In a few days time my son Matt AKA ‘the Gruber’ will be exactly year old. It will be a year to the day when I rushed my then girlfriend now wife into hospital for what was supposed to be a natural delivery but turned rapidly into an emergency caesarean section. The first thing my son did after being pulled from his mothers tummy was give the paediatrician a solid right to the jaw. It was this point that I realised I would love this little man forever.
Since he was born its been a massive rollercoaster of a journey and I have learned a lot on the way not just about childcare but also what having a child actually means. Considering we have been having babies for millennia the dispassionate practical information out there is surprisingly disparate, spartan and based more on emotion saturated opinion than hard facts. So I thought I would start writing a little run through of what its was based on my experiences and those of my wife with ‘the gruber.’ So here goes.
When my then girlfriend first found out she was pregnant she did what most normally level headed career oriented women would do and freaked the fuck out. She sent me a message while I was at work and said we ‘needed to talk.’ We had been living together for nearly 2 years at that point and as any man who loves his woman but due to his own bumbling and stupidity occasionally makes the occasional ‘miscellaneous infraction of domestic duties’ and may have reason to question himself.
Thus, with some trepidation I returned home to find the woman I love in the kind of emotional state that would suggest she had found the secret compartment behind my bookshelf revealing a selection of size 10 stilettos, whips, chains and some grainy video footage of precisely ‘how’ I paid off my student loans quite so quickly after college. Anyway, she then informed me with much gravitas that ‘she was pregnant’ something which she expected to be an enormous bombshell. Instead I simply replied ‘Oh thats great news! When can we tell my mum?’ then she burst into tears. After she had calmed down and realised I wasn’t about to pack my bags and head off into the sunset at the prospect of being a father we could get down to the logistics of what being a prospective parent actually meant (which we will get to in part 2).