I am bad at maths. Numbers are no problem but letters send me loopy. Even well into adolescence I would be reduced to tears at my incompetence at something that came effortlessly to my peers. Everybody can identify with that consuming anguish that engulfs the body when you just don't get it, even when the teacher patiently explains for the thousandth time. So it is with baby pacification, gummy smiles give way to howling hysteria the instant the baby passes from my wife's arms to mine (and the baby doesn't enjoy it either).
Walk him around. Sing him a song. Don't hold him like that. Don't bounce him on your knee. Even an idiot could follow those simple instructions. Plainly I have yet to graduate idiot school. There is a vicious circle. When the mother does all the mothering what right minded baby wants an ersatz paternal substitute. But if the dad doesn't do the primary care giving he will never be baby's first choice. And if the baby is benefiting from breast is best that top spot on the podium is as inaccessible as Mount Olympus.
Another Saturday another long read in the Guardian about patriarchy's enduring stranglehold and why there is nothing natural about male supremacy in the world. A concomitant conclusion is that there is nothing pre-ordained about maternal primacy in the home. And yet. 3 years into being a dad and still basically as clueless as when I started; I have a strange hankering to meet and learn from single dads. And I don't mean ones that have outsourced to a nanny or their mother but the ones that are genuinely doing it on their own.
I don't know any fathers who are parenting without the benefit of female assistance/input/instruction and I assume they are few and far between. They are certainly not a common cultural trope. Likewise, how often do you read mothers writing about how their partners take the lead and the load when it comes to child rearing and domestic labour? Almost never.
There was a cartoon that did the rounds a couple of years back about unequal bearing of emotional labour by women and the effort involved in giving instruction to useless men. I could scarcely get to the end so excoriatingly close to the bone did it cut. I didn't want to be that guy, I don't want to be that guy and yet, so often, I am that guy.
It's a cliche but parenting is about teamwork and communication. But an important codicil to this excellent advice is that all teams have a captain. Someone has to be in charge. And captaincy carries its burdens but also its privileges. When two parents equally decline to take responsibility there is not a happy outcome for the children. However the same is also true when both parents vie for the task of laying down the ground rules. Perhaps the secret is familial government by tribunes but I've rarely seen that in action.
My wife recently laid the charge of hypocrisy against me to which my plea is unequivocally guilty. If you want to see a dad stepping up to the plate and putting in his shift don't read a blog by a man about parenting; any proper dad has no time for navel gazing like that. And just as fine words butter no parsnips they wipe no bottoms, noses or work surfaces either.
I know that I am hardly alone in wanting to be a better parent and a better father but sometimes I feel as Nancy Astor must have when she first took her seat in a place built by men for men. I have been to enough mother and baby activities to know that other than the occasional token bloke they are for mothers and babies. On a recent extraordinary outing to Water Babies with my toddler it was only dads that turned up. The swimming teacher could not overcome her cognitive dissonance and kept on addressing us as 'Mums'.
I am crying out for writing by dads for dads. Until then I prostrate myself before my wife as yet again the co-pilot has put the parenting plane into a nosedive.
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