll know you don't mean it. Either way, you've lost the confrontation.

These days it's all about ignoring tantrums, asking structured questions and negotiating requests, which is all a shedload harder than whacking the kid and telling them to shut up. Surprisingly, it's also lot more effective once you learn how to do it (still a work in progress for me and I suspect most parents). This is because if you want your kids to obey you they have to either _fear_ you or _respect_ you.

If you want them to obey you out of fear, and you're not concerned about DOCS coming and taking your kids away from you, you could try smacking them. This will make it difficult for them to understand what you mean when you tell them you love them, when only ten minutes before you were laying it on with a will. Violence is fundamentally the last resort of cowards, and on the few occasions I've smacked my kids on the bottom out of sheer desperation it's left me feeling like an utter failure afterwards. If I can't cope with a four year-old, what kind of a man am I?

Bear in mind too that the fear effect will lessen the more you do it, and as they get older and bigger. By the time they're teenagers and too big to smack anymore, you'll be high and dry with no techniques for dealing with them and they'll have no respect for you at all, and one day your son will hit you back harder than you can hit him. Many people who received beltings as kids can remember the punishment vividly, but can't for the life of them remember what they were being punished for, which just goes to show how ineffective it was.

So, let's delete fear as an option. That leaves us with having to earn their respect.

This requires the ability to remain calm and reasonable while you ignore the 120-decibel screaming, door-slamming, floor punching and so on, which is usually triggered by something trivial such as giving them milk in a cup that's the wrong colour. In my limited experience, tantrums usually peter out after about ten minutes, at which point you can try to have a sensible conversation with the child about the issue, ask them why they were upset, how they could have handled it differently and so on (in short, make it _their_ problem).

There's absolutely no point in trying to reason with a screaming child. They're not open to logic, reason or any of that stuff, all you'll do by attempting it is turn up the heat on your internal pressure cooker. You have to wait until they cool down. This might involve removing them from the room, or if you're in public, getting them the hell out of earshot of everyone else so they don't have to put up with it too (this is difficult on planes).

Disobedience isn't all screaming though, a lot of it is about testing boundaries: "Can I get away with this? Ooops, maybe not. Perhaps I'll try this then..." Children don't know what the boundaries are and if you don't make them clear, they won't understand and will keep testing until you're driven mad.

I generally find the best way to make two year-olds stop giggling and kicking you in the balls while you try to change their stinking nappy is to tickle them. This provides the dual satisfaction of making them laugh while you impose your will on them and get the job done. Humour is without doubt the most effective mechanism for dealing with children: if you can master the ability of turning stressful situations into funny situations and make everyone laugh, then you can consider yourself a child-rearing genius.

## Many people without kids don't like kids

I hate kids. Well, I love mine, but even they regularly drive me to the point where I find myself muttering "Bloody children! Why did we ever have them?" several times a week. Worse than your own kids though, is other people's.

You can tell your own to behave, deprive them of privileges, take them outside and yell at them if they're being outrageously bad, but you have no control over anyone else's. If you want to experience parent-rage, try telling a mother whose child is being a little dickhead what she should be doing to get him or her under control (Christos Tsiolkas's book _The Slap_ covered the potential social consequences of this sort of intervention brilliantly).

It's amazing how many parents fail to do even the simplest things to control their children in public. I imagine we've all experienced parents who expect everyone else to smile indulgently while their children terrorise the place or yell and carry on. The flip-side is that once you have your own children you need to teach them to behave in public. If you take them to a restaurant for example, you might want to consider the other diners. This could involve:

taking your children outside after you've ordered and bringing them back in when the food arrives

keeping them quiet and not letting them run around the place

taking something for them to do.

Sound obvious? Many parents do none of the above. The same goes for travel: if you take them on a long plane flight, be ready to spend every minute keeping them busy so the long-suffering people around you don't have their flight destroyed by your insensitivity.

## "I want a divorce"

This is right up there with "Darling? I'm pregnant!" as the most shocking thing you're likely to hear your wife say.

Statistics are often malleable, but according to sexualhealthaustralia.com.au, roughly one in every three marriages in Australia ends in divorce, with more than half initiated by the woman, and just under half involving children. Add separations to that and it's sometimes hard to see why people bother getting married, and apparently fewer people are. If you're not planning on having kids, then getting married is certainly a nice gesture of commitment to your woman, and presumably she'll appreciate it, but if she doesn't care about marriage, then why bother? If you're planning on having kids, it might make sense to get married so they won't be 'bastards'. They'll be little bastards plenty of times, but if you're married, then at least technically speaking, they're not 'born out of wedlock' or something similar. Not many people in Australia really care about this legitimacy concept anymore, so whether you get married or not is up to you.

One thing's for sure and certain though, once you have children you are, in-effect, wedded to their mother for a long time, whether you're de facto, married or divorced. They say pets are for life, not just for Christmas, well it's the same with babies, only longer. If you split up from your wife while your children are young, you'll still have to be in contact with her on at least a weekly basis about the kids for at least a decade, even if you live on opposite sides of the country. If you can bear to hear her voice after the split, this will be hideous enough; if you've had a bitter and acrimonious falling out and a horrible slashing divorce, you're not going to want to have anything to do with her and You Will Be In Hell. What's more, you're likely to lose a good chunk of everything you own (including your superannuation) and may have to pay child support for decades.

Don't expect any favours, or full (or even any) custody of your children. 50-50 is a good outcome, and with good reason the Family Court expresses its approach like this: "When a court makes a parenting order, the Family Law Act requires it to regard the best interests of the child as the most important consideration. Parents are encouraged to use this principle when making parenting plans." (familycourt.gov.au)

Encouraged. That's one emotion you won't be feeling if you find yourself in this situation. If you end up in court in a divorce battle or custody dispute, whatever judgement is passed down, you can reasonably expect to be taken to the cleaners by the lawyers on both sides. Focussing on the best interests of the child requires you, once again, to put yourself and your partner second. If you've spent more than a year raising a child together you should be used to that.

I know quite a few men in this situation, some of whom married overseas, or married women who came here from overseas. These ones are in a bad place because governments in general are particular about allowing children out of the country. One old friend moved to the USA, married a girl there and had two kids. She's now divorced him and isn't really interested in the children, so he got 100% custody of them. Despite this, it took him three years of negotiation to bring them back here, because they're American citizens and he's an Aussie. A friend of my wife's married a girl from Thailand and they had two daughters. Things started to go pear-shaped and she divorced him and the split their assets 50-50. Now he's in a permanent state of fear that she's going to nick off back to Thailand with the girls, where, in his words "she'd be able to live like a queen" with the money she got from the divorce. He can barely stand talking to her, but she's a permanent fixture in his life. It's a terribly sad story, and the two girls have to grow up with it as their lot, whether they like it or not. In a divorce, the children don't get a choice, they get what they're given.

Apparently women file for more divorces than men. If the couples I know are at all a representative sample, then that's a pretty accurate statement, and given what I know about men, it makes sense. Some of these splits are no-doubt handled in an adult fashion, with both parties carrying on afterwards with equanimity, splitting the child-rearing duties and starting new relationships. There are plenty of divorcees with children out there looking for partners and making their own unique twist on the Brady Bunch, so there's clearly life after divorce.

What does this all boil down to? Finding ways to keep your relationship happy and fun in the face of the challenges of raising children so you never hear the 'D' word.

## Surviving the monogamy

Once you have kids it's more important than ever that you keep your relationship with your wife or partner strong and above all, FUN. You got together because you had fun together right? Because she was a great conversationalist, and okay, because she was so hot in bed, and you couldn't help but fall in love with her. And after you have kids you have to find ways through all the exhaustion, nappies and yelling to keep the things that brought you together alive.

One of the most important ways, happily enough, is sex.

My ex-father-in-law once said to me "If it isn't happening in the bedroom, it isn't happening." He was a wise man, a highly-placed government official, who also advised me against having children. As I said, a wise man.

It's appallingly easy to let your relationship wither under the frontal assault of child-rearing, but if you let the intimacy fade then your relationship will fall apart, and you'll end up only seeing your kids every second weekend and be tied permanently to your now ex-wife.

Unless you got your girlfriend pregnant by accident, you presumably only had kids because you were in love with your woman in the first place. If you let the love between you and her dissipate, then all you have left is the children, and That Sucks. People who have children believing it will 'save their relationship' are quite simply deluded, all it will do is bind you permanently into a situation that's already disintegrating. So if your partner starts talking like that, call her on it and discuss what you really think your future looks like.

Call me obsessed if you will, but if you view a relationship as a house, then I reckon sex is the mortar holding the bricks together. It's pretty unlikely that your relationship is going to hell if you're having sex once or twice a week. Sex requires closeness and it generates closeness, so it's ESSENTIAL that you both get back in the collective saddle as soon as possible after having a child.

How? You could try doing again the little things you used to do that made her fall in love with you in the first place. Can't take her out to dinner? Make her dinner instead. Had to give up sport and turned into a fat bastard? Start doing the Seven-Minute Challenge every day and cut back on the chips.

Here are few other things you might consider:

tell her she's a wonderful mother and doing a fantastic job

tell her she's beautiful three times a week

clean stuff up, then clean more stuff up (children make a huge amount of mess)

tell her you love her every second day and give her a hug

do the washing up

change as many nappies as you can

give her a foot massage

get up at 12.56am, 2.13am and 4.27am to give the baby its bottle

tell her she's a wonderful mother and doing a fantastic job

give the children their bath

offer to brush her hair

read the kids their bedtime stories

tell her she's a wonderful mother and doing a fantastic job

take the children out of the house for a few hours

get up in the middle of the night to rock the children back to sleep

buy her a voucher for a spa treatment

grab her from behind occasionally and give her a kiss on the neck so she knows you're interested

tell her she's a wonderful mother and doing a fantastic job

offer to mind the kids for a weekend so she can go away with her girlfriends and have some time out.

Sounds like you have to do all the work? Well I'm sure she'll appreciate it if you manage to do even two things on that list.

You never know, she might even want to take you to bed.

## Avoiding becoming another chore

One aspect of parenthood that's difficult to deal with is the realisation that you're no longer the main focus of your wife's love and affection. The children take over that position, the husband coming in a distant second. This is understandable, because a mother's maternal instinct to look after her chicks is, literally, instinctive (Oxford Dictionary: acting without conscious intention, an innate compulsion), and what's more, you could leave at any time, but the kids can't. This is a rather grim fact, but if you consider that if you don't have children, then unless you're capable of extraordinary personal re-invention, your partner may well get sick of the sight of you after ten years anyway, and you'll be in the same boat.

Once you have small children in the house, there's always a risk that—from your wife's perspective anyway—sex with you becomes another chore on her endless list; just one more example of having to meet someone else's needs while no one is considering hers. One solution to this is to make sure that on those occasions that you do get her into bed, you take extra care to remind her why she's there. You're likely to be pressed for time, but if you can, consider applying the two-for-one principle: before you have an orgasm, make sure she's had two. How you go about this makes no difference, but if you make sure she comes as many times as possible before you do, you'll remind her of at least one reason why she got together with you in the first place.

# Chapter 7 – So why do it at all?

By this stage you're probably thinking, "Bloody hell, this sounds like a lot of misery, why have children at all?"

I've asked a lot of fathers with young children what they think are the positive aspects of being a parent. All but a few of them look a bit startled at this question and stare off into space for a few moments before getting embarrassed and saying something like "That's a really tough question," or "I'm struggling a bit with that". One bloke said "I enjoy the big welcome when I come home" but his kids are all over five now, which makes a huge difference (they can walk, talk and recognise you for a start). My oldest friend, a lawyer with three boys (including twins, God help him) describes parenting as "The World's Greatest Ponzi Scheme".

Every person eventually comes up with an answer, lots of different reasons, many of them intangible, but one aspect is common to all of them: having children is a fundamentally rewarding and enriching experience, partly because it _is_ _so tough_.

A school principal I know—a man who exudes wisdom, leadership and vision like the rest of us mortals exude sweat—summed it up beautifully when I put this question to him. He said "Children give you the chance to experience trust, vulnerability, love, living in the moment, having time to play, seeing things for the first time, awakening, wonder and joy, all in the space of an hour."

Ask yourself honestly: how often do you experience any of those sensations in a typical day at the office?

## You mean it's not all about me?

Until the day you bring your first child home, your universe typically revolves around one person's needs: yours. What you're going to do, eat, wear, see, hear, feel—it's often about how you gratify your own desires.

Sure, you're in love and you care deeply about your partner, and, depending on your family, you may also have a lot of time and affection for your parents and siblings, you may even be heavily involved in charity work, but at rock-bottom, a lot of what many of us do is about self-gratification.

This changes abruptly when you have children. Their utter helplessness forces you to put their needs above yours. This can be pretty confronting ("You want what? Oh God, can I please sit down and have a beer?"), but it represents a major shift in your relationship to the world. In short, you have to grow up and become an adult pretty damn quick.

I'm not saying that people without children never grow up (although it's a lot easier to sustain a Peter Pan syndrome without a squalling infant around), only that the massive responsibility that a child represents is something you can't ignore and you can't back out of. Parenthood is a one-way ticket—once you're on the kiddy train there's no jumping off—and men who abandon their wife and a young family need to have a damned good reason (although I'm struggling to think of one). If the relationship you have with your girlfriend isn't rock-solid, then having children may hand you a lot of misery along with the joyous bits. I hope I've shown enough examples to demonstrate this.

So what's good about having children? Well, there's a certain sense of satisfaction that you've grown up and you're finally an adult—you're not just chasing your own tail trying to have a good time, you have to behave responsibly, like your parents did (or perhaps not, let's hope they set a good example).

There are a few other perks too.

## Love

Once your children get to about two or three years old they start to become capable of telling you that they love you. Before that though, they show you that they do in a thousand ways: holding the little hand of your daughter as you walk along is enough to make even the hardest of male hearts melt; hearing their tiny voices asking you to do something; laughing with them as you wrestle on the bed or throw them in the air; the list goes on and on but it's meaningless really—you have to experience it yourself.

But the key point is that the more you interact with your children, the more fun you'll have with them and the more you'll come to love them and vice versa. They're totally dependent on you for a long time, but if you ignore them and shun them, expect them to do the same to you once they're old enough to manage without you.

In moments of extremity I've often said "The only thing that's keeping that child alive right now is the fact that she's so goddamned cute." And it's true: cuteness is often their only defence, but it's an impenetrable defence.

Sometimes just looking at their little bonsai faces and stick-figure arms you become overwhelmed by their vulnerability. This in turn makes you feel strong, because after all, you're what's keeping them alive.

## There's more to life than...

We live in such a consumerist society that we've come to believe that life is all about having _things_ , be it houses, cars, gadgets, holidays, hook-up sex, whatever it is, someone's selling it to you. If you can step back from this far enough, children help to open your eyes to other sources of satisfaction. Any number of times I've watched children unwrap presents, only to find that they're more excited by the two-dollar doovry than the fifty-dollar thingy. Children don't appreciate monetary value, they take things at face value.

Kids certainly help give you a bit of perspective about what you really value in life, if you take the time to let them. On the other hand, if you consider them as only one more thing that was needed to fulfil your mind's-eye vision of the perfect life, then you might as well chuck them in childcare, jump in your BMW and go down to the golf course to do some more business.

## Someone to keep you company when you're old

In Australia we like to outsource people over 70 to the age-care industry, and the expectation is that once you reach a certain level of decrepitude, someone else will be paid look after you so that your children can get on with their lives and visit you occasionally.

Not necessarily a great system, but contrast this with the model prevalent in countries like China, where the children are expected to look after the parents in their dotage, in their own homes. What this often translates to in practice, is the wife taking care of her husband's ageing parents. Hmmm, I can hear the conversation now "Did I marry you so I could change your father's colostomy bag while your mother observes that I was never good enough for you, and how you should have married Yee-Lin, who was such a nice girl and whose parents were so much wealthier?"

We're all familiar with the movie scene where the busy man visits his father or mother in the nursing home only once a year, but even once a year is better than never. As you grow older, your partner, your friends and your family start dying all around you. Unless you go early, you may find yourself as the last survivor of your peer group.

It's at this point that having someone still alive to talk to, even if you only see them occasionally, becomes important. Someone who actually gives a damn about you and is prepared to devote some of their time, energy (and maybe their money) to looking after you is even better. Daughters are better at this than sons apparently, but anyone's better than no-one, even if they live in another country.

## Your partner

After everything I've said in this book about how children screw up your relationship with your wife, it's worth pointing out that there's a plus side too. Watching your woman interacting with the children, loving them, looking after them, feeding them, caring for them, is a wonderful thing. You see a whole side of her that you never saw before, and this really does deepen your love for her and, perhaps more importantly, your respect for her.

Respect for her hard-working attitude, respect for her never losing her cool in the face of all the irrational yelling, respect for her getting up five times during the night and still being there for your child at 5am, respect for her working to get her 'pre-baby body' back.

I could go on, but it's abundantly clear to me that my wife is a hell of a lot tougher than I am. When I'm ready to throw my hands in the air, throw in the towel and throw a tantrum of my own, she just carries on through all the UBS (Usual BullShit) that the children come up with, despite her exhaustion, despite her disillusionment, despite her doubts, despite everything. You've got to respect that.

Chairman Mao (yes him again) apparently once said that "women hold up half the sky". Well I reckon that's bollocks. From what I've seen in the last few years, they hold up at least two-thirds of it. Once you have children you'll see what I mean, and it will make you love your partner in a way that's completely new and unrelated to the number of blow jobs she gives you.

The other day, my wife and I were sneaking a quick horizontal polka at lunchtime while the youngest child was asleep. In the conversation beforehand, I made a comment about how much stress the children put on us.

Her reply?

"You think these kids are stressful? Stress is for pussies, toughen up buster."

Couldn't argue with that.

## It's not all about 'happiness'

There have been lots of arguments about whether people with or without children are happier, but suffice it to say, it's not a good idea to have kids to save your marriage or make yourself happy, or fill some perceived hole in your self. One thing children are _not_ is a solution to personal or relationship issues.

If you're religious you might be doing it for the glory of God; if not, you're basically doing it to pass on your genes and keep your bloodline going into the future of evolution on the planet Earth. When your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was dying in childbirth a thousand years ago, she wasn't thinking about 'being happy', she was thinking, "At least I will live on through this child."

In Douglas Adams's classic _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ , an alien race called the Vogons demolish the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass (oops, spoiler alert). Thus endeth the human race, and who cares? No one really.

One study (<https://www.nber.org/papers/w25597>) of over a million people found that the happiness of parents with children correlated to their income. As long as they earned enough to cover the costs of raising their children the kids increased their happiness, but if they encountered financial difficulties, children made them unhappy. To quote the report "Children are expensive, and controlling for financial difficulties turns almost all of our estimated child coefficients positive."

So, apparently happiness does come down to money after all, who'd have thought?

If you take an ultra-long-term view, having children is a pretty pointless exercise, because all you're doing is perpetuating the existence of a species that consumes everything around it. If I were an alien passing by Earth in a spaceship I'd say "Quick! Blow that lot up before they get off the planet and infest the galaxy!"

Of course, you might owe it to your ancestors to have a go. Consider that you're ultimately descended from people who lived through Ice Ages, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Wars, Pestilence, Famine, Disease and a World Without Wi-Fi and managed to have children who survived long enough to have their own. Tough? Hell, we're so soft now we can't even begin to imagine how hard it must have been to be a woman living in a cave, eating the odd root and berry, and once or twice a year managing to scrounge a scrap of meat before dying at age 24 from the Common Cold after giving birth to eight children, two of whom survived.

These days many people are obsessed with 'finding happiness', whereas our ancestors were obsessed with 'finding food and shelter'. I reckon happiness for them was sitting around a fire roasting a piece of woolly mammoth and thinking that maybe they could take the day off tomorrow because they still had a tonne of it sitting uneaten outside the cave. Boiled right down, having children means you've passed on your genes, and all those ancestors of yours back through the millennia, who suffered through it all and managed to pass on their genes, can lie happily in their graves knowing that it wasn't all in vain – they're still alive in some form or other. Sounds like life is meaningless? Well, you might need religion, that helps some people find a meaning. But before embarking on that journey, consider reading _God is Not Great_ by Christopher Hitchens.

So be happy about having children. Unless you're a famous scientist or artist it's the only type of immortality you're ever likely to have. The ways we describe happiness now are pretty abstract. A lot of people don't even know they're happy until something really awful happens that makes them sad or depressed and they realise how good they had it before. We see happiness as some sort of ecstatic state of mind, the sort of state you're in when you've just fallen in love and you're on a limerence high.

What's more important in the long term though, is _contentment_ , and you get a lot of that from children. Watching them grow up and learn to walk and talk, hearing the funny things they say, receiving their love and affection, all of these things add up to a lot of contentment. Sure, when they turn into adults and move out you might only see them once a year (ungrateful little bastards), but hey, you'll have your own life back by then, what's left of it. And heck, things could be worse, they might not move out at all.

So, as Con the Fruiterer used to say, "Good luck to youse and your family."

