Last week, my wife’s sister, Aoife, gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, Effie. We couldn’t get enough of the pictures of her tiny features and wrinkly wee hands, and got very emotional over the footage of her coming home to meet her big brother, Charlie. Two days later, our friends Diarmaid and Kate sent photos from Melbourne of their newborn son, Tiernan, and we once again pored over the pics with fawning adoration.
We were so moved that we took a dig back through photos of our own adventures in newborn care. ‘God,’ my wife said, as we scrolled through pictures of our daughter when she was only minutes old, ‘do you remember her being that small?’
‘Um, not really no,’ I said. Our daughter was born less than two years ago, so the memories should be fresh in my mind. They are not. Stranger still, this lapse in memory hasn’t just happened, it’s happened for the second time in two years.
In this very column, following my daughter’s birth in 2022, I often wrote about how strange and novel the experience of our second child seemed. How little I remembered about newborns, the patterns of their sleep, even just the sheer terrifying, implausible tininess of their little bodies. Practically nothing I’d learned from our son’s earliest days four years prior had been retained.
At the time, I felt that the fact I had literally been writing a weekly column about all of these events, should have forestalled this amnesia. It did not. A glance through those columns jogged memories of milestones, events and gags, but they might as well have been written by an – admittedly handsome and hilarious – stranger. Should I, then, be surprised or not, that the exact same thing has happened again 20 months later? ‘Maybe it’s evolutionary,’ I said to my wife, as I stared at the photos on the screen, from the time before memory, the prehistoric days of 2022.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘you’re just trying to get through every day and your brain isn’t taking it in.’ At this she seemed unconvinced, on the grounds that she was going through a hell of a lot more than I was, and she can still remember those days with startling clarity.
When congratulating people on their new arrivals, I say what everyone else says. Sleep when you can, take it slow, treasure every moment. To this, I will now add, ‘Try to engage your brain so that you actually have moments to treasure’.
As we scrolled past our daughter’s hospital pics, I felt like I was remembering better. Soon, we got to the moment where my son was introduced to his sister, an event I remember more clearly than anything I’ve ever witnessed in my life. He is filled with love and I hear myself choking up behind the camera.
‘But, wait,’ I said, as Nana and Grandad hove into view, beaming to camera during this beautiful introduction, ‘Your parents were there?’
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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