Clearly this blog has hardly even started – I’ve only managed one full day of overseeing childcare alone and haven’t done a full week yet – so I’m really pleased, if not a little surprised, by the response. The feedback so far has been universally supportive, I’ve had a ton of positive comments on Twitter and friends I haven’t heard from in years have felt compelled to get in touch via Facebook to voice approval.
Within hours of the first blog going live I even had a Russian broadcaster inviting me to take part in a panel debate on parental leave. Sadly I couldn’t make it. You know, childcare responsibilities and all that.
Anyway, while I’m enjoying all the attention – and I am clearly vain enough to be wary of doing anything that might jeopardise the adulation I’ve been enjoying these past few days – it has occurred to me that everyone being so interested is a bit weird when I’m only doing what millions of women do and have done without any attendant fuss.
I cant help thinking that, if a woman were writing this, some of you would probably not have bothered to read it, dismissing it as just another of those exercises in navel-gazing that pass themselves off as blogs. Why should a man doing it be any more interesting?
Maybe everyone has been attracted by the inevitable hilarity that will ensue from the range of new things at which I am now able to be incompetent. But I’m sure some interest has arisen purely because I am male and the novelty value that brings. I can’t stress enough how chuffed I am that you are all reading this, but I can’t help feeling it might be more valuable to take time to find out what millions of women who take maternity leave go through?
As a culture we’re pretty dismissive of maternity leave. In the corporate world that I usually inhabit I hear frequent references to maternity leave as a holiday, usually made as a joke, but the sort of joke that the teller seems to believe holds some underlying truth.
Conversely, the expectations on me seem very low. I was being facetious when I said in an earlier post that I just needed to stop the kids from dying, but I don’t feel under any pressure to achieve anything beyond looking after them. Obviously they should be my main priority, but they are my only priority. When Helen gets in from a tough day at work, the house is a mess and she is more surprised if I have done anything towards dinner than if I haven’t. Any spare time I have during the day is spent fannying around on Twitter or writing this blog. My shambolic inability to organise anything means I am clinging to a strict timetable of feeds, drop-offs, pick-ups and lunch, largely improvising the bits in between those regimented times. I spend so long enjoying any free time that does materialise between appointments that the next deadline is upon me before I’ve had the chance to do anything more with my time than waste it.
It’s early days, but so far I generally don’t achieve anything more than keeping the kids entertained and intact. For the moment at least, nothing more is expected of me. I suspect many women who do this do not enjoy the same luxury.
One day down
I have survived the first day. Also – and probably a more important detail, this – so have Minnie and Baxter.
Admittedly there have been no real challenges yet. Despite my fears after Helen’s work decided her first day back should be marked with a meeting at half past stupid that left me to do the entire breakfast/washing/tooth-brushing/dressing routine on my own, I coped. I even managed to get myself dressed (I’d been warned that failure to achieve that is frowned upon at the school gates…)
In fact it all went so smoothly this morning that I felt sure the only way I could have been ready so early was if I had forgotten something significant. Rather than spend too long worrying about whether I was sending her to school without pants (I wasn’t, I promise) we used the bonus time for a brief impromptu disco before we set off.
Admittedly Minnie left the house with the worst arranged hair since she started at the nursery, but I am lacking the requisite life experience to be able to achieve much with two Hello Kitty hairclips. Fortunately the winter weather allowed me to stick a hat on her after I’d completely botched it, allowing me to blame the Emo Philips look on over-snug headwear rather than my own incompetence when other mums cast quizzical looks my way.
Minnie has also started to rationalise the new arrangement in her own way, calling me “Mummy” throughout breakfast and telling me that “Mummy is now Daddy.”
Any cuteness was more than canceled out by her following up with “Mummy, where’s your hair gone?”
Two weeks ago she asked me “Daddy, why is there a hole in your hair?” and her references to my advancing baldness have become more frequent since.
I guess my opportunity to spend more time with her will also be her opportunity to get more digs in about my insecurities. Maybe this wasn’t a great idea after all.
What the hell am I doing?
Outside of the fields of lap dancing and Page 3, women tend to earn less than men for doing the same jobs.
This is widely agreed to be wrong, but the male-dominated boards of established multi-nationals are understandably reluctant to admit that the phenomenon is down to anything as sordid as sexism. Instead they offer the excuse that any imbalance is an accidental by-product of a biological inevitability: that it is women who have babies, women who take maternity leave and women who are subsequently left behind by male peers who keep advancing their careers while the women are forced to put theirs on hold.
Despite widespread recognition of this injustice and acknowledgement of a significant cause behind it, nobody has ever done anything about it.
Until now.
What the world’s women have clearly needed is a hero, someone to strike a blow for equality. And I have decided it should be me.
I, a man, have decided to handicap my own career progression, purely in the name of equality and in no way motivated by a desire to spend time with my children.
And so it is that today I start three months’ of my share of parental leave while my other half goes back to work in the hope of earning enough to keep us in gin and nappies (in that order).
As soon as I realised that my company was offering shared leave before it becomes law next year, taking three months off seemed a great idea. As well as Baxter, who was then imminent and is now nine months, I have a three-year-old daughter, Minnie. They are both brilliant and find new ways to delight me every day. The opportunity to take more involvement in their formative years seemed too good to be true.
The decision to take the leave was made in seconds. That was almost a year ago now though and – I won’t lie to you – right now I am terrified.
There has been the odd day where I have been in sole charge of both children and these brief dummy runs have been a success. Well, nobody has died. Three months will obviously present a few more challenges than individual days but a lack of fatalities will remain the benchmark by which I judge the whole thing. Nobody dying is essentially the limit of my realistic ambition.
Hopefully I will continue to update this blog with reports of non-fatalities. More likely, I will find this childcare thing is actually quite involving after all and the next update will be in March, from the comfort of my desk, when I am safely ensconced back in the comfortable embrace of the office and, more importantly, my children are safely ensconced in the care of someone who knows what they are doing.
Adventures in child-rearing 