Unclehood

My blog-life is always a few months behind my real one. This happened way back in August. In an attempt at masking identity, I’m using initials instead of names (because I can.)

My good friend, H, gave birth to a baby girl, V. 3 and a half weeks later, when mother and child were back at home with the visiting grandparents, and father was away in the Red Centre drinking beers, I decided it would be a good time to pay a visit and say hello to the recently arrived drooling life-form.

Now let me tell you about babies and me. I have nothing against them, but personally, I don’t find them very cute. Admittedly, there are cute babies and there are cute babies, so it’s just me I guess. I’m sure if I’d seen me as a baby, I would have run away in absolute dread. And don’t even get me started about work colleagues who insist on showing me pictures of their newborn.

I’m also scared of holding babies, not least because of the sudden unannounced burst of bodily excretions they so obligingly send forth my way, but also because they’re so small and I might accidentally drop them and they might fall through the cracks on the kitchen floor and be lost forever, doomed to be raised by a foster family of cockroaches.

So I approach babies with a healthy sense of caution, and exercise even more caution with the parents, grandparents and other family members involved, because invariably something I say is bound to upset someone. I think I lack that particular part of the brain that deals with baby-and-new-parents-social-skills, or maybe the years of alcohol and drug abuse have destroyed it completely.

But come to think of it, we have a few things in common, babies and I, such as -

· Lack of hair.
· Easily amused, especially by little colourful objects that can be swallowed.
· A strong affinity for boobs.
· A tendency to drool (in my case, especially when boobs are involved)

There you go, put a diaper on me and send me into the infirmary, and I’d be drooling away with the best of them.

Anyhoo, so there I was at H’s house, speaking to the newborn’s happy grandparents, sighing inwardly that the conversation was going quite well. Thankfully, H has warned them that I was a dumbass when it came to babies, and she herself was quite good about it, bless her. And V was, well, she was just happily doing whatever it is 3-and-a-half-week-old babies do.

I think I learnt more about babies in that one day than I did in the other 28 years of my existence. For example, that they couldn’t focus their eyes just yet. And strangely enough, I was feeling quite comfortable, partly due to the fact that I had just downed a beer, and the whole awkward conversation had gone by without incident. So when asked if I wanted to hold the baby, I said “Yeah, OK”, surprising even myself.

Next thing I know, I was cradling V in my arms with H giving me instructions on how to hold her properly. I’ve never held a baby that young before. And at that moment, when I looked at V, and she looked back at me with her out-of-focus eyes, I kind of got what the fuss was all about. I understood it, this whole baby thing. Thankfully, during this epiphany, I didn’t drop her.

So there it is. Not that I suddenly have the urge to become a father or anything so extreme. No, these instincts that have been woken inside are strictly avuncular. But I’m not scared of babies anymore. And I think I’ll do alright with newborns and parents and grandparents in the future.

PS – All the best, little V. I’m sure you’ll do just fine!