What happened after is that I was in a serviced apartment out by the park for eleven days with a five-day-old, an incision, and no idea how to do any of it.
My mother died in 2017. I do not have sisters. My closest friend was in another country until the April.
And my father — a man who could have a building emptied — could not help me with a single thing that actually needed doing at three in the morning.
He came every day. He sat in a chair. He held the baby badly and knew it.
And on about the fourth night I was crying at two in the morning over a bottle I could not get the temperature right on, and he stood in that doorway in a jumper and said: “I don’t know how to do this. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
