Distracted Dad
Richard Hearn is making mental checklists
At night, the mind plays tricks. In quiet, elongated, wakeful darkness, a phrase, a memory, a feeling can loom large. At 3am, up with our one-month old, I’ve become obsessed by yes, you’ve guessed it, ergonomics.
This might make me sound quite sad. A dry scientific term, all health and safety and best practice, rattling around my brain in the middle of the night.
For those that want an official definition, ergonomics is ‘the science related to humans and their work’. Maybe I’m getting too technical; I’m basically saying you need various objects close at hand when looking after an infant.
Let’s use three key situations as examples.
During bottle-feeding or changing a nappy, one thing out of reach can be disastrous. Anything missing or slightly too much to the left or right upsets the equilibrium. Upsets me.
The third situation is what I’m going to call the ‘put-down’ which is neither something that happens in the company of Oscar Wilde, or at a vet’s, but is that oh-so-important transfer between a babe-in-arms to a babe-still-asleep-in-his-Moses-basket.
“Missing the remote control is the worst – stuck on the shopping channel at 3am conjures up one of the lowest moods possible”
Having a blanket, say, or, worse still, maybe the Moses basket itself, in the wrong place at that time and you’ve careered through the barrier from success into failure.
I’ve decided this is where much of the stress of early parenthood lies. There’s a scene in Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs when a skeleton vainly reaches through the bars of the cage for a jug of water. I feel that skeleton’s pain.
That sums it up. It might be a drink, a cushion, the sports pages of the paper. Missing the remote control is the worst – stuck on the shopping channel at 3am conjures up one of the lowest moods possible. I speak from the heart.
Get this wrong, start the long-drawn out feed without preparation, and it’s like being at the cinema holding your popcorn, but you’ve forgotten to start the projector. (This is a rubbish metaphor – you’re rarely both a paying viewer and the projectionist at your local Odeon – but I’m too tired to think of anything better, so it stays).
I am writing this one-handed, barely able to focus on the screen, with The Baby cradled in my left arm, gurning at me and occasionally kicking my typing hand. Any capital letters you see will have been added later.
Over time, the checklist of what is needed for any simple task gets refined. Just make sure this is a mental checklist. Write it down, and you just know it will be on the other side of the room, out of reach, when you need it most.
