Dad matters: First outing brings mixed feelings

The first night out without the baby brings on mixed feelings.

Amid the watersheds of early parenthood, sitting hunkered and unseemly in the company of significant and esteemed events such as teething, crawling and walking, there's an odd and selfish occurrence: the last time you went out to a restaurant without your child. It has been more than a year since our last child-free meal. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. Rather, when we went for dinner last Tuesday for the first time in a long time, I was surprised at just how strange and difficult it was.

Astrid's grandparents have been in Abu Dhabi for a few weeks and they offered to look after her. So one night Lucy and I went out for dinner. Getting pleasure from eating out is mostly habit. You can see the awkwardness and tension of uninitiated or occasional diners. It sags and waddles in ill-chosen garb. It stutters and prevaricates over the menu. It gasps at the hefty bill. Regulars know how to relax and enjoy themselves - I know because I used to be one - but after a year of not going out, I felt I'd lost the knack.

At first, I felt quite happy to be out without Astrid. The air was warm and the breeze was pleasant. It was a relief not to have to be continuously vigilant and responsible. But the euphoria was fleeting, akin to an inmate released from jail who relishes his freedom but is quickly swamped by its possibility. The pleasure ebbed away when the waiter brought the menu. Scanning its embossed type, larded with unctuous nouns, I reached the end unable to find a dish that cost less than Astrid's new shoes.

That's the main problem: you can kid yourself that you haven't really changed, that you're the same person you used to be only with children, that you don't do anything differently, but it is, I would venture, impossible to stay the same. This realisation rears its head most visibly when your old life intersects with your new and it crops up when you try to re-enact stuff you did before you had children. I was meant to be enjoying eating out because I used to enjoy it, but I wasn't.

This awareness that you have changed is not as depressing as it sounds. It is better to go with it than fight it. We will still try to go out for dinner more often. We will develop a new habit but we will choose somewhere cheaper in future. The polyphonic spree of Abu Dhabi's Womad festival last month seems to have done wonders for Astrid's sense of rhythm even now. She enjoyed bouncing around on the sand to rasping Mongolian folk music, Afrobeat and French ska, but it was at one of the festival's drum workshops that she truly embraced the power of the beat. She banged on the bongos for a long time and even followed the rhythms of the group at times.

Scientific research has found that babies are born with the ability to discern beats. In 2009, researchers from the Institute for Psychology in Budapest and the University of Amsterdam played a drum rhythm to newborn babies and used EEG to measure how their brains responded. When the rhythm was altered, the babies reacted in a way that suggested they could perceive the beat. These findings do not explain why some babies seem to have rhythm, while others do not. Perhaps every baby has its own rhythm. It is just not necessarily the rhythm that is prevalent at the time.