The first time Yorkshire dad whose parenting blog went viral

When we returned home from the hospital it was to exactly the same pile of bricks that we had left, just a few days before, but we were now Mummy and Daddy and consequently this was a strange place, a singularity, where time is swallowed up in a daily gulp.

Time has no meaning here. You look at the clock and it’s 7.30am, the next time you look it’s Thursday. There is no day, there is no night. Just the distance between coffees and those blissful moments on the toilet when you get a breather.

For a fortnight I didn’t shower, didn’t shave, barely ate and neither of us escaped from our dressing gowns or pyjamas. We looked like the forgotten patients in the basement of a Victorian asylum.

We certainly didn’t have time to wash and iron our own clothes. Most of us have experienced what it’s like to return home from holiday and find that you have nothing clean to wear. For a few days you are forced to dig in the back of the wardrobe amongst the dregs of your sartorial history.

New parents face the same problem, taken to the extreme. During this period, I once answered the door to a woman collecting for Guide Dogs for the Blind. I had a thousand-yard stare and a beard you could bury a croissant in, and I was wearing a Star Wars dressing gown, boxer shorts, wellies and a T-shirt I got free with a KISS album. It had the words ‘Pull the trigger on my love gun’ printed on it. The woman took a step back, looking as though she wasn’t sure if she should ask for a donation or start fishing for her pepper spray.

She knew what I knew when I looked in the mirror: I was a man on the edge. And Lyns was stood next to me staring into the same abyss.

Within the first few days of Charlie’s arrival we were wrecked. We thought we had prepared for this ‘adjustment’. Or at least prepared our home. We hadn’t. In fact let me take you on a tour around the average three bedroomed home - my home in fact - with a small baby in it.

As we enter through through the front door, you will notice the massive accumulation of stuff in this small passageway. One of the reasons we haven’t been out much since Charlie was born is because we can’t reach the front door.

When I used to come home from work I would fling open the front door, casually toss aside my coat and keys, and stroll to the fridge for a beer. Now, it’s no small achievement if I can muster enough shoulder strength to force the front door open.

Having fought through the hallway, we arrive in the living room (ignore the people drinking tea; they are straggling visitors who refuse to leave, I’m looking at you Auntie Pat). We spent the previous nine months emptying the local Mothercare store into this living space. We bought too much. I’ve cried three times this year: once when I first saw Charlie on a scan, once when he was born and once when our Barclaycard statement arrived. We definitely bought too much. But then the relatives arrived with more. This is why this room had been transformed from a space for relaxing and socialising into a cross between a playgroup (on Ofsted special measures) and the back room at Argos.

The kitchen isn’t much better. Nobody has too much space in their kitchen cupboards. You fill the gaps over the years with novelty mugs and pint glasses you stumbled home from the local with. When you suddenly require the room for sterilisers and stuff, you soon realise that your kitchen is tiny. As you can see, every cupboard overflows and every work surface is covered with spoons, teethers and bottles. And because each bottle disassembles into 67 working parts, you have move thousands of pieces or plastic and rubber teats from one surface to another just to find the kette.

You will notice the impressive Jenga-stack of washing-up - no one is doing that anytime soon. Neither is anyone mopping the kitchen floor. It used to be that if the kitchen floor was shiny then it was adequately clean. Now, we accept it as clean if it isn’t sticky enough to suck your shoes off as you walk to the dishwasher.

Careful as we head up the stairs. Like a moron, the one thing I did find time to do before the birth was fit a stair-gate. You now have to open and close this bloody thing every time you walk through it. Obviously this was fitted two years too early and it’s as though we are observing the countryside code in our own house.

Bedroom one is now ‘The Dump’ or ‘The Overflow’. We used to have a drawer like this; now it’s a room, floor to ceiling packed with Jesus only knows what. Bedroom two is our room. This is where we spend most of time, so the room is best appreciated as a kind of Tracey Emin art installation of half finished mugs of coffee, plates, discarded clothing and general disarray.

Half open drawers spill out their contents into an already chaotic scene, giving the impression that a jumble sale has just been abandoned after coming under mortar attack.

And finally, the nursery. An oasis of calm. A pristine monument to babyhood. That no one ever goes in.

So apart from the nursery, in these early days every room in the house is a disaster zone. We lived in such order before. Now what was once a light and perfect home is just a couple of trips to Mamas and Papas away from being as functional as one of those hoarder’s homes that the occupants are found dead in.

Here’s the truth. There is no going home. The home you left behind just a few hours/days before? It’s gone.

What we left behind when we raced to the hospital, was a home in which we could casually decided to watch a film, open a bottle of wine, nip to the pub for a quick pint, have a conversation, a shower...think.

Our home was designed to be a place of solace, a place of escape. But now it turned out that the thing we had spent so long trying to escape had followed us home and we had invited it in. And everyone knows that with soul-sucking monsters the worst thing you can do is invite them in. It just makes them all the more powerful.

But here’s the thing, it turns out that monsters, for all their soul-sucking, can be a beautiful transforming power and inviting ours in was the single greatest thing we ever did. Yes, our home was changed. We had a great life before Charlie’s arrival and I’m not going to say anything as sentimental as it took him to make our house a home.

Our house was already a home. It took Charlie to make our home a bombsite, a wreck, a place where time is chewed up and spat out, a place of anarchy, chaos and madness. And who could have possibly thought that all this was exactly what our home had been lacking?

This is an extract from Matt Coyne’s new book Dummy, published by Wildfire, priced £14.99. He will be appearing at Waterstones in Sheffield on Thursday. The event is currently sold out but call the store for returns.