They warn you about the tiredness, but they don't warn you about this sort of tiredness
As I said last week, there is no substitutes bench, and that doesn't only apply in the event of illness. A normal, standard day is packed enough.
They tell you about the tiredness. Good God, do they tell you about the tiredness. Get ready for four or five years during which you’ll sleep barely an hour a night, they tell you. You’ll emerge from it all looking like a cartoon image of a henpecked husband, six days of growth on your chin, half of your shirt hanging out, hair askew and eyes so grey it looks like you’ve been fighting outside a kebab shop.
In truth, that feeling of utter sleeplessness never really comes to pass. It takes a few minutes to give an infant the slurp or two of milk they need to get back to sleep. If you’ve planned things out, you don’t have to stand in front of a Perfect Prep machine for five minutes, taking in the sickly sweet aroma of formula. Just grab a premade bottle from the fridge, get it done, get back to sleep. It never felt like something that was doing me much damage.
Perhaps the last couple of years have been payback for that. It’s difficult to tell. This week’s parenting column is brought to you by the word foreboding. You see, it goes a little something like this. Every Friday afternoon, I drop my kids off at their mum’s, and I either pick them up or have them delivered back to me on a Sunday afternoon. It’s an easy arrangement, and those days off are precious.
But sometimes, there comes a rift in all this. This week, my ex-wife has requested that I have the kids for the weekend. I am perfectly cool with this. We’ve done it several times before and I have claimed back those couple of days at later points. But that doesn’t mean that the extra days aren’t extremely hard work. This has been a difficult week. I’ve been both emotionally and practically ‘busy’. I really could have done with those couple of days, but this week they are not going to be forthcoming.
I am aware of my privilege in this respect. I know that there are plenty of other parents for whom there is no break whatsoever, for whom it is seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. I doff my cap in the direction of those people. But once you’ve got into a rhythm, a break to that starts to feel like something that looms large on the horizon. Five days then stop becomes twelve days and then stop.
I work hard during the week. I covered my morning routine on here a couple of weeks ago, but that only scratches the surface of my day. I get back from the school run at about 9.00 in the morning. I have another one, which lasts from about 2.50 until 3.30. I have one for their dinner and bedtime routine, which lasts from 6 to 8 and which takes in cooking their dinner with them, any homework necessities (which are bottom of my list of priorities, if I’m absolutely honest), watching something on the TV or doing something with them, and then getting them to brush their teeth, into pyjamas, and then to bed.
I have to fit everything else between that. Work, obviously, is important. The majority of my time between 9.00 and 2.50 and between 3.30 and 6 will be taken up with that. But it doesn’t end there. Everything has to be fit within these windows; washing and drying clothes, putting clothes away and tidying their (increasingly disgusting) bedrooms, the absolute slew of information received from their schools, any other housework (including washing up at least three times a day), trying to keep myself clean and in order, EVERYTHING. Remember that time the government increased the amount of money they expected single parents to work from 25 hours at minimum wage to 39 in order to continue to be eligible for Universal Credit to top up low incomes? Yeah, fun times.
When they finally get to bed, cooking and eating may take an hour. One evening a week I record a podcast and edit it the following morning. There is often other writing work to be done, people to speak to, and some sort of downtime to be achieved. I have been known to go to bed at 10.30 at night, but too often I’m still awake well past midnight, still uncomfortably bubbling with the combination of chemicals that my body has produced to keep me going and the remaining detritus of external stimulants that jolted me awake earlier in the day.
And there’s no-one else who will do this. For those five days a week I have to be on this sort of form. The cold that I was recovering from last week has broadly receded–though it’s still more or less there–but my kids’ stomachs don’t care for that. It’s a constant juggling act, and I spend my life with this low-level fear that it might only take the slightest of touches for the array of plates that I am spinning to fall crashing to the ground. I’d like to prioritise myself, but I have to prioritise others.
It probably doesn’t help that I’m older than most with kids the same age as mine. The average age of a first-time father is just shy of 31 years old. I had just turned 43 then my first was born, and as anybody who’s seen Cristiano Ronaldo playing football regularly over the previous decade, that’s a period of not-insignificant physical decline, even among those who have prided themselves on keeping themselves in as close to peak condition as possible. It will not surprise you, dear reader, to learn that I have not done that over the years, though I’m trying to do better now.
There’s no particular moral to this story, no lasting message that I want anyone to take from it. It’s 5.25 on a Friday afternoon, and I have dinner to prepare in just over half an hour. I might be done before nine and ready to at least kick back. It could be past midnight. Five days down, seven to go. I’m not even halfway there yet, and already my legs feel like lead. But I’ve got this because I have to. I just don’t expect the next week of my life to pass very quickly.