THE JOURNAL
“A Fantastic Piece Of Luck”: Why Mr Bill Murray Was Right About Me Becoming A Dad In A Pandemic
Illustration by Mr Iker Ayestaran
It all seems so dramatic now. And it was. A pandemic pregnancy. A lockdown baby. Worries upon worries upon worries, about things we expected to worry about and about things that never existed before. In the end, our daughter, born in June 2020, turned our looming claustrophobia inside out. Lockdown became an intensely intimate period of bonding – 12 months of, give or take, uninterrupted parenthood. Extreme babying. A crash course in love. Over time, our worries eased and were replaced by less pressing concerns, such as why she keeps eating tables. And now, as this babbling ball of optimism hurtles towards her first birthday, I’m sizing up an extraordinary year of fatherhood. My emotions have outdone themselves.
A year ago, anxiety was attacking from all angles. I have a 43-second audio recording from our delivery room. A ghostly nocturnal dispatch. My unborn baby’s heartbeat tearing it up on the monitor. Gas and air being subconsciously chugged by my girlfriend, Charlotte, stealing snatches of sleep between the pain, groaning between gasps. And rattling away underneath, the midwife’s cryptic, constant, worrying typing. I was slumped in a chair, recording it all to document the surreal ambience, I guess. I can’t remember doing it. It was 1.41am, although I only know that because that’s what the phone data says. That room existed in its own spatial and temporal dimension. Time had bent by that point.
I’d been up for 40 hours. Charlotte’s contractions seemed eternal. They’d kept her (and so me) from sleeping the previous night. Covid restrictions forbade partners from being in the delivery room for too long before or after the birth, but I’d been allowed in at midnight because Charlotte’s waters had broken and we’d all assumed the baby was imminent. This was not the case. Rosa eventually arrived at 4.16pm the next afternoon, and I would be wearing a mask until I left about 7.00pm. A face full of fabric for 19 hours. Every second of it had felt strange, but then the air had been thick with weirdness for months.
We were having a baby in the midst of a pandemic, an astronomically bad time to be having a baby, we thought. Everybody thought. We’d headed into the final trimester just as Covid engulfed the UK in March 2020. People kept asking, sympathetically, how it was going. The chirpy man who runs our local café and laughs at everything anybody says was suddenly a terrifying harbinger of death. He knew of people who’d gone into hospital for various appointments and had returned very ill with Covid, so he insisted we mustn’t go to the hospital. We definitely had to go to the hospital.
Of course we were worried. We were both ill for a couple of weeks around that time. We later assumed we’d contracted Covid and were concerned about what that might mean for the baby. Nobody knew what it might mean. I was disinfecting every solid object. I washed my once soft hands so much they resembled those of a 90-year-old builder. For some scans and appointments, I was allowed into the hospital, for others I wasn’t. The rules changed as the world changed. And things were going to be tough. With lockdowns, social distancing and restrictions, we’d be getting little to no help, no respite, once the baby was born.
“I didn’t feel an immediate bond with our baby, but that would come soon enough, steadily, increasingly, unbreakably”
But the pandemic brought peace. God knows we wanted to make the most of that while we still could. The trees began to blossom and our life was tranquil. During the last few months before the birth, we had no choice but to isolate. That April, a mallard in our local pond produced seven ducklings. Every morning at 7.00am, I’d walk down there and sit with them. To watch them grow by the day. To watch their mother guarding them, nurturing them, teaching them to feed, swim, fly.
Later, Charlotte and I did an intensive weekend of NCT classes, all smashed together on Zoom. It was fine. It was helpful. It featured awkward breakout rooms. We asked questions, took notes, made friends, etc. But soaking up sunrises with the ducklings provided spiritual guidance. Parental instinct in action. There were two or three fights here and there. A couple of bigger ducks – no-good scoundrels – had taken a dislike to the mother, attacking her and the babies. She saw them off sharpish, every time. There aren’t NCT classes for ducks, as far as I’m aware, but that protective reflex was there from the start.
I didn’t feel an immediate bond with our baby, but that came soon enough, steadily, increasingly, unbreakably. And emotion came from surprising places. After an initial eruption on the second day, Rosa’s bowels shut up shop. She wasn’t feeding well. She was underweight. Visiting midwives hastened us to A&E, twice. Covid regulations barred me from the hospital, so Charlotte was stuck there on her own for hours while I stalked about outside, nodding off in the car, eating ice cream, frustrated that I couldn’t provide moral support. Both times we were sent back home with more feeding advice.
After 11 days of this, while massaging our baby’s belly, I somehow gave things the nudge they needed. An early feat of fatherhood. Eleven days’ worth of blockage presented itself. Charlotte cried happy tears, relieved tears, thank-God-the-poo-came-out tears. It was an extremely cathartic expulsion, for all of us, I’m sure. It was genuinely joyful.
Then again, everything has been affecting me emotionally. It’s hard to say how much of that has been accentuated by the Covid maelstrom, but no doubt the baby has heightened everything. Sometimes pretty randomly. I have cried at television programmes I have no business crying at. I’ve cried at Married At First Sight Australia. I’ve cried at Teen First Dates.
And there has been real melancholy. I’ve been upset for my friends who are sad that they’ve missed spending time with my baby while she’s a baby. I didn’t let my parents hold her for weeks, concerned for their health more than anything else, until a doctor said that, if we were being safe, we must consider their mental health, too. Passing Rosa to her grandmother for the first time after what seemed like aeons of no physical contact felt monumental. It was.
Covid’s antisocial obstacles have, perversely, had their benefits. For much of Rosa’s life, government rules have prohibited an influx of kindly baby tourists, which has allowed us unfiltered intensity with her. An enforced cocoon. And working at home throughout has given me a front-row seat to every moment of change. A year in and I’ve yet to experience the pang of being away, at all. I’ve not missed a single first. Her first smiles. First teeth. Giggles. Words (ish). I introduced her to dogs (to my great pleasure, she is now obsessed with dogs). I’ve been there for her first snow, her first blossom. I discovered her third tooth while making her laugh in the queue for my first vaccine. So much of her history is intertwined with Covid history. It’ll be wild for her, one day, to sift through our photos and videos and realise she was raised at such a seismic time, grew through lockdowns, learnt about life in a world that was just as new to the rest of us too.
The pandemic has humanised so much. Much of my work is film journalism and while Zoom interviews replaced in-the-flesh encounters, they also took me into people’s homes. Formality crumbled, barriers broke. Chat was deeper, more sincere. If I mentioned the baby, other parents’ faces would light up and they’d ask how it was going during such a time. Ms Sofia Coppola asked how difficult the pregnancy had been. I spoke to Mr Russell Brand the day we were off to get Rosa’s birth certificate. He remembered doing the same for his first kid and “the bliss of it all”. Mr Bill Murray, an incredibly sweet man and a father of six, seemed genuinely overjoyed for me. “How great to have it happen now,” he said, beaming. “That doesn’t happen to dads very often, where they’re forced to stay with their baby all the time. That’s a fantastic piece of luck.”
“I’ll never know how I would have tackled the past year without her”
He was right. Those early months were a balm. I did the dawns, waking with the baby at 5.30am. Those mornings brought bliss. Bottle-feeding my tiny girl and then having her slump to sleep on my chest, on my shoulder. A few hours later, I’d go to work – in the next room – committed to my pay cheque, but around to help out with meltdowns and nappy catastrophes. I’m still at home, still loving the mornings – 6.00am never felt so good. Me and the kid. Her pudgy, smiley little face fuels me. Every morning is Christmas morning for her. She’s just so happy to exist. No matter what keeps me up at night or brings me down in the day, she is the great leveller.
I’ll never know how I would have tackled the past year without her. When Covid shut down everything four months before our due date, we were plunged into an uncertain and worrisome world. Everything closed, everything stopped. Hospitals were overrun, appointments were cancelled. Our support networks, both medical and social, were diminished, but the constant bonding has been priceless. And I’ve been there for all of it, more present than I would have been at any other time. Was having a baby – becoming a father – in a pandemic strange? I guess. But is it ever not?
This child, then. My lockdown imp. She has my eyes. My father’s eyes. Cheeks like space hoppers. A naughty grin that befits her temperament. She’s like one of those monkeys from a safari park that clambers onto your car and rips it apart, except the car is me, and my hair and my chest hair. Our house is taking a beating. And now, as we seep slowly back into normality, she’s got a far bigger world to explore and demolish.
It’s been a crazy year. And, in our particularly tiny world, an unforgettable one. I’ll miss it.
