Becoming my parents

I grew up to the sound of National Radio. All through my childhood, my dad woke at some predawn hour and switched on the radio in the kitchen while he made us porridge for breakfast and thick slab vogel sandwiches for lunch (oh my god I sound old) and the sounds carried through to my room. The four tones, three short and one long, that precede the news on the hour; the weather report spoken by the same voice with the same order of placenames each day (Northland, Auckland, Waikato and the Coromandel Peninsula, scattered showers clearing in the evening...); the radio plays and short stories read by enthusiastically dramatic voices.

Add to that Bob Dylan, Ella Fitzgerald, Van Morrison, Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, and a solid amount of classical music, and you have the sounds of my childhood.

Like most children, I grew up chortling at a good deal of what my parents did.  National Radio? It's just people talking. Classical music? Borrr-ing! But like most people in their late twenties and early thirties, my parents' habits have started to become my own.

I don't have much time for reading at the moment. I don't have much time for feeding my brain. I haven't read a newspaper in a long time, although I have read the odd BBC article on my fancy smartphone, a gift from a friend that has proved sanity-saving when breastfeeding takes up a good chunk of the day.

I tried TV. Have you watched daytime television lately? At first I found it amusingly terrible, but now it's just terrible. It's all hype (Tyra), dirtbags (Jeremy Kyle), weird kids shows (H2O Just Add Water) and awful makeover scenarios for the home and body (60 Minute Makeover and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy).

So I looked up the frequency for National Radio and found my housebound mind both nourished and calmed by the string of shows emanating from the stereo. There was no blast of advertising; short stories were read, giving me that old inspired feeling I had almost forgotten; and they even played some fairly modern music. What's more, the consistency of the voices seemed to make Zephyr sleep longer. His nap stretched for two hours and I was left feeling pleasantly surprised by the absence of distaste that becoming my parents left with me.

I thought I would take it one step further. I downloaded an album off Itunes: Mozart for Mother and Baby. I played it for Zephyr's next nap and found myself relaxing as I settled him to sleep, rather than fretting about how long it might take. He, consequently, fell asleep easily and slept blissfully to the sounds of Piano Concerto No. 20 in D. I was sold.

So I guess this is how it starts. Zephyr is going to grow up, like I did, despising the boring radio and the boring sleepy music I play for him, and then, in thirty years time, the cycle will begin again.