This photo was taken when my baby and his fatherhood (it belongs to him) were 2 weeks old. He’s moulded to my chest in the bath, and looking at the photo now I can still feel the warmth, how good and right that felt.
But this new togetherness was under threat, from a mad world that didn’t see what babies and new parents really need. It’s come some distance in the last 18 years, but I am writing this because there is still a way to go.
Maternity leave is still a work in progress, but paternity leave in most countries lags far behind. And this is based on the idea that women birth, and breastfeed, so they’re the primary parent. What this misses is that the psychological birth of a baby is 50:50 between parents. This meets developmental needs of kids, but also meets social justice needs of women and men.
I’ve been writing along these lines for nearly a decade here at My Doctor’s Handwriting. But in 2007 as I became a dad it was much more instinctive.
I was determined to be 50:50 in this new venture. I had changed my son’s first nappy the night he was born, and slept on the hospital floor that night because too many dads wanted to stay and there weren’t enough fold-out beds. I let the Maternal and Child Health Nurse in when she did her home visit, and went along to the centre with my baby and his mum for subsequent visits. That I wasn’t welcomed in by the sign out the front stung a bit, but the nurse we had was ahead of her time, and engaged me equally with Mum.
I did expressed bottle feeds. I became expert at not losing the tiny valve thing from the pump in the bottom of the sink. I walked the pram along our street at 3am when nothing else would settle him. Many things only his mum could do, but we were a team, and I was here to be her equal. Not the same as her, but worth just as much.
But by the time of this photo, I had just run out of paternity leave, as I started mine when his labour began. The manifest inadequacy of 2 weeks was a slap in the face from the world. Woeful did not begin to describe it. Like most new parents of a fortnight’s experience we still felt like (to paraphrase the great Kaz Cooke in our much-thumbed guide Kidwrangling) billy-carters at the controls to the Space Shuttle.
We were just not ready to split up the team to send me back to paid work.
So I broke into my annual leave for another 4 weeks. But then crunch time came as I ran out of that.
We were both sleep deprived and I was working a split trainee job between a secure unit (where I feared getting punched as I didn’t have my wits about me) and a parent-infant unit (where depressed mums were telling me they were doing ok til Dad went back to work!).
I tried to play for some more time, but was met with “well all parents get sleep deprived”, said kindly but with the tone of one who has a roster to fill.
I get it, the system’s what it is. We worked something out. Part time for a couple of weeks, maybe. And things turned a corner at home around then, so it was ok.
But not long after that I was passed over for a promotion I had been verbally promised. I was gutted. I’d even bought a jacket to help me step up and overcome my imposter syndrome.
An objective view might be “dude, you can’t be both. Career man, home guy, choose.”
I wanted to punch objective view, thank you.
But the story’s not done.
Because of the demotion, another door opened. I was not at first thrilled with the idea of working in an antenatal clinic in a maternity hospital. What if it was full of man-hating midwives and social workers?
Bollocks, it turns out. It was so welcoming there. Before long I knew what I wanted to be: A Mother-Baby Psychiatrist. Yes, that’s what we called ourselves then.
Years before I called myself a Fatherhood Clinician, I knew I wanted to help mums and their new families perinatally. I came to realise I could do that best by helping their men as well.
Now my perinatal psychotherapy practice is about 50:50 mums and dads, mostly individuals, some in couple work, others with their little ones.
Which brings me back to my little one and my younger self here, clean and warm in the early spring of 2007. Young new dad me doesn’t want to go back to paid work he loves, because he loves this work more.
Not that it’s all lovely, this home work. It’s definitely way harder than the paid work where he might get punched and women cry in his office.
But he knows which team needs him more.
My Doctor's Handwriting 