Dadhood and me: how becoming a father made me reflect on my own childhood

In the middle of some domestic squabble with my kids, not long ago, I tried to explain to them that chores crust over a life like rust, like barnacles. For a few years at the outset, everything’s done for you. By the time you’re a teenager you’re aware of the chores you’re meant to be doing to help yourself and other people, but aware in the sense of a distant, lofty theory. If you eventually become a parent, or if you otherwise become responsible for a child, it means the immediate eruption of a chore-warhead. It means years and years of chore-fallout. It is the least-warned-about part of parenthood – the totality of the childcare, its 24-hour constancy, the confusing wait for a sense of completion that never seems to arrive. There’s a fear of what it will be like if and when the job finishes, when a duty’s discharged. Because what then?

I’ve been pondering this as I move out of the chore-pocalypse phase of raising children. Mine can reach the cupboards now. They know what plug needs to go where, what buttons need to be pressed to summon their shows to the TV or to defrost a bagel. They’ll disappear for hours or more at a time. To where? To overcome how many obstacles without me? I used to know, down to the atom, what bedevilled them. I knew their prejudices, the prompts for their rages, how to placate their omni-hungers. As the work of being the parent stops resembling man-marking in football, or defending against the bullying set piece, it also becomes more cerebral and mysterious, slower chess. Their needs aren’t obvious. It’s been ages since I’ve been able to put out any existential fires with warm milk.

I’m starting to see that this is the phase where you become the parent you swore never to be. Inquisitive when it’s least welcome. (“And what did you do at school today?”) A pedant. (“It can’t be ‘nothing’, you cannot have spent a whole day at school doing ‘nothing’.”) Needy. (“You used to tell me things.”) Sulky. (“I won’t ask again.”) Inconsistent. (“And what did you do at school today?”) Writing this out, I realise my dadhood, now, has much in common with getting dumped. Before you realise you’re the dumped-in-waiting, you’re contributing to its inevitability. When you do realise, you behave in ways that amplify and hasten the crisis.

About the same time I became a parent, we bought a sofa: a comfortable boxy thing upholstered in green fabric. For as long as my children can remember anything, they can remember me pleading with them not to eat crumbling chocolate on that sofa. Not to lie on it wearing football boots. Not to balance cups of juice on the arms. Even so, the sofa, today, looks like an object that’s been slept on every night for a decade by trail hikers, midwives and mud wrestlers. The green fabric is spoiled beyond salvage and all I have to show for my hours of nagging is the nagging itself.

The destination – hell sofa – was fated the moment I let children near it. If only I’d realised this at the outset! If only I’d used the precise amount of energy and credit from the naggings and tellings-off to drill them instead in clever debating techniques, patisserie recipes, the shot put, Mandarin. So much of parenting involves the expenditure of effort in wrong-headed directions. You try to force-feed them instruction or correction. The realer, plainer education goes on despite this, around the edges. How many of us chose our earliest routes into life through a game of opposites? When I was small, I watched my own dad come home every day from an office, visibly bummed out by the commute, the suits, the sameness of it all. No doubt I formed my earliest inclinations then, towards a career as a freelancing, pyjama-clad gig worker. For years my dad smoked 20 a day. I’ve smoked 20 in my life.

Modelled for me as well were episodes of perfect dadcraft. There was that time he surprised me while I was playing with my He-Man toys, announcing, superbly, without preamble, that we were going to see a live-action He-Man movie that instant . No forewarning, no tedious wait for the day to come; we just got in the car and went. Both my dad and I loved high-intensity, white-knuckle eating experiences and we shared millions of them when I was growing up: the fatty skin of a peking duck, big cooked breakfasts, vinegary Golden Wonder crisps. He was an armchair football fan who played every minute of the matches, flinching at tackles, leaping up to make imaginary headers in goalmouth scrambles. I would pace, like a worried coach on the sidelines. I still do.

I remember more complicated moments in our father-son relationship, stuff it has taken me half a lifetime to properly parse and appreciate. On a camping holiday, once, my dad and I argued about whether or not I was allowed to watch a scorpion fight a wasp. Another parent on the same campsite had contrived to get these two furious insects inside a jam jar. Even as dozens of kids gathered around to enjoy the spectacle, my dad quietly but forcefully dragged me away. I was furious at him, seething. I was 10 years old: I wanted to find out who won, the scorpion or the wasp. Now that time has passed, and it’s too late to tell him so, I think I won – by having a parent who rejected casual cruelty and who would accept my fury and scorn as the cost of removing me from cruelty’s taint.

It makes me shiver to think of the times I was disappointed in my dad and showed it. There was that birthday. I’d asked for a remote-controlled car. A gang of cooler kids at our local park had these intricately engineered miniatures made of fibreglass and titanium. At weekends, they whirred them around the exposed concrete of an empty duck pond. The remote-controlled car I ended up with did not seem in the same league. No sticks, no levers on the handset, no telescopic aerial, proudly jutting up towards the sky, as if its owner might casually be in communication with the International Space Station, too. The whole notion of my car’s remote controllability was a bit fanciful, given that the handset was strung to the car by a rubbery chord. When you turned it on the car trundled forwards. The controller had one button. When you pressed this one button the car went backwards, in a hobbled rightwards loop. This was the only way of steering.

My dad and I took it to the duck pond, a competitive coliseum, full of smug children giving each other’s privilege lots of relaxed, professional appraisal. It was obvious from the other kids’ faces, mine was not an enviable car. I could see my dad clock their dismissal and I could see him feel bad about it on my behalf. I wish he were alive now. I’d love to tell him what I’ve figured out since, that the job of parenting is exactly like controlling that ridiculous car, a counterintuitive backwards circling in an effort to avoid hazards and (eventually, hopefully) progress. I’d like to tell him that his vicarious pain and shame that day wasn’t wasted, because by sharing it we halved it.

I’ve come to think that the best thing you can do for a kid is to provide a base level of love and support that’s non-negotiable, with the freely offered admission, on top, that everything else is guesswork and chaos. There is no model adult life. If there were, how trying, how curtailed an existence, if a kid were left to try to recreate it. I’m comforted to think that the bad days and the middling days of my dadhood are as important as the miracle, dawn-to-dusk, unimprovable days. (All six.) On those rare occasions, when your kids see you at your best, you can trick yourself into believing you’ve mastered the role. Then they see you flail again, they hear your lazy answer or receive your wrong-headed telling-off. They get lectures when they need to be left alone. They’re made to wait for you to finish some task when, in fact, they long for your gaze.

Speaking of gaze. If there’s one thing I’ve grasped completely after a decade of parenting it’s The Look. I became accustomed to The Look being sent my way whenever I was out in public with a baby or a cartable toddler. The Look usually comes from men and women of a certain age or stage and it is always the same. Broken down into a chemical formula, The Look would read something like (N+R-E) x OA, or nostalgia enhanced by relief and diminished by exhaustion, multiplied by an obscure ache that has no name, an ache that will presumably never be cured, because it’s an unresolvable grief for babies and toddlers who no longer exist. I give The Look to other parents now, dads in particular: the ones who look like I did a decade ago, frazzled and cunning, both blissed out and bored.

The sore knees. The sore heart. I wouldn’t give any of it back

I published a novel this summer, in which a group of ill-equipped adults have to learn to care for a small boy. It was a scenario I dreamed up to try to dramatise my shock and my unpreparedness on first becoming a parent, when it felt as if I was being driven over by a double-decker bus of responsibility and anxiety that has continued driving over me, forwards, backwards, ever since. I wrote the novel over about 18 months, post-pandemic, and when the time came to give it a title I was spent. Nothing fitted. Before my editor suggested an apt title, I pleaded with friends for their suggestions. One had the idea of outsourcing the job to Chat-GPT. We sat on a park bench together while he tapped in some prompts, asking Chat-GPT to generate titles for a novel about fatherhood and the different ways that men react to responsibility.

I remember a long list being generated. I wish I’d written all the titles down, but the funniest sticks in mind: Daddies’ Dad Dilemma . All the artificially created titles were like this, combining themes of frustration and compromise, a manful sacrifice. Trained on the scrapings of the internet, the computer had come to understand that human dads are reluctant, embattled figures, always straining against conditions that threaten to domesticate them.

My generation was supplied a cultural diet that insisted on this. In Mrs Doubtfire , Robin Williams’s character became a rounder, more reliable parent by adopting the appearance, behaviour and mindset of a woman. Mr Nanny and Kindergarten Cop , among many other movies of the 80s and 90s, were premised on the received wisdom that muscular men are all thumbs near kids or dishwasher fluid. Consider Honey, I Shrunk The Kids . It’s there in the title, that sense of unavoidable disaster. Left alone to babysit, what else was Rick Moranis’s character gonna do but let his children mess around with a miniaturising raygun?

When did the cultural assumption of fatherly hopelessness begin to fade? Because I’m fairly sure it has faded, certainly from its Doubtfire -era apex. Gender stereotypes have been eroding, thanks to brave example, influential art, a more open discourse. A post-pandemic decline in office-bound work as well as various tweaks to employment law have encouraged more dads to become hands-on. There was once a free chuckle to be had if a movie was called Daddy Daycare . He’s a daddy! Caring! Reform has been patchy. Security, opportunity, geography factor massively. But I’m convinced there’s a broader awareness, now, that to opt out of parenting through shyness or squeamishness is to opt out of an enormous privilege.

In my novel (we called it Going Home ) I’ve tried to capture the granular process by which, if you remain present, if the sustenance and survival of a tiny child is on you , aptitude descends. You catch the basics of childcare in days, hours really: it’s that totality, that 24-hour-ness, the immersion facilitating the knack. I’ve tried to write about the surprises and hilarious parts as well as the tedium. I wrote it partly for those generations of men who might have itched to become more involved in their children’s daily lives, but didn’t because of money or social mores, because of some sad and crushing expectation that they’d conform to the example of drearier forebears. Gutted as I am for those dads who itched to do more and weren’t able to, I’m even sadder for the dads who never itched – who were never tipped off about a secret.

The sore knees. The sore heart. I wouldn’t give any of it back. Nor would I want to do without the epiphanies about my own upbringing. It was with a jolt that I realised, recently, that my dad didn’t actually give a shit whether or not my bedroom was tidy. Ever. And it wasn’t of red-line importance to him that I wore smart shoes to a relative’s wedding. These were things we’d argue about for hours when I was young. As we yelled at each other, I would shout terrible things. I would rage and wonder, why does he care this much about leftout toys, scuffed trainers? It’s taken a switch of roles to make me realise he was only trying to teach me to respect other people.

If I asked my kids to list the fundamental things I really care about as their father, if I quizzed them about my core dad-ly beliefs, it’s likely they would mention the green sofa and my inexplicable mission to protect it from food smears and mud. One day I hope they’ll grasp that what I wanted to teach them was to notice their surroundings, to account for other people’s legitimate sensitivities, to be sympathetic about other people’s more fanciful pet peeves.

For now, the grind goes on. There are backs to scratch. There are plasters to apply, inoculations to play down, vegetables to play up. There are tricky conversations to initiate, lectures to botch. I question at least a billion micro-decisions I’ve made as their parent, regretting habits and weaknesses I’ve copped to, opportunities blatantly missed. I’m also pleased and relieved about unintended triumphs along the way. It continues, day after day, dilemma after dilemma, as it must do till a duty’s discharged.

Going Home by Tom Lamont is published by Sceptre (£16.99). Buy a copy for £15.29 at guardianbookshop.com