‘Yeah, I know Sham. I love Sham. He’s a good guy,’ I say, smiling. My mouth is dry. Maybe I do need some water.
‘He says the same thing about you. You live round here?’ he asks.
‘No, just walking.’
‘Stay safe, yeah?’ he says, presses his open palm to his chest.
We spud each other and I turn round and head home.
That night, I put you down in the Moses basket. You stink of our combined sweat, and you’re hot. I put the fan on. Immediately, you start complaining and shifting about. I put an app on that simulates white noise. I select the seaside. You complain and shift and I lift you onto your front and rock you ever so slightly until you’re asleep again.
By running into the man outside this mosque, and by spudding him and him recognizing me, something has shifted. It’s like I’m home.
The walks were a source of tension between your mum and me. I was happy to do whatever worked to keep the household ticking over. She wanted us to get you into a bed so we could normalize a version of what our lives should be, what you should be.
Your mum was happy for the time it gave her to sleep. The walk would guarantee her a two-hour block of sleep, and you usually then slept for a further four hours on return. Six hours, in those early confusing weeks, of uninterrupted sleep, was a godsend. She was partly concerned about our safety. Whether I should be walking around an unfamiliar city at night with a vulnerable baby strapped to me. Because I would return each day with a new story: a new area I discovered, or a strange interaction or something weird I witnessed. Or stupid stories that sounded like I was just out with my friends having a good time.
I took you to Josie’s stand-up show one night, and watched from the side of the stage, my chest rumbling with laughs I tried to suppress so you didn’t wake to a guffaw in your new ear.
I took you for a pint with Calvin’s daddy and we ended up meeting Neneh Cherry. She smelled your head. I had the sudden unexpected sensation of a teenage crush lurching towards my chest, smiling.
I tried a mango milkshake from that grotesque two-floor ice cream parlour in the centre of town that was always empty except for chaperoned young brown people on dates. It was disgusting. I drank the whole damn thing though. I found a place that sold hipster mango lassis, they were over £5 so I left and walked to the South Asian cash’n’carry in Easton and bought proper mango milkshake and mango lassi, internally cursing how hippies who like India were ruining all our recipes. They might as well have put raisins in the lassis and milkshakes like they do in curries.
I bought a mango one night and ate it the proper way, over over your head, sweet juice dripping behind your ears.
Each little adventure became another way I got to keep living my life the way I wanted – spontaneous, curious and near a pub – and have a kid. So while I thought it was fucking heroic to walk you for two hours, and have a swift pint and read twenty pages of a book in a quiet pub just before closing time, all it seemed like was that I was just finding excuses to take you to the pub. Rather than be at home with my child, doing the work that we needed to do to bring you into this world as you should be.
We were supposed to be sleep training you. Getting you out of the sling and lying down. It’s funny how babies sleep hard upright, but the second you lie them down, and they’re responsible for controlling their own comfort, they stir and don’t know how to get themselves back to sleep.
My friend Jon, early on, after one of my desperate social media posts about trying to find a sleep solution, just before I latched on to the sling and kept doing it until I couldn’t, sent me a document he’d got from a sleep consultant. It was a plan for getting kids to sleep, and some rules.
The key ones were: establish a routine and don’t stay comforting them until they go to sleep. They need to learn to fall asleep by themselves or they will always need you and will never learn to settle themselves. It talked through how to establish a routine, how to deal with your fussing during the night, how to help you learn to settle yourself and how to place you in the Moses basket.
Friends told us about controlled crying. Which helped to teach children to settle themselves.
Neither were preferable to just putting a warm cute bundle in a sling, stroking the soles of her feet while she purred, and listening to the entire Wu-Tang Clan back catalogue. But, things needed to change. We were desperate. The walks weren’t sustainable. What if I needed to do an event? Your mum couldn’t walk you. We needed to get you into a basket.
Controlled crying is horrific.
Utterly horrific.
But it works. I think. We tried it once. And it went badly. We were supposed to start the controlled crying on the Sunday night. I was in London on Saturday because I needed to earn some money.
It sort of worked? Not in the way intended. But in a sort of muddled-through attempt at getting it right.
We were so damn tired. Oh god, so tired. Like, I could fall asleep anywhere tired, be in deep sleep within a minute tired, and wake up and feel that sleepy anxiety I’m not going to make it to the airport on time tired. I was sleep in the work toilets tired, get an Uber to pick me up (down the street so your mum didn’t judge me) and sleep in the eight minutes it takes to drive to the office tired. I was so tired that when there were pockets of designated sleep time for me, I was too wired. I couldn’t do it. Coffee and glucose drinks and salty packets of crisps, and having the type of sedentary job that meant I didn’t move unless I needed a wee or wanted to attempt to sleep in the toilet, were my best friends.
Everyone jokes about the lack of sleep when you become a parent. Till it becomes glib and once it’s glib it doesn’t feel real. No amount of jokey foreshadowing or eye rolls or barbed comments can prepare you for the nightmare chaos of sleeping two to three hours a night if you’re lucky. And then there’s always some smug cunt parent who’s like, ‘oh, Jakey always sleeps right through . . .’ like it’s the easiest thing in the world.
But for us, the sleep was a problem. You never slept, Ganga. Neither of us could cope. Everyone goes on about the sleep deprivation when you’re a new parent. None of it prepares you for what it actually feels like. The depression, the nausea, the inability to form sentences, have cogent thoughts, make decisions. The crying at random things. The feeling too wired to sleep. The drumming anxiety that this will never ever end. These are the rest of your days now.
I go away to Spain for three days to speak at a conference. It’s work but it results in fun times, like Ben Okri leading me and Jay Bernard through the empty midnight streets of a small quaint Spanish town trying to find the perfect egg and chips he tasted the year previously. By the second night I am feeling so guilty about being away, I’m pining for you, for home, for familiarity so much that I sit in my hotel room and watch Wonder Woman twice. I text your mum frantically for updates. She replies with half sentences. She’s tired and has no energy to record what you’re doing for me. Also, she’s in the moment and needs to be present with you, and when you’re in the moment, you’re in the drudgery of sleep deprivation. You’re not sleeping and so when I text her late at night, wandering the streets with Ben and Jay trying to find egg and chips, she replies quickly and frantically. She is frustrated. Everything is wrong. Why the fuck won’t you fucking sleep? And I’m pulled out of the moment. I’m suddenly trying to find excuses to come home.
Shall I return early? I suggest.
Your mum is not happy with my text. I’m away, I’m earning money, she’s made peace with it, it’s what I need to do; I just need to let it be shit for her in the moment and I need to let her complain and I need to just listen. It’s fine.
I still feel guilty. When we do eventually find the egg and chips, I’m no longer hungry. I drink half a beer more and return to my hotel room to stare at the phone, hoping to not hear from your mum again, hoping you have finally fallen asleep.
I return to find the travel cot jammed in the doorway of your bedroom, one end suspended in the air, you asleep on
your mum’s chest and all the lights on at once. I never found out what happened with the travel cot.
Sleep was an issue. Your mum and I were utterly crazy, constantly arguing, constantly taking each other to task for every single minor infraction because they were more manageable than the big problem in our lives, getting you to sleep.
This is why the sling became so necessary. It’s funny, because in a way it helped you and me bond, it helped me feel more at home in my city, it helped me meet Neneh bloody Cherry, mate. But the sling was always makeshift. A hastily fashioned desperate and reactive act with no vision other than, this is currently working, let’s do this till it doesn’t. The mistake I made was thinking that because you were sleeping it was working. It was far from a long-term solution. And as the weather was getting colder, it was becoming evident that I couldn’t keep walking you around.
As your mum said, what am I going to do? Keep you in a sling till you’re four? Fourteen? Forty?
Much as I enjoyed the mental image of an old man rocking his forty-year-old daughter to sleep in a sling, I knew what she was saying. Neither of us wanted to attempt controlled crying. It sounded like a lot.
The point of controlled crying is to let you cry. And eventually you will give in and fall asleep. We, the adults, have to pick an interval time where we will go in and comfort you for thirty seconds, using the exact same method, a head stroke, or a cuddle, or a word of encouragement. The point is to show that we don’t respond to your cries, we won’t automatically appear when you fuss, showing you that we are your first responders. You have to settle yourself. But, we are there and will come in every now and then to check on you. But it won’t be because you’re crying. So you start with quick intervals for the first half-hour and then slowly extend them to five, then ten minutes. By this point, you’re supposed to be asleep because crying is actually knackering and you’re really tired. Surely you’ll be asleep, right?
I was in London the day your mum, desperate for you to sleep so she could, started controlled crying a day early. I came to London to do an event about a project I’d worked on. The plan was to see a couple of friends for a quick drink after and then come home. Tack on some normalcy, a pub!, pints!, bants!, to a commitment I already had. Your mum said she was fine with me having a few pints because she, like I, was desperate to return to a degree of normalcy and we should both be grabbing any opportunity for a pub!, pints!, bants!, or whatever we wanted. You sleeping was step one in a return to pub!, pints!, bants!
I found the pints super strange. I arrived ten minutes late to find my two friends sitting at the table in silence.
‘Hey,’ I said, as they both got up to greet me. I cuddled them both and sat down. I picked up the pint that had been bought for me already and sipped from it. I felt my phone buzz. It was a text, from your mum.
GIVING UP, it said. I’M STARTING CONTROLLED CRYING.
‘Shit,’ I said. ‘We’re having sleep problems and we’re about to start this super weird super strict sleep routine to break her.’
My friends laughed. One slid a pound coin over to the other. They giggled a little more and patted each other on the back.
‘I bet him a pound you’d mention your baby in the first ten minutes . . .’
‘I said twenty,’ said my other friend.
They laughed, childlessly, about my concern for your mum, back home, dealing with your inability to lie flat by yourself, while I went to a pub!, drank pints!, had bants!!
‘Now,’ my friend said, ‘you’re not allowed to talk about babies for the rest of the evening. And we won’t talk about football.’
Fuck these guys, I thought. What else do I have to talk about anymore?
You came and changed absolutely everything. Now everything has conditions attached to it. Spontaneity has repercussions, going to the pub instead of straight home has consequences, having a job that takes me away has an impact.
I texted your mum back.
WAIT TILL I GET HOME. I’M LEAVING NOW.
I figured, what was the point of staying? If I couldn’t talk about the one thing I was capable of talking about. And my friends couldn’t fill the awkward silence that left by talking about football?
At times of crisis, you get to see a vision of who you are and who you can be. I didn’t act immediately. I waited for your mum to reply. At times of crisis, I wait for your mum to tell me what to do, it would seem.
It took her twenty minutes to respond. She was probably dealing with you.
OK. THX.
I didn’t see the text come in immediately. I’d left my phone on the table and gone outside to smoke what would be my penultimate cigarette. I didn’t enjoy a single drag but not being around my friends was enough for that moment.
They were supposed to be my closest friends and yet, and yet, they had told me that the most important thing to me was boring! Not pub talk!, not bants!, not for pints time! I couldn’t be here. I needed to be at home.
‘Guys,’ I said, returning to the table. ‘I’m going home. I’m needed.’
‘What the fuck?’ my friend said, standing up. ‘Trust you to duck out when it’s your round. Classic.’
‘I’m needed. For reasons I’ve been told I can’t talk about.’
They both made fun of me being passive-aggressive but it didn’t matter, suddenly none of it mattered, I knew where I needed to be. I needed to be home.
I noted, as I rushed to the tube, that since we’d left London, this was the first time I was thinking about home as somewhere else.
Those moments, when you get to see, in a quick flash, that you’ve grown beyond something you love, are often uneasy. So many great films are about people trying to return to their sense of home and comfort. They start from a place of stasis. Maybe they’re happy with their lot in life. Maybe they’ve accepted it. They have a flawed vision of who they want to be. Often it’s different from who they need to be. Maybe they haven’t realized who they need to be. Maybe they think they are who they need to be. Often, an external event will force them to go, unwillingly, on a journey. All they’ll want to do is get back to that flawed vision of themselves and the comfort blanket this offers. But as they come up against obstacles in trying to return to their initial status, and people who challenge their belief in their vision, they change and they learn and they try a new version of life and they grow and they get closer to that version of them that is who they are meant to be. When they return, they return changed. Their version of themselves is now a dysfunction. It serves no purpose. They have grown beyond what they thought themselves to be. They are now who they always were meant to be and this does not fit with the stasis we met them in.
It’s so nice, isn’t it? How Hollywood and the classic hero-man-quest story of Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings and Napoleon Dynamite have drawn a neat little circle around that most universal of problems we all face. Be comfortable. Life disrupts your comfort. You realize that the comfort, after a lot of trying and testing, no longer fits. You need to grow.
A baby is that external event, hurtling towards Earth in the form of an alien invasion, or a ring that needs to be chucked into a mountain, or a terrorist hostage crisis in the White House, or the fact that you’re ‘not even meant to be here today . . .’
You have changed everything. You are my trigger. I’m on a quest to become a better person. And in the Hollywood film version of this life of ours, the moment I left the pub!, the pints!, the bants!, with my friends was a significant moment for me.
In the movie version, Bradley Cooper (for in the movie version of a book about how to raise a brown baby, they’ll find a way to centre the white person’s story, or just brown and fatten him up for an Oscar-winning performance), will slam his pint down and, in a terrible English accent, tell his friends that they need to be more supportive of him, that he doesn’t have time for their chat about their single lives, who they’re shagging and the hilarious things they did when they were drunk, and he needs to be with his baby, goddam
n it! He’ll storm out, he’ll be in Leicester Square (just to hammer home that we’re in London and Bradley Cooper is doing a London accent, mate), he’ll take the Central Line from Leicester Square to Kensington, which is actually Notting Hill (yes I know this is an impossible tube journey, tell that to the makers of Thor: The Dark World), where he’ll be greeted at the door by his wife, played by whichever actress is young and blonde and hot and zeitgeisty and not yet twenty-five when this film gets made, and he’ll take the baby off her, kiss her like it’s their last kiss on this green Earth, and slam the door, saying, ‘Honey, I’m home.’
In reality, I took the tube to Paddington, waited thirty minutes for the next train, sloppily and sadly comfort ate five tacos and drank two beers, thinking about how awful that drink had been and what kind of apocalyptic scenes I was headed towards, sat on a train for two hours, watched a terrible action comedy that I couldn’t even tell you now what it was, drank three beers on the train, ate crisps and waited for my friends to text me an apology.
In the film version, Bradley Cooper will say (well, shout, he does just shout all his lines, with a smarmy shout-smile across half his smiley shouty lips) exactly how he feels. A big powerhouse monologue that has wit!, and bite!, and emotion!, AND BANTS!!. And his friends (probably played by two people less good-looking or noticeable than him, at least one ethnic, maybe Jason Segel and Dave Chappelle) will sit there guiltily and attentively listening as he tells them exactly how he feels. They’ve been the snarky energy of the film so far. Now, neither has anything to say.
‘Listen, asshats! Sure, once upon a time we all went out and got stupid drunk and maybe you all flirted with girls and I stood there and laughed as your hands strayed and yeah, there was that time under the bridge with the two French tourists. And yeah, come on, we’ve all gone to work hungover as fuck, texting each other fragments of the night before, like goddamn aren’t we the last gang in town. But we were assholes. I hate to break it to you, but we were. And my life has swelled. I’m not who I used to be. I’m a different person now. Goddamn it. Goddamn, a baby. I had a baby. A brown-ass baby. A brown baby. And I have changed. I don’t find any of this shit funny. Dave? Stop being glib. And Jason, grow a pair, you obviously still love Alyssa, just call her. What did she do that was so bad? What was so inert in your relationship that you had to throw yourself into empty, meaningless, terrible drunk sex with drunk strangers just so you have something interesting to text your friends the next day? My god, my baby, do I want her to grow up in a world full of men like us? I mean, I’m like a feminist now, and you know what? It ain’t that bad. Being a feminist dad of a daughter. I can see now how repulsive our conversations were. I can see what change we all need to make, as men. And you know what? That involves me talking about my precious sweet baby who changed my life. That involves me being there with her, instead of here with two grown-ass man-babies who need to grow the fuck up.’
Brown Baby Page 14
