Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle) (5 page)

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Authors: Alex McCord,Simon van Kempen

BOOK: Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle)
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The only thing on our London agenda that didn’t involve the baby was a two-hour cocktail party for the luxury hotel conference Simon attended. The party was two blocks from the hotel and we organized a sitter in the form of Simon’s best man, Eddie, from our wedding, who also happened to be the director of finance of the hotel we stayed in. He came upstairs directly after work and played with, or rather walked the floor with, spaced-out François, who was wide awake and looking as far as his two-week-old eyes could see at the new person holding him and whispering to him all sorts of inside information with which to tease his father later on. It was the first time I put on a cocktail dress postpartum, and played it safe with a blazer on top. I had had my hair done in the hotel earlier while François nursed under the cape, and couldn’t quite believe that I was two blocks away from my newborn, wearing makeup and a pre-pregnancy dress, standing and conversing with people. That evening everyone had seen us in New York a month earlier at a sales road show for the hotel Simon managed, and couldn’t believe how “sprightly and well rested” I seemed. “Let me tell you,” I said, “it’s all smoke and mirrors. I’m about to collapse and slide under the piano and a drink is not even necessary.” It was so surreal—someone also joked that I mustn’t have even had a baby, that it was all a ruse with a fake belly and we were laughing at them all. It was all too real when we scurried back to our room and found our new baby who was just becoming hungry and looking around for his mom. I quickly changed, snuggled up into an armchair and fell asleep with François attached to me while the guys ordered a bottle of wine and Simon made Ed give him an exact play-by-play of every move they made in the two hours.
Life with a new baby is exciting and exhausting, as anyone who has been through it will tell you. In hindsight it seems harder than it did to me at the time, because there was such a constant adrenaline rush and everything was such a new experience. Nevertheless, there were times when Simon went to work and I was at home with the baby, looking around at the laundry to be done, the newspapers thrown everywhere, the sink full of dishes to be dealt with and hungry cats yowling for a refill of bowls, which I couldn’t bend down far enough to reach because François was sleeping in the carrier on my chest. One day I took a photo of the Greek tragedy our dining room had become, just for posterity. Taking that photo was helpful for my sanity and proved that these messes that happened in the space of three minutes were truly real and not exaggerated. The break that I got to find the camera, take the picture, download it and e-mail it to Simon allowed me to regroup enough to face cleaning it up 15 minutes later, and not put the baby in a FedEx box to send to my mother. When François was born we didn’t have a housekeeper or a regular babysitter, nor did we have any family in the city. It could have been isolating and depressing, but I forced myself out the door most days, even if for nothing more than a walk through the autumn leaves covering the city.
We were very, very lucky that after getting over their initial shock at entering the world we had two good sleepers. Once we moved them out of our bed and into their own, we had a few cry-it-out nights with François and virtually none with Johan. We felt well equipped to bring a baby into our bed and never had a problem rolling onto either of them. Certainly some do argue against co-sleeping, but Simon and I both slept with cats and dogs our whole lives without squishing them, and neither of us drank to excess or took sleeping pills. I became pretty adept at nursing on my side while (sort of ) sleeping, which delayed the problem of leaping out of bed at regular intervals. One concession we made was to keep an infant car seat right next to the bed, and used it a few times. That also made us more comfortable when we had been out to dinner late and they fell asleep at the restaurant—we just brought the car seat out of the cab and straight into our room with no wake-ups. Another sneaky thing I did to get more sleep was put François in a king bed with bumpers on either side of him. This worked well for the first two months out of our bed, then once he began to roll we put him in a portable crib. While he was in the king bed, I could crawl in next to him to nurse if he woke up, and by the time we moved him into the Pack n’ Play at four or five months he was sleeping through the night most of the time. As a result, we never bought an actual crib for the boys. They went from our bed to a big bed to a Pack n’ Play to a twin bed between 18 months and two years, pretty much without incident. Johan spent a few nights in the Bugaboo bassinet because he liked it for some reason. We didn’t avoid the big wooden crib for any reason other than convenience, and it worked well for us.
 
Simon
I have to say looking back now over six years later, the rose-colored glasses of which Alex wrote are firmly in place and for the life of me I find it hard to recall too many negatives. The wonderment of seeing black tar emanate from your new baby was hardly a negative. Nor even was the midnight race to the 24-hour pharmacy to buy a breast pump as Alex’s breasts were seemingly engorged with too much milk and she thought they were about to explode and fly off her chest. Frankly the hardest thing was probably the few times I held a crying Alex some four months or more after François was born. She was upset because he was then sleeping in another room and screaming for her, not out of hunger but merely missing her skin and not really liking his newfound nocturnal solitude. Before too long he learned to sleep throughout the night and to this day both he and Johan, with whom we also adopted the “cruel to be kind” sleeping strategy, have blessed us with mostly disturbance-free nights ever since. Thanks, guys.
 
Alex
Lest one think the first six months were perfect, let me tell you—they weren’t. I had terrible trouble pumping milk with François, and ended up taking him everywhere. Or (when we absolutely had to get a sitter) I’d leave formula as backup while we were out and then pump as soon as we got home to relieve the pressure and to build up a store of frozen milk. I never wanted formula to touch their lips, but it did on occasion, though I’m happy to say they both nursed on demand until they weaned themselves. François abruptly quit nursing at just under a year, and Johan held steady until about 16 months.
Another problem we encountered was Simon’s frustration with my mommy-brain, and my frustration with both his frustration and myself. Sometimes it seems as though the lack of sleep and general order to new moms’ lives causes a loss of IQ points, but I’ve always been of the “never let them see you sweat” mentality, and did my best to appear put together at all times. I did this pretty well during the first six months of each boy’s life, so well sometimes that I even fooled my husband, who then resumed thinking of me as a normal person capable of a decent day’s output and on occasion wondered why the laundry wasn’t done, dinner wasn’t on the table and I wasn’t out looking for more acting or design work when he got home, when all I really wanted to do was lay down and die from exhaustion. This expectation worked both ways: I have always been an overachiever and relentlessly whipped myself to see how much I could accomplish for the baby, myself and the household each day.
I was so obsessive about it that I felt as though I needed to go to confession if I even turned on the television or picked up a book during the day. I remember I so desperately wanted to a) feel like a normal person and b) be useful and productive that I went a little crazy. Simon began to appear to me as an alien from the land of effectiveness—someone who could actually wake up at a normal time, shower and put on a suit, go to his office and be useful all day. I was jealous of his routine and normality, and wondered whether I’d ever feel like that again. It didn’t help that my two professions were either freelance or, well, ephemeral would be putting it charitably. Prior to François’ birth I was fighting in the trenches of acting, trying to find a breakout role. I was beginning to build some momentum around the time I became pregnant and it was heartbreaking to be written off once I started to show, although when pregnant with Johan I was fortunate to do a movie with people who made a character pregnant for me. To then go out and fight for parts or design contracts when I was so loopy and out of it (for example, staring blankly at my computer screen and not being able to remember my full name) was difficult. I hoped that being in an altered state would spur my creativity with graphic design, but really all I could do was hold on to the one client I had at the time instead of finding new ones. After François was a year old I did manage to get some fresh on-site freelance work, and it was beyond weird to go into an office where no one knew me and or that I had a baby.
 
Simon
With Johan’s birth approaching, Alex and I were both concerned with how our two-year-old would react to a newcomer who’d be challenging him for our attention. We discussed this and decided that I’d take the lead with François and let her concentrate on Johan. At that point, François was a rambunctious toddler who loved to play with Daddy, and I was a daddy who loved to play with him. While this delegation of children made sense at the time, it also led to a quandary in that Alex and I separately were worried that with my concentration on François I was missing out on bonding and developing a relationship with Johan and him with me. In fact, I had to make a conscious effort to spend less time with François and more with Johan, which with me away from the house working nine plus hours a day wasn’t that easy. As our first year being parents to two children went on, François developed a regular sleep pattern of 11 hours a night while Johan napped throughout the day and slept for about seven hours at night. Eventually we all slipped into a nice pattern that worked where Alex would put François to bed at 7:30 p.m. or so and I would spend a good hour alone with Johan until she returned, gave him a final feed for the night and then he went to bed as well.
I have to admit that it probably took a full year for my feelings for Johan to rival those of François and whether or not that’s typical of how fathers react to second and subsequent children, that’s how it was for me. Now, they are well into their second and fourth years of school at the ripe old ages of four and six, and I can honestly say that there is no difference with the intensity of my love for each of them. In hindsight it’s hard to believe there was ever a stage when there was.
One of the challenges I expected to face as a father, and perhaps I’m not there yet, is that I have no immediate role model from my own life to emulate (or to not emulate as the case may be). Two months before my sixth birthday my father died and my mother, at the young age of 32, was suddenly the sole parent to four children whose ages were 13 months, almost six, nine and 11 years old. She didn’t remarry until 18 years later and so throughout my entire childhood and the remainder of the time I spent living in Australia my parenting was solely conducted by a woman. Sure, I watched Fred McMurray in
My Three Sons
as a young boy, but I’m not sure that those secondhand childhood memories of a fictional TV program featuring fatherhood in America were going to help me much when it came time to be a dad myself.
 
Simon, His Father (François) and Baby Brother Adam
 
I suppose the abiding promise I made to myself and Alex (and silently to the boys) was that I was determined to last on this planet long after their sixth birthdays… and 16th and 26th and perhaps even Johan’s 36th as well. Here’s hoping.
10 TOP MEMORIES OF RANDOM THINGS WE DID WHILE IN THE POST-BIRTH HAZE:
 
10. While changing François’ diaper on day one or two, we both stood mesmerized by the changing pad as meconium oozed out of him. It was really the most bizarre and fascinating thing I’d seen to date.
9. We took baby Johan for drinks at the Mercer Kitchen when he was 48 hours old.
8. Alex - I worked as a location manager on a low-budget film produced by childless 20-some things, buzzing around Manhattan and Brooklyn negotiating space deals with François strapped to my chest. This was the first nakedly anti baby prejudice I experienced and the only time in my life so far I ever resigned from a job
7. Alex - I literally cried with gratitude when Simon gave me an espresso machine for my first birthday as a mom
6. We subversively took sleeping babies to as many non child friendly places as pos sible to prove the point that children can be seen not heard and not bothersome such as dinner at the Ritz in London the Sahara Desert shopping on Madison Avenue Underbar in Union Square and film festivals.
5. Simon - I took three month old François to see kangaroos in a paddock near my mother’s house when we visited and let him grab their fur and even“ride” one Of course in photos it looks like I was trying to feed him to them
 
Baby François = Wallaby Food?
 
 
4. Alex - Screamed at my husband while he held me in a quasi headlock to prevent me from going into François room for yet a fourth time in the middle of the night after we’d both agreed to let him cry it out
3. Simon - When Johan was born introducing François to his baby brother in the hospital He very carefully held Johan on Alex’s lap and whispered “Hi Johan Hi baby” The wonder in his two year old voice was clear
 
Hi Baby! François Meets Johan
 
 
2. We took one-week-old François out in the Baby Björn to see the New York Marathon as the route was one block from our apartment at the time It took us a moment to realize why no one was standing on the opposite side of the road where weʹd gone for a better view Of course once the runners started to clog the road we wouldnʹt get back across for an hour so we literally sprinted across the street with the baby just in time
1. Alex - Did not even try to squeeze myself into pre maternity trousers for about a month—I continued to wear maternity jeans with draped sweaters and gradually eased myself back into pre baby clothes

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