The Hairy Dad Chronicles #4: One Year Progress Report

So, a year ago today, I completed my final day of work in my customer service contact centre job and joined the long-term self-employed: full-time Daddyhood. I've been meaning to blog again for a while - there seems a lot going on in my little head - and this seems a good occasion/excuse.

After Dadding it up, there was another big change three months later: a move from Manchester (where I'd lived for twelve years) to Leeds (where we knew no-one). This meant the first three months from January until 1 April were a kind of Phoney War, a ghostly sketch of how our life together was going to be. There was no real point joining any playgroups for such a short amount of time, and I would've felt strange signing up to a shiny new social life when I thought I already had one. However, I did discover something of a new daytime city, a city of parents and young children that I'd only glimpsed in the non-shadows. Parks became cultural hotspots; museums morphed into lifelines, places where hanging around felt permitted and where there was even something to ruffle the embers where my imagination once glowed.

Once we had moved to Leeds, the game changed and Jasper and I were faced with an intimidatignly blank social canvas. I actually lost some weight from walking up and down hills all around our corner of North Leeds* - the hills being a considerable change to flat, rambling Mancunia. I "threw" myself (relative to my sedate standards) into SureStart centres, singing groups for toddlers at Opera North, and eventually a local playgroup (run by parents). I decided to put myself forward as an organiser to try and get involved and get to know people. There was still the awkwardness of effectively asking people out, albeit on playdates in the park: I'd never been too hot at making the first move, so a few nerves were wracked. My previous method of striking up friendships had been sitting next to people in the pub and drinking. I was pleased with myself for the efforts I made though, and Jasper and I do have a few budding friendships on the go now.

When we were alone in Leeds, however, things got harder and darker.  The days seemed longer and a sense of desperation often swelled in my belly a couple of seconds after waking up in the morning. It's hard to understand exactly why this was - but my mental health was thrown into sharp focus. When Jasper was a very recent arrival (and with exhaustion ramping up the fears and tensions), there was depression, there were panic attacks and a lot of anxiety and dread jangling our nervous systems and weary minds - but as a routine and a sense of capability slowly formed, the angst eased and a sense of normality pinked up once again.

This was different though: I felt thorough alienation - a natural result of moving to an area without any friends. But on top of that was the dread of being unable to "do it", of not coping - which steepled up into a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. Loving Jasper but also despairing at being stranded with him, and feeling terrible guilt about any resentments or panicky anger that would bubble up. My strategy was to try and break through the anger to tears as quickly as possible, to expose the raw nerve underneath my behaviour. Jabber came and cuddled me on several occasions when I was in tears - still does when I get upset now - and while I was partly delighted that he was so caring and would see his father as a human being, I worried that he would inherit some emotional instability from my example. I hate the idea of such a small person having to absorb so many huge emotions.

And the worst thing, the most horrible to try and deal with, was getting angry with the little human that was just trying to work out what life was about. This is what has brought things to a head - my head has brought things to itself. The anger came (comes) most likely from the sense of not being able to cope - depression, anixety and anger swilling around together - hormones narrowing my vision, overriding my furry nurturing mammalian instincts. Mealtimes were a flashpoint - related as much to issues I have about feeding myself as to any worries about Jasper's diet; when Lou came home from work, I felt compelled to report on how the day had been, and if I felt that I hadn't done enough (a very easy feeling to allow to take hold) then that would become another source of tension. Barriers are thrown up exactly where and when togetherness is most sorely needed by both of us.

I'm aware how absent Jasper is from this account. Of course, he can't blog about it; he can't really tell me how he feels about things, probably can't know himself. But I'm barely mentioning the object of all this fathering. This seems to illustrate just how far up my arse my head is - how much things are still about me, and not him. However, the feelings are so powerful that it's hard to break out from them, perspective is dizzyingly out of kilter. One critical voice chimes in with the shouty chorus that has berated me since forever.

And the emotions feel very old. I look back to when I was a kid and trace my sense of inadequacy and frustration to impatience from my Dad and I think the anger too. And I have wondered whether my Dad picked up these same frustrations from his childhood - the way he described his relationship with his Mum - a single parent, a wartime widow with two children to look after, a keenly intelligent woman who may have resented the lack of opportunity to express herself. I never met her, as she died just after my parents married, and my Dad has also been dead since I was 24 - so a lot of this is guesswork. But it feels intuitive. And I want to break this chain: I don't want Jasper to be trying to figure this same stuff out for himself in 40 years' time. I can't be sure that I'll be around to talk through it with him either.

So, I have been using cognitive behavioural therapy to try and re-programme myself, to try and take this anger out of the equation, to turn the depression inside out and focus on the many positive points of light in my everyday life as a Dad. And aside from the techniques to help me focus on the moment and not fret about the past and future, I've been instructed to challenge myself to provide evidence for my fears: focus on how well Jasper is doing, on how well I am doing. Instructed to reject the assumption that I am doing something wrong. Then I can relax and not assume that Jasper is doing something wrong. And the adrenaline will melt away and Jasper will continue to smile and grow into a happy(ish) human being. That's the plan.

I'm determined to make this fatherhood deal work - and if I squint a bit, I feel I am doing a good job, a job that I'm very lucky to be able to do. And I feel very lucky that Jabber is such a lovely lad. I'm still having to count to ten a couple of times a day when he feels less than co-operative, but I've tried to make a bit of a game of it and count with him. If he learns that trick at least, that'll be worthwhile.

This has been written largely in the past tense, which is inaccurate. A lot of these struggles are still very present, very immediate. But I think it helps me not to become overwhelmed if I can draw a line between Coc then and Coc now. And I need a lot of help at times - it's all big stuff.

Another frustratingly inarticulate post. I will have another crack at it, but it's taken so long for me to say this much that I need to get it out.

Yours in paternalia

Coc x

* The walking was less to get to places we needed to be than to fill hours that I needed to fill. Walking often helps to calm me down, although it can develop a bit of a manic aspect at times.

The Hairy Dad Chronicles #3: Daddy Day Care

Howdo!

Apologies for the unimaginative title, but I couldn't really think of a snappier one quickly enough.

So, our attempts at minimising our gender footprint also include the big one: childcare. This is the one that literally separates the men from the children.

Over the last twenty-one months we've tried to keep things as balanced as possible. Lou had six months of maternity leave from her job and was able to go part-time for another six and I was able to get a month off as a new father, combining holiday and my own statutory leave.

After the initial chaotic three months or so, where time felt close to nothing and sleep and feelings were fuzzy cousins to our reality, we settled into a routine of each of us looking after the little wizard every other night and me doing the bulk of the after-looking when I wasn't at work, while Lou watched over him while I sweated over a hot call centre. Noone got enough sleep and we were living against the clock, but it sort of worked. And Lou's parents helped out enormously, looking after him two days a fortnight, which meant we still had precious couple time and Lou could work.

We had fears about where our dollars would be coming from in a few months' time when Lou's job would be finishing, so when the opportunity for a full-time, permanent position came up in Leeds, we agreed the time had come to leave Manchester. Relocation, relocation, relocation. The job was considerably better than paid than what she was already on, and this opened a new door for us: a door we'd talked about for quite a while.

The wage I was earning was effectively the same as what we would be paying for full-time nursery care, and it wasn't a very expensive place where Jasper was spending his couple of days a week. It was a lovely place, but we felt we had a choice. We could try to carry on as we were, dropping the little bundle off and picking him up, with Lou somehow commuting the hour or so, and so on; orrrrrrr..... I could give up my work, we could move to Leeds and I'd look after Jabber full-time. Simplicity itself.

We talked about it a bit: my job was quite frustrating, I didn't really see myself progressing through the company, and Lou was sitting on some serious career tracks. It wasn't as though I was one of the country's leading neurosurgeons or a talented baker or a particularly enthusiastic traffic warden. And more "importantly", it would be a chance to walk some walk after talkng the talk for a while: some attempt at gender balance.

So, in January this year, the job was quit and I enrolled at Parenting High full-time. We were living "The Dream", but it was a dream with some dry, curled-up edges. Having been someone who spent most of his twenties and thirties unsure whether I could look after myself, it seemed a strange career move to look after a fifteen-month old creature. And here was something that I should have realised beforehand that still only dawned on me after a few weeks: I hadn't been trained for this stuff.

I know no one is trained for parenthood, I know. But this whole gender thing still has some teeth, I think. I can't pretend this is a universal truth and that every man is similarly poorly-equipped as I am in to take care of others; on the other hand, it feels as though there is a gender element to the whole preparation for life. That girls are encouraged to think ahead, see to the details and take care of business, while boys can explore and ponder their schemes for self-fulfillment. I've become more acutely aware of how others have seen to these details for me - and how often those others have been women. I've had to somehow make myself aware of what needs doing. So, that's a steep learning curve right there, which I've been clinging to despite enormous gravitational forces and my own incompetent fingers.

I don't want this to read like an excuse. I'm fully aware that as a grown-up adult, I should've been very much aware of what needed doing every day and who should have been doing it. I'm not sure how this happens, how these jobs become so invisible, but I want to try and disrupt the signal on the cloaking device for Jasper. Even if I don't feel like I know what I'm doing, by doing it I'll hopefully give him a positive example. And I'll make sure that I'll point out to him what needs doing as he gets older, so that he doesn't have even that excuse.

I'm pleased that I'm on the learning curve, that I feel I'm following my principles (which is a weird feeling to which I am not accustomed), but I cannot tell myself that a lifetime of applause and shiny medals awaits, because people just get on with bringing up families all the time.Just because I'm finally starting to grow up, it doesn't mean I can stroll about the world expecting my hero hugs. But I'm still pompous enough to have some ideas as to why we've gone this route as a family and I'd like to share these with you now.

The reward will hopefully be that Jasper sees things differently, that he feels more responsible for the details in his own life and takes care of things and other people accordingly. Hopefully, he will think that it's perfectly normal for a Dad to look after his kid all the time, which it is - really: even if it doesn't always feel like it. Conversely, the plan is also that he will be quite happy not to be the main breadwinner or blithely assume that his career will come first, take precedence over those careers of the women in his life.

Lou read some interviews a few months ago with women who had been confronted with the decision between childcare and career. She told me how fortunate these women felt that their partners had given them the choice between having a career or staying at home to bring up the children. Either of these options would certainly involve some sacrifice for the young families, not least fiscally, but it was remarkable to Lou that the third option of the husband looking after the child was not considered. Once the breastfeeding stops, it could be argued, there isn't much that the father shouldn't be able to do that the mother does: it ceases to be about anatomy but the culture and politics remain. In our case, the practicalties swung the role of primary carer in my direction.

The other thing which I've noted is the length of the "working day". Jasper generally wakes up between 6.30 and 8am, usually around 7.30. (We're very lucky that he sleeps as well as he does.) My day starts with his, as a rule. Our deal is that I also look after the house - the bulk of the household chores - although Lou still cooks frequently and will normally chose the menus for the weekly shop. After his lunch, Jasper sleeps for a couple of hours and I can get some work done - I'm also doing proofreading and writing CVs to earn our spending money - and then it's housework and keeping the littlun fed and entertained until he goes to bed around 7.30pm. Then, I often have proofreading or similar work to do for a couple of hours, soemtimes quite late into the night. I could be better organised and get things done quicker, but that's the shape of things so far. A full-time job of childcare and household chores plus a part-time job. All my sparetime is now monetised: the clock is ticking and it sits in the kitchen. I've no threshold to cross to go back to work; it's always at home.

Sounds a lot, and it can be knackering and a little alienating, but this is largely because I consider a job the kind of things that more responsible folk do when they get home from work anyway. It's another case of my dodgy mindset: why is doing a load of washing work? Everyone has to do washing. It's the assumption that I'm entitled to hours sitting on my broadening backside watching TV that's causing the problem.

Anyway, I must go to bed. This blog hasn't quite covered the points I wanted, I don't think. I may well have another attempt later in the year to undo some of this clumsiness. But part of the issue with my new role is that there's always something I could be doing with my time, something less self-indulgent.

Peace out.

Your pal in daycare,

Coc x