Fatherhood, that is. James Snow shows his baby bore syndrome has not flagged, but grown more bookish.

Poet, novelist and jazz critic Philip Larkin got it all wrong in those famous lines of his from the mid-sixties:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
 They may not mean to, but they do. *

    Any first time parent, especially dads, will understand what he obviously really meant was:  “your baby sons and daughters” in that first line. I mean, my baby daughter has turned my life upside down. When people tell you that your life will henceforth be a riot of sleeplessness, daddy day care house arrest, endless diaper changing, irrational fears of all kinds and 24/7 cleaning up of dribble, vomit, poo and  pee and toys strewn all over the place, etc., they neglect to tell you that your life really will be a riot of sleeplessness, daddy day care house arrest, endless diaper changing, irrational fears of all kinds and 24/7 cleaning up of dribble, vomit, poo and  pee and toys strewn all over the place! Your footloose and fancy-free days are over, and so is the adventure that brought you to Turkey in the first place. Adventure? The “urban safaris” that used to remind one of how much romantic character and the city has? To hell with that. I’m happy the seaside from Kurucesme to Bebek now has perfectly sterile, corporate style slate, which is smooth and flat and perfect for pushing a baby around (In the past I would’ve seen the beauty in the cracks and imperfections that distinguished poverty-stricken Turkey from prosperous, boring old museum-like Europe and its nanny states) and the newly renovated playgrounds.
    Dads undergo other less notable metamorphoses as well. Take music for example, I go through the days with my head full of “Hey diddle diddle the cock and the fiddle/ the cow jumped over the moon” and literally dozens of other looping nursery rhymes. I’ve even picked up ones that I never knew as a kid from BBC collections. British co-workers are bemused when they hear a Yank humming “The Grand Old Duke of York” or “Hot Cross Buns”! The fact is that I’ve been forced to bring my nano to the workplace where thankfully I change some of my daily input to stuff like Hot Chip’s Dj Kicks or Sigur Ros’ latest. Otherwise, it’d be nothing but “Dr. Foster went to Gloucester”** and the rest of it.
Mobility is the other profound change. No more impulsive going anywhere! – And when you do plan to go out, with the baby in tow, the packing can take half an hour, before you actually leave your domicile to let your baby experience some of the sights and sounds of the world outside. A few meters down the road and the baby then promptly falls asleep so there goes your grandiose plan to show your baby the Bosphorus, the sky, the trees, smell the flowers, etc. Don’t expect any trips anywhere else. You won’t be able to afford them. As a friend commented, you know you’re a parent when you have a picture of a kid in your wallet where your money used to be. Other things play the role of slowing your life down. If you were accustomed to a hectic, productive life, hustling for jobs around town and cyberspace, it can be quite a shock to the system – it can also send your already walrus-eyed, sleep deprived self off to sleep like a stiff vodka and Valium.        
    For example, sit down to a bottle feed without preparing something to watch, or something like an audio book to listen to, and there you are, for about 20 min. of feeding and 15 min. of winding and burping, lost in your own tedious thoughts, most of which are just a rerun of the ones from the day before. It should be pointed out that the chances of actually concentrating on a DVD/TV or audio book are slim, as babies know it when they don’t have your undivided attention and they can get agitated and grizzly if you tune them out – even during a feed. I’ll leave the joys of changing diapers like a real, post-feminist ‘New Man’ to the reader’s imagination.
Luckily, there are helpful books for fathers-to-be to prepare them for the changes in lifestyle to come. The uplifting “Dadlands”, for example, features a list of 16 things dads can expect to give up. Here are just some of them: going to the bar/cinema/theatre/sports events. You are also warned there will be no more “impromptu sex on the floor…any kind of sex, anywhere…conversations with non-parent friends…conversations which don’t involve children”. Actually, the writer concludes there won’t be any conversations anymore, at least what we used to consider conversations.    
    The writer also recommends you kiss any adventure holidays goodbye and quite simply forget about “having a life”, end of story. Nice. A big shout out to author Daniel Blythe for making fatherhood sound so inviting. Reading through the sub-genre of fatherhood books that has emerged, one quickly arrives at the conclusion that there is no upside to it. Even the best book I could find included an essay by novelist James Hawes called “Why not to Dash your Baby’s Brains Out”. The answer to the titular question being that, although the baby is stopping you from doing all the things you’d rather be doing by crying, etc., maybe you wanted something to stop you. After describing the anger his wailing baby is able to incite in him and all the expletives that pour from his mouth, followed by total exhaustion, he sees how this is an “excellent precursor to meditation.” Wow. Some silver lining, eh?! Lucky are the dads who can attain his Zen take on things! Forget Eastern philosophy. When a guy is left alone with a baby that won’t stop crying, invoking Pan from Greek mythology makes more sense. With each passing minute, the panic grows: “Why won’t she stop? Did I give her the old milk by mistake with a day’s worth of festering bacteria!? Does she hate me? Haven’t I learned how to hold her yet? Has she realized I can never handle the responsibilities of fatherhood…that I am a fake?” and so on. The only good news is that hypochondriacs can now transfer all their fears of illnesses and terminal illnesses to their babies and give up a little of their own self-absorption, and in Turkey there are lots of diseases and conditions to choose from.

Warning: If you hadn’t figured it out already this article is a fine example of baby bore-ism, so I’ll dedicate it to my mom, one of the few people who might be interested in reading it.
 
    Some dads, to be fair, adore fatherhood. Tim Klus, known for his wailing sax solos at Istanbul’s world famous 360, experienced it completely differently. He called his baby boy his “raison d’etre” and a quick scan of his new daddy-o Facebook photo albums revealed a man either seriously high on MDMA or overwhelmed by a tsunami of euphoria brought on by his adorable son. When I asked him what to expect before I became a father myself, he said something along the lines of a mix between “the arrival of the atom bomb and Jesus at the same time”. Little did I know then, that I would later have the same moronic, drug-addled look and experience the same high when my daughter was born, and in the ensuing weeks. A friend from university understood my feelings of initial bliss, but advised me to enjoy it while it lasted as his kids, now teenagers, have begun screaming obscenities at him when they don’t get what they want.

    Another positive, is, let’s face it, the mothers still shoulder most of the work. “Fatherhood”, a book by Marcus Berkman, points out that fathers “don’t really need to know or do anything” as long as they are prepared to forsake all visitation rights after the inevitable divorce. Most of the books aimed at mothers eschew such cynicism, but they suffer from a penchant to include highly proscriptive, quasi-fascist “routines”, which the authors are at pains to make mothers feel guilty about if their babies won’t follow them to the letter. However, I have yet to see one of them, which suggests running out on the family, and all the responsibility that goes with it as do many of the books for the guys. Miriam Stoppard, Gina Ford, the “Baby Whisperer” woman with the unfortunate surname of ‘Hogg’ – are all strictly PC (An exception to this rule is the wonderfully irreverent guide to pregnancy produced by the “Rough Guide” folks). Most of the content of the books aimed at fathers is meant to be funny, good old lager lout wit, but for the proud, happy, often annoying new dads the humour can be way too dark. I guess I myself am still euphoric about my new hood. What the t-shirts that show a couple of newlyweds with the caption, ‘Game Over’ and the daddy books that convey the same message forget is that we parents are still ‘in the game’. The adventure continues. Only it’s a totally different sandbox, and like your first sexual experience, it cannot be explained to someone who has not experienced it. In my own case, I have no idea what the future holds. With that pithy saying: ‘One Day at a Time’ in mind, I’m lucky if I can say this particular day rocks! So far just about every day has.

*    From his poem “This be the Verse”
** How the hell the British got ‘Foster’ and ‘Gloucester’ to rhyme is anyone’s guess.