Growing Into Fatherhood

I was recently reading a long and furious thread on Mumsnet posted by a new mother expressing equal parts astonishment and anxiety about how hopeless her partner was proving to be at parenting. It would be fair to say that the more seasoned mothers leaping to weigh in were neither astonished nor anxious. They were familiar and furious, piling in scornfully with expressions like ‘weaponised incompetence’ and ‘learned helplessness’. 

One mother, clearly subscribing to the show don’t tell school of thought, simply posted this picture (by Javier Royo interviewed here: https://www.rebobinart.com/en/javirroyo/): 

And I don’t know if I’ve ever been more discomfited by an image in my life; I felt attacked. How I wish I did not, how I wish I could have looked at that and been entirely nonplussed: ‘What’s all this about?’. Instead, there was a curdling sense of recognition. 

So affected by this little cartoon have I been that I’ve taken, at drinks, dinners and meet-ups with friends, to producing it and observing carefully the responses it provokes. My own private Rorschach Test. I’ve seen Trumpian expressions of quizzicality, tight lipped smiles, heard gales of laughter and, in the case of one mother, it elicited a single word response: ‘Yes.’ 

You sometimes hear Tigger like first time parents enthusiastically announcing: ‘We are pregnant.’ And maybe the fathers to be that make these declarations go on to act as embodied ripostes to the suggestion that fatherhood infantilises. They are, no doubt, the sympathetic abstainers who eschew booze and decent cheese to affirm that they are doing pregnancy together. Rocking up to pregnancy yoga classes and cultivating expertise in hypnobirthing techniques. 

But I hope I will be forgiven for expressing my personal opinion which is that pregnancy is personal. In fact, it’s hard to think of an experience that is less collective or shared than gestation. I think of it in prepositional terms. Pregnancy happens IN a woman but it happens BY or occasionally AT a man. In the latter case you need to watch out because a man that feels that way is highly likely to conclude that he does not like pregnancy being done at him and will be out the door faster than you can say ‘Child Support Agency’. 

You sometimes hear talk of the 4th trimester, the idea that babies, even at term, are not fully cooked and need a few months to realise that they’re in the world and no longer in a personal flotation tank. You don’t so much hear talk that for most if not all fathers the 4th trimester is their 1st trimester. Sure, unless they’re particularly obtuse or myopic, they will have noticed that their partner or wife’s shape has changed somewhat over the preceding 9 months. But it’s not their body that has undergone a life defining and creating transformation. 

Because pregnancy happens in a woman every day of it is, quite literally, a growing preparedness for the baby that is to come. When a woman lays her hands on her belly she is laying her hands on her baby. When a father lays his hands on her belly he is touching someone else, no matter how besotted, committed or evolved is his devotion to their relationship. Seeing is believing, as they say, and one thing I can say to any new father is when you see that baby you best believe that your life is about to change: big time. 

If you’ve undergone the bourgeois rite of passage which is the NCT course or read any books on first time parenting you sometimes see or hear an observation to the effect that mum’s job is to look after the baby and dad’s job is to look after mum. I have always balked at this advice as it is trite and glib and patronising but also because what most new mothers want more than anything else in the world is sleep and the only way in which they get any sleep is if someone else is looking after the baby. And therein often lies the rub.

Returning, for a moment, to the despairing mum of Mumsnet, in the detail of her post she enumerated the ways in which her partner had demonstrated himself to be the Dummkopf of daddies and the feeblest of fathers. He was hopeless at feeding the baby, at changing it and at soothing it and, if you know anything about babies, you’ll know that’s all of it. 

This provoked scores of responses effectively saying the same thing: he’s doing it on purpose; don’t stand for his shit; does he think this is your job; women have to learn this stuff too and, most jaundiced of all, the dreaded LTB (Mumsnet for ‘Lose The Bastard’). Being an anonymous online forum there was, unsurprisingly, no defence mounted to this denunciation and I certainly wasn’t foolhardy enough to venture one. Apart from anything else maybe this hapless father was the embodiment of the expression ‘If you want something done properly do it yourself’. But there is a riposte to that aphorism and it’s ‘Practice makes perfect’. Of course, in order to practise you have to want to but, just as importantly, you have to be able to. 

I can only begin to imagine how spectacularly uncomfortable it must be to be 9 months pregnant, permanently impeded by having the equivalent of a small box of books strapped to your belly. But even harder it is to imagine what it must be to have one moment life within you and the next without. Newborns want their mothers and mothers want their newborns. That is inescapable biological reality. If you’re a new dad this can be quite confronting. If you’re a decent dad wanting to give it your all you will need to reckon with the possibility that even your all isn’t want the baby wants. More challengingly your all might also be found wanting by its mother. 

This is where humility and patience are required. You are a latecomer to this party and you will need to prove that you’re bringing something to it. If I could rewind the clock to the arrival of my firstborn I would very much like to have understood this better. However understandable it is to feel that the introduction of a baby adds the metaphorical 3rd to the marriage if you don’t learn to relinquish that feeling you are doomed forever to be the lemon. The way to retain your partner’s affection, respect and ultimately love is to work for it and that means staying firmly on the side of team adult not diminishing and demoting yourself to the kids’ club. 

But there is a lesson too for mothers. Fathers are only as useful as you permit them to be. There’s nothing like being in left in charge of a baby to learn what it is to be in charge of a baby. And not for an hour or two under close, anxious supervision. But a weekend or even a week of working it out for himself. And sometimes his working out won’t be yours but if it works, it works. Obviously, if the baby is endangered in any way there is a clear red line but giving birth confers no parenting expertise, it’s a question of trial and error and if you want your partner to be a father you have to let him try and, just as importantly, you have to let him err.

The great thing about having more than one child is you get more practice and I’m hoping with our 3rd I can, albeit belatedly, demonstrate that however many fathers that cartoon might fairly lampoon I am not among their number.

In Parentis - My New Job

 

How can you tell someone is having a good time on social media? They're not posting anything. If they're having a really good time they don't have social media at all. In a similar vein, how can you tell if a father is doing a really good job of parenting? He sure as hell isn't writing a blog about it. With this little paradox in mind I'm starting a new, part-time, full-time job in 2025. Except it's not new and it's neither part-time nor full-time, it's also not a job. I'm going on paternity leave. And it's not leave because I'm self-employed, so I'm just not working (and not earning) for 4 months, also I'll be parenting for the rest of my life. And parenting's not a job unless your child is your boss, which is never a good dynamic.

Furthermore, the baby's already here, he's been here for 6 months. Conventionally it's the first child that enjoys maximum attention from its parents but in my case it's the 3rd that will be getting 8 times more of my time than either of his predecessors. It's hard to explain why it's taken me 3 rodeos to put in something approximating a proper shift (and I say that conscious that 4 months is still only 16 weeks) but the simplest explanation is that it's not if not now when, it's if not now never.

It may also be that my wife subscribes to the 3rd time lucky school of thought when it comes to entrusting her progeny to her liege man of life and limb. While I'm in the midst of fathering, at the same time, an 8 year old and a 5 year old I'm acutely conscious that dedicating months of your time to children when they're older is not really possible. If you don't build that bond in weeks at the beginning it can take years or even decades to build it later.

I'm feeling a combination of excitement, apprehension and relief. Relief at stepping off, even if for a moment, from the 100mph collapsing carousel of the criminal justice system, apprehension at having my shortcomings exposed when I really should know what I'm doing by now and excitement about being able to parent with full focus and attention and not in hurried moments between frauds and fisticuffs.

Baby yoga, baby sensory, baby cinema, baby music, baby art - I can't wait.

You'll know I'm making a decent fist of it if I'm not posting (too much).

In Loco Parentis

 

Discovering a person in adulthood whom you previously knew in childhood is one of life's quietly dislocating experiences. It's like realising a picture you thought you knew well was in fact just a child's sketch. Few children know the adults around them with an evolved intellectual awareness of the type of person that they are, but all children know how the adults around them make them feel.

These thoughts were much on my mind as I attended last week the Memorial Service of my House Master James Cook, whose obituary you can read here: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/james-cook-obituary-eton-master-who-married-his-matron-vfrsv2tcr

I did not know James, or JNBC, as teachers at Eton are known by their initials, in childhood but in adolescence; that long liminal state in which we can be embarrassingly sure of our opinions and judgements. I can tell you how he made me feel: cared for and regarded. It was with good cause that something his eulogy emphasised again and again was his kindness. 

We like to assume that all children grow up surrounded by kindness but one of life's roughest lessons is discovering how often that is not so. When you are entrusted as a child to the residential care of an adult who is not your parent if that trust proves unfounded lifelong damage can be the result. I was blithely oblivious to that fact as a teenager but two decades in the criminal justice system has proved to be a hard education.

I wrote after the birth of my first child how there is nothing like becoming a parent to engender a sense of gratitude towards one's own parents, however deficient they may have been. But my real awe and wonder is reserved for those who are prepared to take on that mighty responsibility for children who are not their own. It is little secret that teenagers can sometimes come up short in the delight department; imagine what it is to be literally responsible for the health, care, and wellbeing of 50 of them. Exposed daily to their pranks, defiance, and churlishness it seems incredible that corporal punishment was relinquished so readily.

James Cook was a profoundly civilised man who cared that his boys should be civilised also. I shudder to recall how often we were anything but. However, it was only in listening to his nephew's beautifully delineated account of his life that a man was revealed entirely unknown to me and my complacent assumption that I knew him at all.

We live in a time when more and more are choosing not to have children or who have not, by force of circumstance, made that choice of their own volition. Men like James Cook are a reminder that the cultivation and development of young people is not the exclusive preserve or responsibility of parents.

The kit ain't it - Babying without the buggy

I feel like one of the strongest contrasts between a first time and a third time parent is quantity of kit. New parents are absolute suckers for the marketing man or woman and the erroneous if understandable belief that the more paraphernalia they buy the less terrifying the rollercoaster will be. I write this as the window closes on what is by far my favourite period of being a parent and unfortunately it only lasts about 8 weeks.

Our 3rd was born 7 weeks ago and he is, I'm glad to report, thriving. That is baby speak for growing and getting milk drunk as many times a day as he wishes and he wishes A LOT. While it would be an exaggeration to say that he has doubled in size where once there were sparrow wings and fretwork veins now there is chunk and ruddy cheeks.

All of that means that I am glumly counting the days until I can no longer safely and comfortably tuck him under one arm and go for a decent walk. Obviously, if it really came to it, I could probably give a prop playing teen a firearm's lift if their life depended on it. What I'm talking about is a leisurely stroll without perspiration or real effort.

Most firstborn parents enter such an intensive nesting phase that it's not uncommon for this entire golden period to be gobbled up without the baby so much as leaving its home. And if they do there is anxious zipping, swaddling, hatting and the accursed pram. It was a blessed moment in my life when the pram was finally banished from the hall when it was deemed that No. 2 could jolly well walk and a moment of some dismay when it returned to block, obstruct and generally encumber passage in and out of the house.

What the pram most particularly does is separate the baby from you and from the world and if I believe in anything it's in connection and not separation. Don't get me wrong I love a bit of a sky view but if you're just arrived in the world surely you want to see it and its people? For that reason I'm even a bit unenthused about slings and not because, like Piers Morgan ludicrously sling shaming Daniel Craig, I think they are unmanly but because I want my baby to turn out not in.

Unless you've done it it's difficult to describe the contagious joy and goodwill that is engendered by taking a tiny baby for a walk in your arms. Even surly faced men well versed in London's rules of studied disregard for strangers will stop you in your tracks to wish you congratulations. Walking past a full bus had the same effect on the passengers as if I had just walked past with a million pounds in cash in my hands. 

More importantly the baby gets to see all these people and to see the world at its gladdest and most welcoming. If it takes a village to raise a child the village needs to see the child even if that village is to be found on the mean streets of North London. It also goes without saying, if you're a dad that is, that taking the baby out gives the mother a break and teaches the baby that it is just as safe, well and homed in the hairy arms of its dad as the more familiar ones of its mother.

Lastly, and most positively for me, there is the enormous impact on the father's wellbeing of spending time with a baby like this, mano a mano, not as combatants, obviously, but as collaborators. I was extremely interested to read recently a piece by Jonathan Kennedy in the Guardian which explained that fathers that engage in this kind of bodily contact and care experience a rise in their levels of oxytocin. Anecdotally I can absolutely attest to the amazing feeling of calm and wellbeing that is spurred by perambulating without the pram.

A Matter of Life

Having an English degree from a decent university means I should probably know the difference between fear and anxiety. Therefore it was probably not ideal that I was pondering their respective definitions sitting quietly in the corner of a room on the labour ward while an excellent midwife carefully explained the induction process to my wife. Eventually I decided that fear means knowing something bad will happen and anxiety is worrying it might. Consequently, it was the source of a great deal of anxiety that I realised what I felt was fear.

Husbands, birth partners, men in the birth room, call us what you will, are not there for the fellow feeling of shared experience. At best we can soothe, support and advocate but what we can never, ever do is speak from experience. It is intriguing, therefore, that so many women choose to be attended by their husband, partner or boyfriend for what is, inescapably, a uniquely female process.

What was clear to me was that was not the moment for such idle wonderings. My one job was to be a pillar of reassurance. But it is hard to sound reassuring when you are frightened. So I had to focus my efforts on transmuting sickening fear into, at most, racing anxiety. This was very hard to achieve because one thing my English degree did equip me to do was to detect and reject a euphemism at 1,000 paces. And the plain English word for induction of labour is force.

Freebirthers will have you believe that labour is an entirely natural process and that medical intervention of any description is an unforgivable interference with nature's way, they would rather give birth on the concourse of Euston Station than in a hospital. Conversely there are some medical professionals who take the view that the only truly safe birth happens on the surgeon's table. Being a man I've always taken the view that it is not really my place to have a view on this debate.

But even with no skin in the game I did not, do not, like induction. It is an oxymoron to say to a pregnant woman: We're going to do this naturally but we're going to force the naturally. You don't need to be a consultant obstetrician, gynaecologist or seasoned midwife to predict that the body's reaction to this is likely to be WTF, at best.

Often induction crops up as a late pregnancy solution. Sometimes, as in our case, it's a result of medical imperative. What that means is 'I'd rather not' doesn't really have anywhere to go. So when the midwife talks gently through the sweep, the gel, the hormone drip, the 'popping' of the waters I realised it would be facetious and inappropriate to ask when the emergency caesarian would take place.

Waiting for life is much like waiting for death. You don't know when the appointed hour will come and so once the door closes on the labour room you can't know whether it is for 3 hours or 3 days. As the man in the equation you are chief spectator and primary witness but, in an ironic finale to the process of conception, you are completely impotent. It is sometimes said that there is no torture worse than seeing one you love in pain and it's reasonable to ponder whether the movement to have husbands and partners present at birth was spearheaded by an emotional sadist.

Or, alternatively, it is a basic blow for equality that if you're going to share in the pleasure you should share too in the pain. And there is definitely no lesson in life that actions have consequences like being present at the arrival of a new one. It would be interesting to know the extent to which witnessing childbirth deters men from doing the dirty on their partners. The cowardice of desertion from a mother and child can only be accentuated by having seen what the mother went through to produce the child.

It is generally considered that it is testosterone that impels some men to do harm and cause pain. But I have wondered whether it is the agony of childbirth that causes most women to balk at the idea of inflicting physical pain. When you have suffered so much to give life who in their right mind wants to deal death?

Anyway, only a man could fritter time in such metaphysical wondering when there are nappies to be changed, a baby to be burped and a push present to be bought. So I will confine myself to saying this; I could not be prouder of my wife or love her more for all that she has endured and my admiration for her. and all those that have borne children, is unbounded.

Mother and child are doing well. Dad will look after himself.

Captain Parent

As I await the arrival of our 3rd I’ve decided it would be prudent to conduct some research into advice and guidance for multi-child parenting. There are the obvious tomes: How to talk so kids will listen & how to listen so kids will talk; Siblings without Rivalry; Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids; and so on and on.

Wherever one looks there is an expert or a guru on hand to foster secure attachments, to encourage baby led weaning and to emphasise the sanctity of your child’s autonomy. I mean no disrespect to any of them in saying that I eschew all of it in favour of the absolutely inviolate parenting template that is The Sound of Music. 

Before you get completely the wrong idea I am OBVIOUSLY not talking about that meddling nun. Instead, I’m taking about the GOAT of parents, the original Big Daddy -Georg Ludwig von Trapp. It is a shame that so little of the film is devoted to an examination of his first-class parenting methods for let us not forget the scale of his task. 

In a time in which many two parent families are completely undone by the stresses of rearing just one child Captain von Trapp was single-handedly raising 7, and just consider the age range: 

Liesl 16 

Friedrich 14 

Louise 13 

Kurt 11 

Brigitta 10 

Marta 7 

Gretl 5 

That’s a whole 7 Aside team of pre-schoolers, tweens and teenagers. Without rules, boundaries and discipline that schloss would have been reduced to the state of a menagerie in a trice: Liesl snogging Rolf under the pergola; Friedrich sneaking off to Salzburg to neck Schnapps with his mates; Louise Tik Tokking on the parterre and Brigitta blaring out Taylor Swift from the drawing room. 

You probably weren’t counting the last time you watched the film but he has ALL of those children on parade in under 10 seconds and the one that’s late is late because she’s reading a book. This is Olympic gold medal parenting. And lest you rashly suppose that actually this can’t be good for them given how beastly they are towards the hapless succession of failed governesses think on this: they drove those nannies away because they already had the perfect parent. 

 So here are my 7 reasons for tipping my cap at the Captain: 

 1. The whistle – permissive parents might balk at the Captain’s manner of summoning his ratings or ‘children’ as they’re known on land. But think of the frequency with which you have to shout to gain your kids’ attention and you too will see that the £25 you spend on your very own Boatswain’s Pipe will be one of the best investments you ever make: https://www.acmewhistles.co.uk/whistles-accessories/acme-classics/boatswain-pipe 

2. Individuality – it’s modish to feel that perhaps the children might be inhibited by their uniformity at the start of the film when in fact the Captain has taken great pains to give every one of them their own distinctive call, a system so successful that even Gretl gets it. 

3. The uniform – Speaking of uniformity those children are in a turn out smart enough to bring a tear to any Hapsburg eye. You want your children to act smart then get them dressed smart. You want your children capering about in public embarrassing the family name then dress them in curtains. 

4. Routine – Mornings are spent in the classroom and afternoons are spent marching. Mens sana in corpore sano worked for the Romans and it works for the Captain too. And as an Anti-Anschluss family those children are going to need to know how to handle themselves when the time comes. 

5. The stage – Like any civilised parent the Captain recoils at the idea of exposing his children to showbusiness. He knows too well that it starts with folk songs and before you know it there’s a film crew in your home trashing the parquet and smashing the Meissen. 

6. The Baroness – Until Maria turns up with her innocent ingenue act the VT children are on the point of being blessed with a step-mother for the ages. The whole point of a step-mother is that she’s supposed to fall for the dad in spite of the kids not because of them. When Liesl’s 20 who’s she going to want to be taking style tips from soignée Schraeder or milksop Maria? 

7. The flag – The Captain can spot a tinpot blackguard at 40 paces and if parenting is about leading by example his flag rending isn’t just one of the most stirring scenes in all cinema it’s proof positive to the Von Trapplings that their old man is made of the right stuff.

3 is the Magic Number

If you ever ask a parent of 3 children what it’s like there’s always a pause. It might be a second, it might be 4 (I know because I’ve counted). The answer is then invariably some euphemistic spiel about the challenges heavily caveated with an insistence about how they wouldn’t have it any other way. 

 You often hear about ‘one and done’ or ‘two and out’, this blog is about ‘three fall’. My interest in the concept of 3 child families has grown significantly since my wife announced that we are to become one. That particular pregnancy announcement hit very differently to the first. Less bouncing off the walls jubilation and more staring at the crayon streaks on the walls apprehension. 

 I’ve heard it all. No more man marking: it’s zonal defence with 3. Stupid big car. Impossibly expensive holidays, impossibly expensive outings, impossibly expensive meals. Impossible. Expensive. It’s getting your draft papers when you haven’t even finished your Hail Marys for making it through the first two tours. 

 Obviously, there are also the ecocidal reservations but learning that the childbirth rate has fallen off a cliff means that perhaps signing up for a 3rd rodeo is actually a form of public service. Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing it’s definitely a thing. When my wife prevailed upon me to take the leap I said I would do so whole heartedly but warned her that there would obviously only be one outcome to her rolling the daughter dice for a final time. 

 Quietly, I too was looking forward to a girl, variety is the spice and all that and different flavour parenting certainly holds an appeal. As fate would have it, however, Nancy Drew will not be joining the Hardy Boys, at least not this time around. Still, it’s going to save a fortune on the hand me downs; although we might want to put the redecorating on hold for another decade. 

 Any lingering doubts I had about the endeavour were dispelled by a friend who has just welcomed his 3rd. Once you’ve had 2 kids you are, unequivocally, a parent, he said. So why stop at the GCSEs when you can get the A Level as well. The other thing you realise is those bloody hard days, weeks and months at the beginning really don’t last and not because everyone tells you this too shall pass but because you know it does. And isn’t there something enticing about rearing a baby without the fumbling terror of the ingenue? I joked to my wife that perhaps we should go back to NCT classes, this time as grizzled veterans rather than anxious neophytes. 

 I will not pretend that I took to parenting at the first like a duck to water, more like a duck in a Chinatown window. But 7 ½ years down the track this is definitely who I am now and I’m looking forward to giving it a go having got the angst and petulant dismay at the loss of my unencumbered life out of the system. 

 On that note I’m off to explain Middle Child Syndrome to the 4 year old.