Dad-tactics before the birth
Being a new Dad is busy. It’s tiring. It means being always on and always available. Being interrupted is your new default state. Your longest available free time will be measured in minutes. It will be unscheduled.
Although more daunting, all the parenting things will take care of themselves.
Instead, I wish I had received advice on how to best make use of my time before the birth. And how to prepare my daily life to the fragmented tempo of being a parent.
In short:
doing any time or attention intensive projects and planning upfront
setting up my habits to being modular and adaptable
mentally preparing for this new interrupted mode
squeezing in some last minute responsibility-free fun.
For me, this would mean:
Get any strategic thinking done now. Be that career, family, finances or side projects. You will not have brain space to do so for at least 6 months. Your preferences and outlook will shift after the birth. Do the building blocks of strategic planning now and adapt later. We did a lot of career and family decision-making on the fly that added undue stress.
Write down your plan. You probably have some plans for how you would like to parent. In the fog of war, these plans will be forgotten. Write it down. Make it short; make it simple. You will be in reaction mode for 6 months and will fall into the habits of whatever’s easiest or pushed on you by grandparents, aunts and nurses.
Get fit. It’s a base from which to build. I did the sympathy pregnancy thing and transformed into a fat fool. Plant the seeds of a fitness habit that has a minimal dose you can do while sleep deprived and at short notice during brief, unscheduled windows. Walking the buggy is good, but you need to sweat; I didn’t do this until much later.
Put your finances in order. Being explicit about your financial situation will be a source of security for you both; mainly for herself.
Read books. Especially hard ones. You’ll not be reading many of these again any time soon. They’ll sit there taunting you on the bookshelf, while the little one taunts you from the playmat.
Get away. Lads trips will be a very rare commodity. Get one in now even if you don’t feel like it. I wasn’t in the headspace for one and thought I had to stick around Adeline for support. Get debauched.
Savour being ‘carefree’. Enjoy doing things at your own pace. Enjoy doing things last minute. Enjoy being accountable to ‘almost’ no-one. Drive to Dundee in your bare feet.
Read parenting books in advance. You won’t be reading these on the battlefield. They’re mostly bollocks; they’re all long-winded and boring. Write short actionable notes.
Think strategically about career. Make any career moves now that will give you more flexibility when the little one arrives. Identify what work you can do on autopilot and what requires more mental bandwidth. Work, post-baby is different. I don’t know how anyone does it.
Get any creative work done. Unless creative work is your bread and butter, it will be increasingly hard to carve out time and mental space for deep work. As I said - autopilot.
Figure out how to quickly decompress. You will need to do this. This could be meditation, pushups, short walks, whatever. Having a go-to tactic in your pocket will help. Trying to find what works when you already need it is not ideal.
Stretch. I put out my back, changing Luca’s nappy on day 3. Partially from moving house a fortnight before, partially from sitting in a hospital chair overnight, almost entirely from having the flexibility of marble pillars.
Finish any projects or permanently shelve them. If there’s any large loose threads, either tie them off or leave them go. You don’t need that mental baggage. It’s looking increasingly unlikely that I’ll be lining out for Man United. I’ve put an end to practicing my autograph. I feel a lot lighter.