Written six years ago, but never posted until now thanks to exhaustion.

I am five years in now, and I realise I have written nothing on being a parent. Every year I wanted to, every month.

But the years went by and I found myself changing nappies and working at midnight and sleeping very little and it always felt there were More Important things to be doing than advising the next tranche of adventurers. 

The key things I say to every prospective parent are: you are GAMBLING with your life.

If you’re lucky, you will have an angel baby and will wonder what all the fuss was about.

If you’re unlucky, you will strive like anything to have kids, reorient your psyche around years of miscarriages and IVF and jealousy. After all that, you may end up with a difficult baby.

Most people will be somewhere in between, but these tips should apply to them.

• Sleep when you can.
  • (You can’t.)
  • (You may never sleep soundly again.)
• You have created something that you love with a deep love, like a first romantic love. This is the blessing.
  • (The only blessing.)
• You also know it will die, that it will suffer, as all things must. This is the curse. 
  • (Not the only curse.)
  • (You also know it will grow and cease caring about you. This is the second curse.)
• At first, you will lie awake making sure it lives. Every missed breath, every groan is agony.
  • (Later, you will suffer agonies as they make their mistakes that you know they have to make.)
• You will make mistakes, in how you care for it. Every action you take has consequences when tending these early shoots. You are too tired to be blamed for any of them.
• You have endless good intentions: all the things you will teach them, the dream of the human you will create, erudite and strong and brave. But, save for the strongest and cruellest amongst us, you will actually create what you cannot help but create. 
  • (A morality is in action, not in words.) 
• Your worries and actions will give you superpowers. You will catch things, lift things, do things, spend things you never would have before.
• Your mind may be hijacked. By love.
  • (You and your partner(s)’ psyches may differ. Love and hormones will hijack you differently.)
  • (You may fall out of love because of it. Another curse.)
• In a year, you will learn to change a nappy in the perfect dark in seconds, without spreading shit and piss everywhere. 
• Your sense of smell will change. You will walk into a room full of children and know if anyone has defecated, whether it’s your children, which of your children it is, and even the consistency of the stool. 
• Your sense of hearing will change. Anything you hear that vaguely sounds like a crying baby will cause you to leap into frantic action, even when deep asleep.
  • (You will never be deep asleep again.)
• Your sense of sight will change. Anywhere that you encounter small children, you will be driven by internal forces to nod and smile and coo. 
• You will learn to be as still as a stalking lion and as quiet in your movements as a panther. Lest they wake.
• Every parent understands the sleeping bob. You hold the child sideways and bend at the knees repeatedly, with a motion flexible like a sapling. After a time – second, minutes or hours – they sleep. They may have slept anyway. They may only sleep for moments. But you will be grateful for the respite. 
• From this, you will grow strong, asymmetrically.
  • (Your knees will not. Your knees will age, fast.)
  • (Your body, it is likely, will break. The strange postures, the weights, the work.)
• In these long midnight moments, you will remember old songs, dredged up from your childhood.
  • You might understand what the feeling of an oral tradition was, before the written word broke the chain and the information revolution fragmented our attention span.
  • You will sing them, night after night. You will bore yourself – until the day they join in. 
• Holidays are no longer holidays. They are work.
  • (Work is no longer work. Work is rest.)

After all these learnings… you will want a second child. You will have a variety of reasons but one good unconscious one is to avoid wasted expertise.