Author: Gillan Drew

Struggling writer.

The Twilight Zone (pt II)

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There have been more mysterious occurrences, but these are of the everyday variety that I imagine every parent experiences. Despite having dozens of muslins, they inexplicably vanish the very moment you need one. I sterilise six bottles and before you can say ‘deja vu’ I’m sterilising six bottles again. And last night we spent an hour looking for an errant nipple shield that we discovered had somehow leapt from Lizzie’s lap all the way into the dog’s bed on the other side of the room and chewed itself up. Weird.

Once you’ve entered the twilight zone, you rapidly lose your connection to the world around you. Before Izzie was born I would always know the time of day, the day of the week, and the date of the month. Now these things seem irrelevant, as important to me as if someone told me there’s been a coup in a country I’ve never heard of on the other side of the world. What difference does it make to my life if it’s Tuesday and not Monday? I think of the me that checked his watch every five minutes and think, ‘How quaint.’

Enhancing this sense of dissociation from the world is the fluidity of your identity. The cornerstones of who you are, those things that anchored you to life, pull out of the earth and you find yourself adrift.

Before the birth I had a great idea. I would scale back who I am, get rid of Gillan the author, Gillan the partner, Gillan the lover, Gillan the artist, Gillan the student, Gillan the charity worker, Gillan the model-maker, and all the other Gillans, and simply become Gillan the dad. Then I wouldn’t become frustrated at not being able to do all the things I wanted to do, because I was doing everything that Gillan the dad needed to do. Over time I’d let the other Gillans back in, but for the foreseeable future I was a dad and no more.

It was a dumb idea. Painfully, naively dumb. I never ceased being Gillan the partner, and in fact I could not be Gillan the dad without being Gillan the partner – the two are inseparable. And Gillan the dad is such a new identity that it could blow away on the breeze.

It’s also unhealthy to be nothing but a dad, or indeed a mum. You’d quickly burn out if that was all you did, and then you’d be no good to anyone. The few minutes I steal here and there throughout the day to write this blog, giving Gillan the author his due, keep me identifiably me. It grants me a hold on my life, tenuous though it may be. Without it, I’d be drifting through a sea of nappies and bottles in ill-fitting clothes, facing reflections I didn’t recognise.

I’d recommend all new parents keep one part of your life to yourself in the early weeks: it makes you a better parent. Instead of dividing yourself into different personalities, acting how you think you ought to act, just be you. Gillan the dad, Gillan the partner, and all the other Gillans, stem from Gillan the man. And so long as I remember that, I’ll get us all through this wilderness unscathed.

That said, Gillan the lover might be taking a back seat for a while.

The Twilight Zone

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Day and night have blurred into an endless, formless twilight and time has lost all meaning. The rhythms of hunger and sleep have replaced the arbitrary units mankind imposes upon Nature. And things have taken a turn towards the surreal.

It started on Friday night when I woke Lizzie to watch the most impressive electrical storm either of us had ever seen. In every direction the sky convulsed, the lightning tearing apart the fabric of reality. The thunder claps rolled on top of each other in a continuous wave and the rain, when it came, was a foretaste of the end of the world.

Except Lizzie didn’t see it. Come the morning, she said to me, ‘Apparently there was a storm last night. I must have slept through it.’ So I’m now doing the night shifts. If she can forget witnessing someone crack open the gates of heaven, then she needs more sleep. Whether from tiredness or because I’ve been inducted into a mysterious dimension populated by shadows, and shapes, and the shadows of shapes, I’ve started to notice that the world is behaving a little odd: the inanimate, the animal and the Izzie.

When I make up bottles of formula in the night they scream at me like dying ghosts. The bedroom smells like curry powder for no reason I can grasp. A globe decided to jump off the window sill and roll down the stairs yesterday, denting the South Pacific and making a split across Asia. What does all this mean? Nothing, probably.

The animals are weirder. For some reason, the patio has become a cruising ground for earthworms, which at the moment are obsessed with sex. At 5.30 yesterday morning, a flock of seagulls descended on the street, and they were making so much noise I went out to scare them away, only to find they had opened the binbags and were spreading Izzie’s nappies all over the road. And our cocker spaniel Ozzie has become strangely suicidal, stopping in front of the pram every three seconds and asking me to run him over, or hiding under the sofa cushions as if he wants to be sat on.

More alarmingly, Izzie is doing things that I didn’t think babies could or should be doing. She’s beats me in stare-out contests and at eighteen days she’s already learned her first word: if you’re not making her milk fast enough, the hungry ‘ow-a, ow-a, ow-a’ turns into ‘now-a, now-a, now-a!’

I’m also starting to wonder if she’s in training to be a comic book supervillain. She dug her little fingers into my chest so hard the other day that she drew blood. If I’m cuddling her and she’s hungry she’s got a mean left hook on her. And while her farts smell like sulphur, her poo is like burnt ash.

The scariest thing was yesterday when I put her on my belly for some skin-to-skin. She put her feet in my belt, pushed herself up on her elbows and crawled up my body until she clamped her gummy mouth to my neck like a de-fanged Dracula. I moved her back to my belly; she wriggled back up to my jugular. Thank God she doesn’t have teeth yet!

I’m sure this sense of things being wrong with the world will dissipate like morning mist in the sunshine. Now I think of it, though, it might be less a case of tiredness and more the fact that when I was pushing Izzie round the village a few days ago, watching my feet so I didn’t trip up, I cracked the side of my head on a speed limit sign…

Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Post Traumatic Birth Disorder

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All prospective parents are prepared for a number of things: the labour will be hard, the birth will be insane, the mum will be sore and hormonal for a long time to come, and the first few weeks will be a whirlwind of nappies, feeding, screaming and sleeplessness. With a few perks, of course, like being able to say you’re a parent and getting to use a new parking space at the supermarket. Or, if you’re really lucky, that moment the baby pees on your partner and not you.

Nobody prepares you for the psychological aftershocks of the birth itself. Now that we’re starting to get used to parenting – that is, we’ve realised we’ll always have at least one too few hands for every task – we have time to process what happened that day. And I think I preferred it when we were too busy to think.

Every time Lizzie goes to the toilet she has a flashback to the labour. It started 6am when she woke in agony and started vomiting. I ran her a hot bath but it did little to help. We went to hospital, were sent home because they thought she wasn’t in enough pain to really be in labour, and Lizzie sat in another bath and vomited some more. She had a bloody show, started to shiver, and still the hospital told us she wasn’t in labour yet – these were just pre-labour ‘twinges’. Then she started to bleed.

There was no answer from the delivery suite, no answer from antenatal, no answer from the birthing unit, no answer from the community midwives’ office or mobile, no answer from the back-up hospital and no midwife at the local surgery, so I rang for an ambulance.

The single-crewed paramedic panicked the second he saw her, called for backup because birth was ‘imminent’, apparently, and within minutes there were three paramedics, three midwives and two grandmothers crowding around the tub. Lizzie was six centimetres dilated, so they piled her and the midwives into an ambulance and set off with blue lights flashing. This was four hours after being sent home from Maternity, and less than an hour since the hospital had told us they weren’t even contractions.

For Lizzie, this was the worst of the ordeal, and now the bathroom stirs unpleasant associations of pain, blood and fear. She isn’t really bothered about the public nudity, but then pregnancy and prudishness don’t go together. Trouble is, she can’t exactly avoid the bathroom.

For me, I have a single image that haunts me: my beautiful angel Izzie lying alone in an incubator in Neonatal ICU, hooked up to all kinds of monitors, a drip in her arm and a feeding tube up her nose. She got stuck in the birth canal for two hours as she was back-to-back.

Downstairs, Lizzie was recovering from haemorrhaging on the operating table after a failed ventouse and forceps birth. I spent the rest of the night and next day bouncing between the two. At the time I simply did what I needed to do and put one foot in front of the other for forty-three hours. But now, when people ask about the birth, I come to the moment when Izzie went into the incubator and I can’t go any further. I can’t talk about the four days in ICU; the three days in Transitional Care; the day I cried because my girls weren’t coming home; the day Lizzie begged me to stay but they still made me leave at midnight.

So how do we get past these thoughts and feelings? For Lizzie I guess we need to fill the bathroom with happy memories to replace the bad, such as baby bathtimes, or else it’s as good an excuse as any to get a new bathroom suite. And as for me? I just need to hold my daughter as much as I can and assure her she’ll never be alone again.

It’s not a competition

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It should be obvious that parenting isn’t a competition. If it was, there would be medals, awards ceremonies and prize money. But there’s no extra credit for how long you can go without sleep, there are no special mentions for martyrdom, and if you’re the dad, give up now because there’s no way you can […]

To sleep, perchance to dream

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The past nine months I’ve had a recurrent dream. I’m backstage at a play, waiting to go on, and I haven’t learned my lines. It’s okay, though, because I only have two and I’m confident I can blag it. A couple of minutes beforehand, I glance at the script and to my horror I have five pages of complex dialogue and I’m not ready and oh hell there’s my cue.

It’s obvious what that’s about. No matter how much you prepare, how many courses you attend and how many books you read, you never feel ready for the arrival of your baby. I’ve had that dream at least twice a week, often more.

I haven’t had it since Izzie was born. On the third day I dreamt I had boobs, but I couldn’t produce enough milk so the baby was crying. In the twilight before dawn this morning, in the 90 minutes between settling Izzie down to sleep and her waking up screaming, I dreamt I had just given birth to triplets, and again my boobs were empty. I’m noticing a pattern emerging here.

Izzie might only be twelve days old, but she’s already starting to grasp that while daddy might have a great beard, mummy’s the one with the breasts. I just can’t satisfy her on that one, although when she’s hungry she does seem to think I have a nipple somewhere on my left biceps. If I did, it would make things so much easier!

It makes me wonder what Izzie dreams about when she sleeps.

Apparently, babies don’t dream. Despite reaching the REM stage of sleep and spending around eight hours there each day, they have too few experiences upon which to call for creating genuine dreams. Instead, the brain uses this period of sleep to discover the body it inhabits, learning about the nervous system and creating neural links (this is what the jerking movements, distinct from the startle reaction, are all about). But how can they be sure?

Sometimes Izzie cringes in her sleep and whines as though having a nightmare. Sometimes her breathing comes in fits and starts like she’s excited. Her experiences might be limited, but all of our sensations, emotions, thoughts and behaviours are played out in our dreams, even if all we know is milk, and pooping, and cuddles.

I like to think that Izzie dreams of a man with a great beard and a nipple on his arm. As for myself, I have a feeling I’ll be dreaming of my empty boobs for quite some time to come.

Baby Steps

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When I was travelling through the wilderness of New Zealand I developed a simple mantra: step, step, step. Soaked to the skin in never-ending rain, tramping uphill towards a mountain pass that didn’t get any closer, with nothing but a cold cabin & faulty gas burner waiting for me, it was too much to think of the end goal. Or the middle goal. Or even the next hundred yards. I could only focus on lifting my foot, moving it forward, placing it down, step, step, step.

Raising a baby is all about the steps. My partner Lizzie thinks it’s about getting through the day, but to me that’s far too long term. Don’t think of reaching bedtime, don’t think of the next three hours. Live in the moment.

As I write this, Izzie is cuddled in my arms with hiccups, looking at me in a confused, mesmerising fashion. When the hiccups finish, will I need to change a nappy, feed her, burp her, settle her to sleep? It doesn’t matter. Right now I’m holding her as she hiccups and that’s good enough.

When the authorities learned that two people with AS were expecting, they assigned the unborn baby a social worker and set about testing our capability to raise a child. How would we meet its social and emotional needs? What would we do if it was eight years old and being bullied, or twelve and struggling to make friends? What sort of things did we witness as children (a particularly leading question, I thought: I witnessed some truly awful McDonald’s adverts, but I’m not sure that counts)?

My answer was that no prospective parent can possibly know what they’ll do so far in the future. We were learning about breastfeeding, nappies, burping, not studying dating advice for teenagers. Like any parent we’ll sort out the baby thing first, then the toddler thing when it arrives, then each stage in turn. And when the baby is being bullied at eight, we’ll have eight years of parenting experience, and be better capable of answering that question than if I made something up now.

They ultimately discharged us, with a view to checking in every so often to make sure we’re hitting the social and emotional milestones, whatever those are. Sometimes I think we know too much, and put undue pressure on parents and children, Aspie or otherwise, to fit into a model of what is deemed ‘normal’. But right now, I’m just thinking of step, step, step.

(And the next step was a nappy change, in case you were wondering!)

Staying Positive

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So, we’re rapidly approaching day ten and after 48 hours of military-style torture techniques we’ve just about survived the first growth spurt.

But now we’ve hit the wall. The adrenalin that kept us going since Izzie was born has worn off and the ‘I’m-the-best-dad-in-the-world, this-is-so-easy’ smugness wandered off around four o’clock this morning after five hours of trying to settle the little madam, and it hasn’t been seen since.

No, this is not going to be one of those blogs where people moan about how hard it is to be a new parent. I mean, come on: that’s a given. True, we’ve now joined the ranks of the bleary-eyed zombies that shuffle around muttering about how people without kids will never understand how hard it is, but we knew what we were getting ourselves into. Of course, I hadn’t realised how conversant I would become on poo colour or that I’d have to search high and low to find the right brand of nipple shield, but all life is a learning process.

This will be a predominantly positive blog. We have to find humour in even the most hopeless of situations, and this one is far from hopeless. At four am it can feel a little like the end of the world, but then the morning comes and all is well. What kept me going in the night was the realisation that, swaddled, lifting her bald head on a thin neck and chomping her toothless beak at me amidst her screams, my daughter looks uncannily like a tortoise. More accurately, she looks like a Koopa Trooper from a Super Mario game. That was enough to get me through.

Oh, and ear plugs take the edge off too!