The summer was blazing, the days were humid and stifling. The nights, by contrast, were humid and stifling — and the little one would not sleep.
My night shifts with the angel involved, at that period, a forced waking, a wander of some forty minutes around the house with the child slung against me in a carrier, while I sang her, as best I could, lullabies from the late sixties onwards. In ninety-five per cent of cases the saga ended with me laying her asleep in the comforting lap of my wife and collapsing onto the bed like a used celery stalk.
And then came that night.
I do not know what was troubling her. Teeth, ears, the beginnings of nightmares, heaven knows. I only remember that I was already on the ninth attempt to lay her down, and for the ninth time I was answered with a sawing, grating cry that bore no relation to the charming babble she produced in daylight hours.
Something in me snapped. The Neanderthal holding that baby was not the calm, reasonable man who spent his days telling other people how to live.
I was a sweating, stinking, stubbled creature with a tonne of work to finish by the morning, with eight surplus kilos ruining my appearance, and I wanted to sleep.
In that second I imagined, plastically and sharply, raising my hand and delivering her a slap that began in the writings of Freud and ended on her left cheek.
I am no mystic, but somebody up there smiled on me that night. The little one suddenly stopped crying and sent a small, bewildered hand towards my face. At that same moment, in perfect timing, a rare cold breeze came through the window. I put the paternal role back on, and with renewed strength continued walking around the house singing her an entire album — which, arguably, constitutes a refined form of abuse, since there is no chance of my reaching those high notes.
Babies. Delicate and helpless creatures whom nature has programmed to place total trust in us. Creatures who know how to arouse in us the whole range of emotions, including the one at the black end of the scale — aggression.
Why does this actually happen?
Freud was the first to shove the ugly mirror of ourselves into our faces: unconscious sexual and aggressive drives are an integral part of every normal personality. Were it not for the restraint society imposes, and were it not for those internal policemen in our personality, countless unrestrained hooligans might be looking back at us from behind the polite exterior of the reasonable person.
But why towards children in particular?
Because they are the only people in your life who apply pressure without limit and against whom no retaliation is permitted. A colleague who exhausted you can be avoided. A partner who provoked you can be answered. An infant does neither, and cannot be reasoned with, and does not stop.
I am writing this because almost every parent has had that moment, and almost none of them will say so — which leaves each of them privately certain they are a monster, and alone with it.
You are not. The thought is close to universal. What matters is only the thing you did next, and if what you did next was to keep walking round the house singing badly, then you did the job.