My Diary of Triplet Fatherhood

Experimenting,
You try putting your nose in
A kalaidoscope.

Looking up at the toy
I’m balancing on your head.
It falls off again.

It isn’t easy
Putting on vests if you start
At your tummy.

Autumn days, gentle days. Happy memories pile one upon the last like waves. Pleasantly-cool-beneath-bright-sunshine days, whistful, memory-heavy, heavy-scented already with tomorrow’s nostalgia. Sepia, soft-focussed, super-8 days. Fly-in-amber days. Forget-me-not days. First love days.

I feed geese from my fingers, Brave Daddy, his example setting nervousness at ease. Leaning sideways from their pushchair, each girl clutches her piece of bread protectively away from the edge.

Three faces dappled red and white, tomato first then yoghurt. Unaware that whacking won’t help get the last of her afters onto the spoon, Jemima’s eyes light up. She’s seen me through the kitchen window. I watch her shriek “Dada” in silence. She drops her spoon.

The same old questions. But I don’t mind any more. “One year old last week,” I’d say at first. “One year old two weeks ago,” “… three weeks ago,” “…a month ago”. One year old. Each time the words bring me out of myself. Time passes so quickly.

Breakfast’s over. Strawberries, kiwi, sliced banana. Then cereal, which they mostly feed themselves. I scoop the last into their mouths. More banana (”mamama”, “nanna”, “raraba”), gather toothbrushes. Jem holds her mouth wide open, shouting “aaah” in imitation of what I always ask. Evie wants to clean her own. Scarlett gets bored three brushes in, turns her head away… until I use her toothbrush myself and she pulls it back protectively.

I’m sitting on the kitchen floor, knees up, back leant on the cupboard. Three, full, little mouths hum “mmm” the way I do when I’m tempting them to eat. No temptation needed this time though – they’ve eaten the entire banana I peeled for my own breakfast.

The four of us alone seems normal now; routine carries us happily from hour to hour. Coccooned in the moment, the workplace seems a distant dream.

Little triumphs. Evie turns the pages of a book, carefully, one at a time, pokes each page in imitation of me tracing the words as I read. Jemima makes a diamond, forefingers and thumbs, an action from Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. She wants me to sing. Scarlett clambers up to her feet beside me, plants a beautiful, dribbly kiss on my cheek. Stumbling steps, little legs thrown forward, one, two, fall, I catch her, one, two, three, I catch her, “try again”, “well done”. Balancing blocks. I clap them every time, smile, cheer my encouragement. Scarlett tries to dress herself. Jemima passes toys as I tidy up. Evie claps her sisters when they balance two blocks.

It’s my birthday. We dare a visit to a swanky Italian restaurant; the same one J and I went to on our first date, where she told me whe was pregnant the first time round. The waiters crowd our table, competing to make the girls laugh in English and Italian. Even when they’re gone Jemima keeps trying to catch their eye, screaming in excitement. The girls are ordered seasonable vegetables and, because it’s a special occassion, chips, too, as well as eating pieces of our dishes – spare ribs, pigeon, monkfish, squid, jugged hare. So grown up, so well behaved. I give them each a little ice cream for dessert and Jem screams louder.

J makes risotto and we eat it at the table. Our first real family meal, we each have plates and spoons and cups of water. I can tell the girls feel grown up. Scarlett puts her bread and butter on top of her rice, insists on attempting to eat it with a spoon. Such good table manners already.

Crystals in the window make rainbows across the wall. I tell the girls they’re fairies as they laugh and scream and point them out to me wide-eyed.

In pictures from just two months ago they were chubbier, rounder-faced. Are they babies still?

Scarlett can’t sleep. She fell today and banged her head on a marble floor. I pluck her from bed and we slip next door in silence, sit on the bed in the empty spare room. “Shhh,” I whisper, arms around her. “You’re safe now, Sweetheart. Daddy has you. I’ll always, always keep you safe.” Scarlett relaxes, leans her head into my chest. I hope I can.

With thanks to Jemima for inspiring this one.

No wonder women
shave thier legs; walking’s easier
with leg hair handholds.

“Hey, girls… what’s this?”

“Namama!”

“Barara!”

“Ma-baba-Ba! Ma! Ba!”

“Nearly. Come on, you know what it’s called. Evie?”

“Baraba!”

“Very good but not quite right. Scarlett?”

“Banara!”

“Fantastic! You’re almost, almost there. Jemmy?”

“Rarara-Baaaah-Ba!”

“Ooh! So close, so close. Here’s a clue: it begins with ‘B’. ‘B’. Got that? Ok, try again…”

“Bababababannnnnnnnnnnnnn-Ba!”

“Ba! Ba! Ba!”

“Baaaaaaaaah-Ba! Baah-Ba! Bababababa-Ba! Ba! Ba!”

“Ok, OK, Jem, Shush a moment. That was good, really good. You’ve all got the first bit. One more try now. Ready? Ok, what’s it called..?”

“Barara!”

“Banana!”

“Ba! Ba! Baaaaaaaaa-Baba-Baba! Ba! Ra! Ba!”

“So close, just… hey, wait a minute there! Someone said it. Banana! Someone said it.” I turn around from mixing Weetabix and pear. “Who said it? Who said banana just right?”

Cue silence, of course, plus blank looks, innocent gazes flitting about the ceiling, a sudden interest in highchair trays, the works. They’d probably have whistled and rocked back on their heels if they knew how (and weren’t strapped into highchairs). Still, I flush with pride. Evie has managed the word a couple of times, her first with varying syllables any of them has learnt, but, still, she only gets it out occassionally. And her sister are just on the cusp of getting it right, Lettie tending to use Rs in place of Ns and Jem generally getting too carried away with how much fun shouting is to pay much attention to the exact sounds she’s making.

It seems strange now to think what a small part pride played in my life before fatherhood. Sure, I felt it sometimes but I doubt I felt true pride as many times in the decade before having kids as I have in the year since I did.

What a child does is just so thoroughly impressive. They start with nothing; no knowledge, no ability, no skill, just a bundle of needs and raw instincts. And then, bang!, it’s as if a starting pistol fires and they’re off, growing up. I’d never imagined just how fast they gro when seen close up nor how they grow in so many different ways at once. They take in so much, learn so many things, become so much more capable so quickly. It’s astonishing to watch them at it, building themselves into a person from nothing.

For much of this first year that’s all there was to do, though – just to watch. And then, around the age of six months, it changed – they started to interact. Where as before, if I moved they’d watch, if I spoke they’d listen, now they wanted more than to take things in passively.They see me use an item and they want it too, they hear me say a sound and they’d try to repeat it. Just a little encouragement is enough to incentive to make them try and try, again and again. It’s flattering to be one of the people they use as a model for their growth but, more than that, it’s engaging to be part of the process. Their triumphs become my triumphs. Both they and I are no longer spectators.

So when someone says banana, or takes a step, or balances one brick atop of another, I’m proud because I know how far they’ve come but also, at least a little bit, I’m proud that I’ve helped them on their way.

I received a call today from a very upset J. She’d taken the girls to Emsley Farm to meet the animals and, from the quaver in J’s voice and post-tears sniffing in the background, I could tell that the meeting hadn’t gone well.

The first thing that sprang to mind when J told me the donkey there had bitten Evie was a story her mum passed on last week about a boy who had the middle part of his hand bitten away by a horse. My heart gulped up to my throat, stopping me breathing. I had visions of blood, hospital waiting rooms, waining for doctors to tell me what was happening.

“Is she alright?”

“Yes.”

Apparently, Evie had just done what she does every day, and with the very same result. She’d poked her finger into the donkey’s mouth and poor J had seen it happening but just couldn’t get past our massive triple buggy fast enough to stop it. She heard a crack, could only imagine it was the donkey biting through.

But it wasn’t. When she did get round to Evie, the donkey had her tiny finger clamped between its teeth and would only let go after a minute or more as J tried to pull it out without hurting her baby. But, eventually, she managed it. Evie was OK. She wasn’t injured.

As I listened down the phone, the relief was astonishing. I collapsed back in my chair. I couldn’t have born my littlest girl getting injured; not any of them, for that matter. I recalled that in his youth, my uncle Ronnie (an amateur boxer) once knocked a donkey out with a single punch when it dared to bite him and I wished I’d been there today to do the same. Then I realised I probably would have just hurt my hand, too (and possibly been reported for animal cruelty) so it was probably good I wasn’t.

Evie cried and cried. Other mums gathered round. The donkey, presumably, watched on, content with its morning’s work. Bastard. I know a tower in Spain I’d love to send him on holiday to one way (and that’s down, at terminal velocity). Just by looking at the picture from the Emsley Farm website, you can tell there’s something sinister about him. It’s in his eyes…

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What’s such a shame, though, is that Evie is delighted by animals, so much so that our walks round the park now zig-zag from dog owner to dog owner so she can scream, laugh and bellow in glee at their pets. She finds them hilarious. Recently, she’s even raised the courage to stroke some of the less frightening ones and I hope this doen’t knock her confidence too much.

On the other hand, maybe, now she knows what real biting is, she’ll quit poking her finger into her sisters’ mouths.

Evie has a new nickname. I call her Gnasher.

See, after months of being helpless to prevent herself being barged out of the way, crawled over, pushed down, relieved of toys and generally suffering the fate of the small guy everywhere, she’s discovered she has a weapon that evens the odds. All it takes is one hard bite and, as if by magic, her sister backs off, she stays standing and she keeps that toy she was so happily playing with.

It’s scary. One moment she’s the mild-mannered, little cherub I’ve come to know and love, the next she’s launching herself forward like a rottweiler to savage the arm, hand (or in one instance, bottom) of her sisters.

It’s horrible to see my daughters, who I want so much to be friends, hurting each other. And it’s so hard when I have to tell her off for it. I guess I knew there was going to be a period of parenthood where the word “no” would loom large in my daily vocabulary but I’d never expected the strange mixture of futility and guilt that having to repeatedly say it would bring on.

“No, Evie. That’s not nice.”

“No, Evie. We don’t do biting in this family.” (What family does?!)

“No, Evie. Look what you’ve done. She’s crying.”

or, sometimes, for variety:

“No biting, Evie. You’ve hurt her.”

I try to add an explanation when I say it because I want to get in the habit of ensuring they know why they’re being disciplined (and so I have to reflect on what I’m doing, too) and to say her name, too, because Scarlett, big softy that she is, gets really upset if she hears me being stern nearby and thinks it’s her being told off.

But it doesn’t seem to do much good. Why would it? Sure, on one hand Daddy does bend down and point a finger at her, saying something in a cross voice. But on the other, she gets to avoid being crawled over. And whatever her reaction, I feel terrible. I hate having to tell her off anyway but if she takes no notice it’s worse for feeling pointless and if she cries it’s worse still because I feel even more guilty for not being the nice, kind daddy she expects me to be.

The hardest thing wbout telling her off, though, is that Evie has actually become a lot more confident since she learnt to bite. For a long time it wasn’t unusual to find Jemima and Scarlett bombing around the room while Evie sat and played quielty in the corner with whatever toy they’d last discarded. Now she bombs around with them, safe in the knowledge they’ll think twice before using their size against her.

Not, to be fair, that it is just Evie who bites. All three girls have picked up the habit in recent weeks (I think that’s called proliferation) and each one of them currently sports as least one set of double-semicircular indentations on an arm somewhere (if you look closely you can tell who did it – they have different numbers of bottom teeth).

And not only that, they have started to do something that leaves me completely at a loss for what to do. Putting a single finger out and moving it towards a sister’s mouth, a look on their face which I can never decide is mischief, cunning or mere curiosity, they poke it between their teeth… and get bitten, collapsing, distraught, into tears. Who do I tell off then? It’s as much the fault of whoever poked the finger as who chomped down upon it. And why do they do it? It’s happened enough times now that they must know what to expect but that doesn’t seem to stop them, and I can’t help wondering if it’s a sign. Do they want more attention? Are they so desperate to be cuddled that they’ll hurt themselves to get it? Or is it just another period of experimentation and I’m falling victim to that parental guilt that hovers over every dad’s shoulder?

I don’t know, and until my girls can talk, I guess I’ll have to accept that I won’t. All I can do is to keep trying to do the right thing every time these difficulties arise. So – anyone have any idea what the right thing is?