Insanity during pre-birth interviews
I normally instill confidence in the interviewee
There
goes my reputation as a
sane member of the journalistic community. Last week, I explained that our baby was being born. In the run-up to the big day, I gradually changed from my calm, collected self into a raving lunatic as I tried to get as many pre-birth interviews done as possible.
Normally, when I conduct interviews, I speak in soft, welcoming tones designed to instill a sense of comfort and confidence into the interviewee. I follow all the standard rules: Ask pointed, inquiring questions, listen patiently, and express polite interest in an interviewee’s opinions that might not be as useful to you. Classic journalist stuff.
That all went out of the window last week, when the pressure was on. My conversations with a series of stunned interviewees went something like this:
Me: “I’ve got 20 minutes before my next interview. Tell me everything that you know about the storage management software market.”
Interviewee: “ Well, um, if I could just step back a bit and explain our company’s rich background in …”
Me: “I KNOW ABOUT YOUR COMPANY’S HISTORY! TELL ME ABOUT STORAGE!”
And so on.
Anyway, that all faded from memory on the big day. It’s a girl! Lucy was born at 10 a.m., and she was yelling almost as much as I had been earlier in the week. I suddenly changed from stressedout journalist to doting earthdad, and the soothing tones were back again. Not that that lasted long, mind you.
Lucy was born with a cleft palate and had to stay in the intensive care unit while they checked her feeding patterns. Cleft palates these days are easy to repair — just a couple of minor operations over a few months — but it meant for the first few days, she had to be fed with a special bottle. And it turns out she was particularly eager to be fed by me. Whenever anyone else tried, she would get very agitated and refuse to co-operate. As soon as I stepped up, she’d slug back gallons of milk.
I loved it, of course. What dad wouldn’t? And my feeding her meant her very tired mother could get some well-earned sleep. But it did put a kink in a schedule, which required me to race home from the hospital at 7:30 p.m. and again at 7 a.m. to put our toddler, John, to bed and get him up again.
That also gave me a chance to think about my work schedule, because even with the lion’s share of my interviews completed, I hadn’t managed to write a lot of the articles yet. And one of my first impending deadlines is an article for a British newspaper about cellphone tax revenue in Bangladesh. I’m not kidding.
All of which explains why, at 4 a.m. on Sunday morning, I was half-asleep in the intensive care ward feeding a warm, cozy Lucy, dreaming about Bangladeshis calling the intensive care ward from cellphones. The nurse would repeatedly hand me the phone and a distant voice would say: “Hurry up. John needs his breakfast.”
Anyway, Lucy is now out of the ICU and learning to breast-feed better with her mother, and by the time you read this column, they will be home.
Unfortunately, another three articles come due this week, and I still haven’t finished all the interviews. What was that I was saying about soft, soothing tones?