Save me Time, OR, The Life and Times of Liam Theodore Cassidy Brunstrom, Part 9
Baby is too far away for me to sleep well. Tanya is with family and with people who love her. But she’s not with anyone who regards her as the single most important person in the entire world. She’s with family who will take care of her, but she’s not with someone who can drop everyone and everything else to take care of only her. When I hear that her ten year old nephew took the trouble to help her carrying and folding laundry, then my heart goes out to her and to him and I take the trouble to thank him (and probably embarrass him profusely) over the phone the next time I’m phoning her.
For want of anything else more useful to do, I find myself in the gym working out at least three times a week. It occurs to me that I need to get in shape and if I can’t help Tanya directly from where I am, I can at least make sure that I’m in peak condition to help her as much as I can once we are together. Running on a treadmill feels like running towards something real for the first time. My child will not be the child of a slob, if I can help it. If my child needs me to get off the couch at very short notice, I’ll make sure I can do exactly that. If everything is to be last minute then I need to be someone who doesn’t tire easily.
I also, perhaps ludicrously, wonder whether it wouldn’t be possible to try and adjust my sleep patterns in advance. I’ve never been good at taking naps, with a tendency to get headaches whenever I wake up after too short a burst. I feel confused and vaguely guilty if I don’t know what time it is. But I’m going to have to get used to sleeping in shorter bursts, so maybe it’s possible to practice nap? This project gets deferred and eventually it will provide my midwife sister in law D with much amusement. But I am determined to get myself into something like top form for this child, determinated that no incapacity is going to prevent me from being the best father I can. People say to me “Ah Conrad, you won’t be the worst father in the world”, but in truth, I’ve decided to set my sights a little higher than second-worst father on the planet. I want to be toasted and boasted as a Dad and a ruthlessly competitive streak starts to kick in. However, for this uberDad to emerge, I will have to learn how to react quickly to situations on very little sleep. At present I’m a heavy sleeper, snoring and yawning through thunderstorms beneath major flight paths. That too will have to alter.
And here I am at last, giving large second year lectures on Laurence Sterne, that very great comic writer born in Clonmel in 1713, the only writer to give sentimentalism a good name. The coincidence of this topic in itself is rather bizarre and alarming since one of the main themes of Tristram Shandy is the unforeseeable hazards of childbirth. Walter and Elizabeth Shandy represent opposite poles of theoretical and practical intelligence, a pattern I don’t think it would be healthy for Tanya and I to emulate. Walter Shandy respects and trusts the book learned “man-midwife” obstetrician Dr Slop (who has patented and advertises some very dangerous looking experimental forceps) while Elizabeth insists on relying on the local midwife whose only vulgar and insigificant qualification is the fact that she had delivered scores of healthy babies throughout the parish. (I intend to be a better father than Walter Shandy if I possibly can, though I’m naturally drawn to his ruthless academicism). I gave a copy of this book to Tanya’s sister D some years ago. I’m not certain she’s read it though, I have a feeling that the research demands of modern midwifery do not privilege eighteenth century fiction.
It’s a worrying read, as well as an enduringly funny one, especially for an imminent parent. Everything that can go wrong with Tristram’s birth does go wrong, but the very going wrongness is a comical attack on the pretensions of theoretical learning. Walter Shandy is convinced that nearly all babies are intellectually deformed as a result of being born head first and that feet first is the best possible birthing posture. What is known as a life-threatening “full breech birth” is, for Walter, the only way to go. Yet the delicious miracle is that Tristram survives, against pretty much all the odds and there’s a rare resilience in the book that is not always properly appreciated.
It’s also a book about what looks like bad timing, in which clocks play a pivotal role. It plays games with our experience of time, it makes time stand still and reminds us that the quantity of incident of which we’re conscious affects our sense of duration. It’s a book that already knows that time and space are relative. Walter is so concerned about his child’s education that he insists on writing a manual first so that he can do things by the book. Unfortunately, Tristram is growing much faster than Walter can write so that each chapter becomes obsolete long before it is completed.
I thank my stars that our little one will be born in a country where traditional and scientific concepts of childbirth are less vehemently opposed to one another than they were in the eighteenth century, I’m starting to know that the child will be born in Canada now, and I’m nagged occasionally by the logistics of bringing her or him “home”. What will be her or his “identity”? Will the complications of our distantly distributed national obligations confuse or inspire him or her?
conradbrunstrom 