Don’t Panic by George Lewis

Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time engaging with ideas of how to go through a birth (as a non-birthing participant) and how to begin parenting (as a non-lactating participant who isn’t entitled to meaningfully paid parental leave (Google “statutory pay” in the UK if you have a [more] progressive government & you’re elsewhere or a [more] progressive employer & you’re here … though obviously even the UK offering is more than is available in many parts of the world as standard and tbf the company I work for does have quite a generous annual leave policy which is allowing me to take the legally permitted two weeks but at full pay, so my situation could also be worse)…

The densest and most intense way I have learned about babies (before having one) is by reading The Birthing Partner by Penny Simkin, and the most relaxing way has been the accidental one-on-one 90 minutes we had with the only friendly midwife [we met] in Tottenham after literally no one else arrived for the free community antenatal class we showed up at a couple of months ago…

My lover and I also took about twenty hours of (not free, not one-on-one) NCT classes which were also definitely useful, and we’ve also attended every scan and midwife appointment offered in addition to the standard ones, (extras were offered to due my age-appropriate lover being *technically* a “geriatric” pregnancy, even though she’s the same age as pretty much everyone else I know having children…)

So lots of learning.

And now this.

Don’t Panic was given to me as a gift, and though similarly to The Birth Partner it is about pregnancy and childbirth and early parenting and aimed at a person who is neither gestating nor lactating, similarly to Simkin’s book (initially (though updated) from a couple of decades earlier) it does presume some trad gender roles far beyond sex/body differentials that I also found easy to avoid, but difficult to ignore.

London may be a relatively progressive place in the general context of the UK – which is a retrogressive hellhole with no redeeming features at all, in my opinion (you could make an argument for the NHS (and in my current context in particular for its midwife-led maternity care, however I’ll hold full judgement until this baby is outta my lover and she and it are allll ok) but that’s something that was once good and is being winnowed and whittled until no positive nub remains to be extracted by the next generation of venture capital)) – but the blunt small c conservative binary gender stuff comes out in buckets when you’re talking about children…

I get that my pointless body cannot lactate or gestate, but the entire worth and relationships of a person is not based on what and how their body functions… In my opinion…

But it’s hard to engage with any kind of parenting advice that – at some point at least – doesn’t slip into the “boys do this and girls do this; boys will want to do this and girls will want to do this”, especially referring to the parents, not just to the children…

This book is generally quite progressive – it intentionally clarifies very early on that m-f nuclear families aren’t the only type of family that exists, and many of the vox pops included throughout (mostly from famous comedians who are friends of the writer – a less famous comedian) include people not parenting in this setting…

Lewis is far from a trad wife zealot and does do a good job of normalising queer parenting and solo parenting etc, but he does also sometimes slide into the less hateful end of chauvinism with comments about men loving the pub, men not knowing how to dress themselves or their children, men not doing domestic labour, etc etc etc… light stuff, of course, but the kind of – for me at least – gender essentialist micro aggressions that I’ve felt throughout the pregnancy from almost everyone I’ve spoken to, with some notable exceptions.

Even people who aim towards a more progressive outlook slip into this if you talk to them about pregnancy and parenting enough… “You must be worried about earning more munny to support Ur wife and baby”, for example, when the longer term goal I have is to figure out how to be working and commuting fewer hours so I can maximise time with the child…

Other stuff, too, always always other stuff too…

There is always demeaning labour to be found to do, and though meaningless work hollows out a life and a person, it does ensure food and board aren’t things you have to worry about.

I’m not too worried about finances (at this point), but I’m not (at this point) determined to give the kid a private education or anything else more costly than the basics…

As soon as I understood anything about the world, it was cultural rather than literal capital I always lamented my own upbringing for not containing. And that, thankfully (at least for now!) isn’t something it’s impossible to share, with libraries and free museums and galleries making a serious cultural education something one can access with little more than effort and a free afternoon or two a month…

I dunno, though… I worry that I’m accidentally writing as if this book in itself was offensive or cruel or short-sighted, when it quite clearly wasn’t and I think is actually a great resource, even reading it as someone who will be a parent but will not be a daddy.

Don’t Panic is casual and chatty without being vacuous, it’s informative without being monovocal, and the inclusion of lots of anecdotes and opinions and personal stories from other parents permits a variety of advice to enter in, which contributes to Lewis’s key – and very valid – point: there is no perfect way to parent, the only important and irrevocable idea is the need to care and (to mash his title due to the tense I’m writing in) not panic.

I imagine the advice and the tone here would be very useful and very appropriate to the vast majority of people. And it’s gentle progressive/tolerant nature is the kind of thing that us urbane liberal intellectuals (lol) fear no longer exists in Britain.

It’s good, actually, I think, that a mass market book like this exists, normalising feelings and practicalities about parenting in combination with making it clear that not every child is raised in a home with one mommy who does the childcare and never leaves and one daddy who does the working and is never home…

But is there something for me, resourcewise? Someone who doesn’t proscribe to gender binaries, who doesn’t think flowing clothes are for people who lactate and that people who gestate give the best fashion advice… 

Maybe, yes, there probably is, but it’s not the kind of thing one finds organically or in the top promoted spots on Amazon once its algorithms have realised you’ve ejaculated in an ovulating ****

Good, yes; important, yes.

But I need more.

I do need more.