Fatherhood: Year One

It’s seventeen months since I became a father but it’s taken me this long to get my head together enough to write about it, so here goes …..

When I set out to have a baby I had no idea that there was an international conspiracy of parents who are all sworn to uphold the terrible secrets of parenthood. Once sworn in we are duty bound to pretend that all is rosy, make a few anecdotes about lack of sleep and say how wonderful our children are lest we put the continued viability of the human race in jeopardy by telling the awful truth.

I have however decided to break this silence and I think the best way to do it is to tell my own tale. Unlike the few vacuous books concerning fatherhood in bookshops (there’s usually about two stuck in the back somewhere amidst the 50,000 books on motherhood) I want to try and detail the internal processes that went on in my mind as fatherhood unfolded rather than just recount some tale like a story told down the pub couched in football analogies and bravado. This is what the few books I read attempted to do and they were useless to me especially given that I know nothing about football and comparing things to the offside rule just bewildered me even further.

So to kick off (damn thats a football reference isn’t it) I thought I ‘d go right back to the beginning ….

The Matchbox Stars

Samhain, it’s the time of year where death often slinks into my brain, nestles in the corner and sits there quietly irritating me until I’m forced to stare into its cold mouldering face. I’ve only had three significant deaths occur in my life and the last was my fathers nearly five years ago now. It was hard for me to deal with at the time, not because of the emotion but more because of the lack of it. I wrote this poem a few days after his death, after I rushed home from across the world:

Men are Idiotic Drunken Jealous Sex Beasts

I was reminded this week of a common stereotype about men in parenting circles which portrays fathers as mindless beasts that women need to learn how to handle correctly.

I was watching Bringing up Baby and a woman who was encouraging co-sleeping was attacked by the other “baby experts” on the grounds that the baby could be squished in the bed by parents rolling over them.

They claimed it was unsafe because “the man” might come home drunk and jump into bed oblivious to the little one. You see apparently men such as myself have no conscious control of own behaviour, I’m apparently just a gelatinous bag of beer and football who might spontaneously fall into a bar and roll home three sheets to the wind through no fault of my own.