After much banter and late-night rivalry, my partner and I agreed we’re not cut out for having children, writes Darrel Bristow-Bovey.
“You couldn’t take it,” said my partner.
“No, YOU couldn’t take it,” I replied.
“Don’t be childish.”
“I’m not being childish, you’re being childish.”
We were having an adult conversation about children. We have no intention of having children, but occasionally the subject comes up. One of us says, “It wouldn’t be so bad,” then the other says, “Will you take it for walks and clean up after it?” Then the first one says, “A baby’s not a puppy,” and the other replies, “You couldn’t handle a puppy,” and then it becomes competitive.
Once we argued three days about who should give up their job to be a full-time parent. We both wanted to be the one. “You make more money”; “Please, you make MUCH more money.”
It’s a kind of reverse competition – we’re both convinced we’d be the ones to crack first.
“When he doesn’t bother to come home for Christmas, I’ll be so furious,” I’ll say.
“No, you won’t. You hate family Christmases. You’ll be grateful he doesn’t come home. I’m the one who’ll be upset and wish we’d never had him,” she’ll reply.
But recently we became more traditionally competitive. She mentioned that our friends with a new baby are suffering from sleep deprivation, and I said, “That wouldn’t bother me. I don’t need much sleep.”
At this, she made a mocking, hooting sound. For some reason, she deludes herself that she gets three hours a night less sleep than I do. This is a spurious claim, supported by fanciful assertions that one of us snores and wakes up the other person, who then spends the small hours staring at the ceiling and thinking about the regrettable choices she has made in her life, especially those involving romantic partners.
I pointed out that at dinner parties she’s always the one who gets tired and wants to go home, but that devolved into an unseemly wrangle about the fraudulent allegation that at dinner parties one of us drinks too much and the other has to drag me away before I offend the other guests. Clearly, there was only one way to settle this.
“Tonight,” I said, “we’ll see who can stay awake longest.”
The competition would take place under “baby conditions” – no drinking, no loud music or loud television, no making out. We would remain awake, under circumstances as pointless and boring as humanly endurable, just like real parents.
I started strong. I was making little jokes. At midnight I did some Mohammad Ali shadowboxing to intimidate her with my energy. But by 2am I started to flag. She was showing unexpected resilience. She was making to-do lists and catching up on correspondence. I was becoming too aware of the skin on my face. My eyes felt like unpeeled lychees. My tongue was a hairbrush.
“Wait,” I said, “these aren’t proper baby conditions. We should be able to take short naps and be unexpectedly awoken at unpredictable intervals.”
“Hmmm,” she pondered. “But who will wake us?”
“You wake me,” I said. “It’s much worse to be woken than to do the waking.”
“OK, then you wake me,” she said.
“You can’t handle being woken.”
“You can’t handle being woken.”
It’s a good thing there wasn’t a baby in the house, because when we woke up 10 hours later we realised we’d both fallen sleep on the sofa mid-argument, and nothing would have stirred us, not a baby screaming, not the onset of the zombie apocalypse.
It was a beautiful thing, two people coming together, bonded by something bigger than themselves – the knowledge that they would both be utterly useless at having a baby.