Division of labour: when work stops being work

Being a father it astonishes me that any couple ever thought that a faltering relationship would best be patched up by the addition of a baby.  That is not to say that parenthood isn't wonderful but if your union is struggling with the test of where to brunch at the weekend or what shade of magnolia to paint the living room the notion that a child is going to simplify and cement the situation is insane.

I am pleased to say that no such motivation drove me and my wife to take the plunge.  Instead I like to think that we made the decision to start trying following sober reflection upon the trials and tribulations inevitably attendant upon two becoming three.

Naturally I worried and will now continue worrying for the rest of my life about whether I would be a good father.  But my other bother was about whether I would be a good husband.  To the uninitiated it may seem that there would be no difference between being a good husband in a childless/childfree marriage and fulfilling uxorious expectation within a family.  Not so.  I am not qualified to say whether I was a good husband before baby and my wife is far too sensible and discreet to share her judgment publicly.  But I certainly feel nearly 4 months post-partum that I could be doing better now.

Self-employment has inflicted on me and us a family dynamic that in any other circumstances I would regard as being prehistoric.  Sure I could take paternity leave.  As long as I wanted.  Unpaid.  Three short weeks out of court and suddenly I was in the frying pan AND the fire.  One thing I did know never ever to do was complain about work and the cardinal sin of how tired I was/am.  There is nobody alive more tired than the mother of a newborn and if you get into that ring you will rightly be KO'd in five seconds flat.

I am also sufficiently circumspect to know that I should not remark upon my wife's former enthusiasm for the onset of maternity leave and contrast it with her now keen interest in office developments and hankering for work and I certainly wouldn't do something as foolish as commit that dichotomy to writing.

I had read about fathers who suddenly find they are jealous of the attention heaped upon their babies or feel left out because they can't participate in breast feeding.  It is clear that these men signed on the dotted line without reading a single line of the contract.  Sir James Goldsmith famously quipped that if you marry your mistress you create a vacancy.  I rather less famously observe that when a man has a baby he fills a vacancy: chef/cleaner/chauffeur/bin man/clown.  But not baby sitter.  Say baby sitter and you will rightly earn the instant contempt of mothers everywhere.  Proper papas parent; teenage girls baby sit.

What however I had not expected is that having a little blighter lucky enough to get mother's milk 24/7 [and lord knows it feels like he feeds all day and all night] that as the old man I would be given the cold shoulder.  For a long time my son reserved for me the sort of welcome I would have expected if I had been Herod on a tour of the Bethlehem General maternity ward.  Slowly he seems to be tolerating my company as some sort of necessary evil which I now worry is an attitude he has learnt from his mother.

But what I have really learnt is this.  There is no division of labour when it comes to parenting.  There is childcare and there is everything else and everything else is nothing.  It doesn't matter how stressful, demanding or dangerous your job is, within a family the only labour worth the name is looking after junior.