Why you don't need to be 'manly' to be a good dad

I used be frightened of children — my greatest fear was that I might one day have them.

It wasn’t an allergic reaction to responsibility and commitment that deterred me from rushing towards fatherhood. It was the suspicion that I did not have what it takes to be a great dad. ‘Anyone can be a father,’ the saying goes, ‘but it takes a real man to be a dad.’ The trouble was that as far back as I could remember I had never felt I was a ‘real’ man. Real men were strong and silent; they watched football down the pub and exchanged banter with the lads; they could assemble flat-pack furniture and they loved cars. I admit it: this list reads as absurdly reductive, but throughout my 20s and 30s this was genuinely what I associated with maleness. I didn’t drink, couldn’t care less about football or cars, preferred cafés to pubs and most of my friends were female — all of which made me doubt how much of a man I really was.

There is a brilliant scene in Blackadder Goes Forth when Mary, played by Miranda Richardson, asks Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, ‘Tell me Edmund, do you have someone special in your life?’ Blackadder replies: ‘Well yes, as a matter of fact I do.’ ‘Who?’ asks Mary. Edmund answers, ‘Me.’ ‘No, I mean someone you love, cherish and want to keep safe from all the horror and the hurt,’ clarifies Mary. Edmund thinks for a moment and then says: ‘Erm… still me, really.’ That scene is very funny, but for me particularly so. I was a selfish and self-absorbed person (my wife might quibble with the past tense here) and having a child seemed to be about sacrificing one’s own hopes, dreams and sleep in return for… well I wasn’t really certain what the rewards were. What I did know was that fatherhood was a role for which I did not seem well-suited.

My own father, inevitably, shaped some of my ideas about fatherhood. He was one of those working-class men who demanded respect and commanded authority. He worked all day on the production line of a car factory and by the time he returned home he was often angry and exhausted. He wasn’t one for hugs or telling his children he loved them and he had a temper. He worked hard, accepting all the overtime he was offered, so wasn’t always around, and when he was around we sometimes wished he wasn’t. I don’t judge him for those things. He was a man of his time and he fulfilled his most important duties: he provided and he protected. My father died suddenly from a heart attack when he was 62 and I was 23. It remains the most shattering event in my life and the one that shaped all that has happened afterwards. That perhaps is another reason why I feared being a dad, because to have children means that I might do to them what my own dad did to me: die too soon.

My ideas about fatherhood weren’t only based on my own dad, they were also inspired by the films I would watch and seeing the fathers of my friends. A great dad was, based on what I saw on screen and in my friends’ families, someone who was physically robust and financially solid. He was strong and capable and he didn’t need to call an electrician when a light bulb went out in the living room. I wasn’t any of these things so why should I believe I could be a great dad? And yet even though fatherhood frightened me, I was also plagued by another parallel fear: that by not experiencing parenthood I might miss out on its unknown pleasures.