On Becoming a Dad — “Under Pressure”
Not the pressure of keeping your newborn alive, nor the societal pressure to conform to expectations — something else…
Last weekend, I learnt one of my most best mates is expecting his first child. It’s got me thinking about the great many things I wish I’d been given the heads up on six months out. Writing up my first bit of advice proved more helpful to others and therapeutic to me than I thought it might, so I’m going to carry on.
Here’s the second thing I wish I’d been talked at about…
If I had to describe parenting in one word, ‘pressure’ would certainly be in the mix. The pressure you feel in the early days is the most obvious and urgent kind; a well worn primordial preoccupation with ensuring mother and child(ren) are safe and well. But I’m not talking about that.
I’m talking about a more enduring, abstract, ubiquitous kind of pressure that having children exerts on the rest of your life — and vice versa.
I used to teach, and it kind of reminds me of that. A teacher’s work is never done; the scope of the job is boundless — there’s always something else you could do. And if you could, you would, because (you feel like) you should. Parenting has a bit of that about it.
But there are loads of other things in life like that too. My work’s a bit like that still; it’s often hard to work out when and if I’m ‘done’. So, to protect ourselves, we set boundaries for ourselves (and others) — intentionally and otherwise — around what’s acceptable.
Having children introduces a whole range of boundaries — a dizzying blend of ‘musts’, ‘shoulds’ and ‘coulds’ — into your life, and I don’t think I was prepared for their impact. That’s to say: I knew they were coming, I just wasn’t sure what it’d feel like.
So, what’s new? What changes when the baby arrives?
Immediately, everything and nothing. Bear with me here.
We actually felt quite prepared to welcome child v.1 into our world. They were the first baby in our friendship group and the first grandchild for good measure. None of us really knew what to expect — good or bad — but we had faith in ourselves and each other that we’d work it out.
Anyway, welcoming them home was an event. We’d secured time off work to really indulge in the occasion. ‘Real life’ was suspended.
Until it wasn’t.
Eventually, you’re called back to reality and that’s when everything really changes. Nobody really prepares you for this bit. It’s a wily shift.
In hindsight, I think this was the moment where our respective experiences as parents — as a ‘mother’ and a ‘father’ — started to diverge (which I appreciate sounds particularly bonkers given what my partner had just been through, physically. Alas…).
Our circumstances meant that I had to return to work as soon as possible, with my partner taking as much leave as we could muster. My partner carried on in our new universe, I straddled the new and the old.
It didn’t feel like a hybrid, it felt like both at the same time.
I felt like work didn’t quite understand the extent of my duties at home, and home didn’t quite understand my responsibilities at work. Friends didn’t understand any of it. I found their well-intentioned attempts to empathise annoying, frankly. Our family didn’t notice either — nobody asked how I was coping, but that’s a whole other thing for another time…
What changes is that your life loses any slack it might have had.
I like being busy, I always have. What’s changed is that my life’s lost its slack, it’s fat. There are no firebreaks between anything I do anymore. My schedule is so packed it’s become brittle.
Like anything, the extent to which you’ll be able to deal with this depends on the type of person you are. I’m an impulsive person; I’m prone to error, tangents, whim and fancy. I’ve found this aspect of parenting really difficult to deal with.
To illustrate the point here’s a typical example from my world: Monday evening — it’s my turn to go to the gym. But a fifteen-minute delay in closing my laptop means that I can’t quite get there and back before dinner, baths and bed, etc. So, I swerve the gym. My priority, of course, is to spend some quality time with the kids. But I miss my turn; my opportunity to do ‘The One Thing’ I wanted to do for me. Cue frustration and, yeah, I’ll admit: resentment.
In my experience, it’s easy to let this accumulate. It’s rational. Missing out this time puts more pressure on next time. You’re like a football manager hunting a win. Next Monday, knowing that you need to get away from work at X o’clock applies even more pressure throughout your day, on every task you undertake. This is tough.
Again, some will be better able to deal with that than others. I’ll tell you what didn’t work for me.
I became ever more obsessed with improving my productivity. What has helped has been lowering my — and other people’s — expectations about what’s possible. Refusing more, challenging back — that’s harder but it’s helped, both in terms of prioritising the most important things and helping people to understand the stuff they can’t see.
That’s all I’ve got on this: consider how much slack there is in your day.
Do you have a typical working day, or do they vary? How reactive are you? What’s within your control? How often — and to what extent — do you flex plans to get everything done?
Just consider it. I didn’t and wish I had.
