Richard Baum

At my party on Saturday, a friend of mine who I’ve known since three minutes after I started university, and who has recently married, announced that she was now pregnant. I was overjoyed at the news, cooing around the place like a demented owl and generally doubting my own gender by getting the types of broody feelings I’m not sure men are biologically supposed to get. It was the best news I’d heard all year.

But now, two days and one clean-up later, I find myself asking how on earth this managed to happen. Obviously I have moved on from the biological now. My parents taught me about the dangers of baths that are too hot, and of cabbage patches years ago, and I tell Tam never to take such baths or eat such vegetables because I know we’re just not ready for children yet. No, I don’t mean how she managed to get pregnant in the first place, but how in the name of all that’s rational I came to be old enough not only to have friends who are married, but friends who are now carrying children of their own.

Does this sudden dismay happen to other people? Do others ever just stop for a moment and think about how many decades their inner-selves are from their outer-selves? Is there a cure?

Yesterday, and I mean, literally, yesterday, I was six years old. I lived in a house with my parents and sister, I went to primary school, and I played with a plastic football and Lego bricks. There is no way, NO WAY, that anyone in my peer group is now old enough to have a baby, without them being the talk of the town and rightly whisked off to a country house supervised by sadistic Irish nuns. And yet, it turns out that they are all old enough. How did this happen?

There was someone else at the party, a friend of Tam’s, who has gone through the whole pregnancy thing already, and emerged out the other end with a real child. A “Francesca” that breathes and cries and will soon walk and talk. How could she have done such a thing and survived? Here she is, with a baby, still managing to do normal things like engage in conversation and drive a car, and here I am struggling to come up with the necessary commitment to bung a pizza in the oven for 15 minutes. If I had an actual baby, I really don’t understand how I would be able to do anything other than act like a jibbering wreck.

I can pin-point the exact moment when we suddenly stopped being the young generation and started being the middle one. It was 19:50 on October 31st 2006, when the last of my grandparents died, and there was absolutely nothing and nobody standing between my parents and The Great Hereafter. The shield that separated my cosy little childhood from nasty things like time’s irritating ticking disappeared. But I didn’t have to do anything about it then. I could just pretend to still reside in kid-hood, because there was no-one beneath me coming up on the rails. Now that’s changed too, and there is no place in the play-pen left for me. I’m going to be shoved out of it by a gurgling newcomer who is the product of someone who was, last week, LAST WEEK I tell you, the 18 year old fresher at university tumbling about the place without a care in the world. And now she has travel-cots and stuff that pumps things. It’s unpleasant for any number of reasons.

I have a responsible job. I am elected to public office for God’s sake. People ask me to do things for them, and they get done. I debate issues that matter and people ask me for advice. And yet, in my head, I just can’t contemplate that it is even conceivable that a peer of mine is doing something this grown up. An actual baby, that will be here after we’re gone and will have babies of its own.  

I probably grossly undercooked a sausage or two at my party. I thought quite often about the mountain of debt it is necessary to tunnel into to afford the mortgage on the house. And I let two dozen people drink red wine near my cream sofas. But the one truly frightening thing about Saturday night was the thought that in six months time there’ll be a little one amongst us and we really really won’t be those kids who met on the first day of university any more.

Which would be a sad thought, were I not still absolutely gob-smacked with delight about the whole thing.

Rick