Finding Fatherhood

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Finding Fatherhood
Melbourne’s Child
February 2005

As a relatively typical ‘Generation Xer’, nothing encouraged me to even consider becoming a dad. If anything, society was actively persuading me to seriously question whether fatherhood had any value at all. But while I didn’t seek fatherhood out, it found me.

An intelligent, idealistic and beautiful woman I’d only known for only five months stood on the corner of Elizabeth and Queen Streets in Melbourne and told me I was going to be a dad. For whatever reason, the hand of fate pointed its long, bony finger at me and said, ‘So, what do you think?’

At 23, employed part-time and living in a share house in Thornbury, I wasn’t in a strong economic position to start a family.  My most valuable asset was my guitar. My life revolved around which friend I’d be going to see playing a gig on a Friday night. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was getting myself into. Yet, somehow, the idea of becoming a dad suddenly became the best prospect I’d ever chanced upon. And I beamed at my partner amid the rush of peak hour and said, ‘So  - we’re having a baby’.

Suddenly, I’d happened upon something constructive, something I could be excited about. In an inner city lifestyle all about passive indifference, finding fame through one of the creative arts, or impressing whoever may see you drinking coffee in the window seats at Marios, deciding to become a father was an anomaly. Becoming excited about it seemed totally absurd. But in my quest for an ‘alternative’ lifestyle, I discovered that the greatest alternative was to return to the perceived conservatism of my parents’ generation, and settle down to start a family.

Two young boys later, I now happily advocate fatherhood as a fine purpose for life. It’s real. It’s visceral. It’s everything a two-in-the-morning ecstasy tablet offers but doesn’t deliver: the euphoria of your son looking into your eyes and saying ‘I love you, Dad’ leaves a rave party chuppa-chup high for dead. No men’s magazines with their titillating cover girls will give you an article about the pleasure of deftly changing a dirty nappy with the same skill you once used to roll your cigarettes. No proponents of cool will ever consider that the peaceful reflection of yoga or meditation is just as attainable through a pre-dawn stroll with a teething six-month-old, while your exhausted wife grins sleepily at the prospect of a few uninterrupted hours of sleep.

There are rewards in the challenge that is fatherhood; rewards that even the best description can never do justice. The kinds of rewards only attainable through the lived experience. You can purchase your surround sound, multimedia entertainment system and sit in a darkened room watching someone else’s child being born, but that woman isn’t your partner. Those are not your hands covered in warm blood and water. It’s not you touching the softest skin you will ever feel, and it will never give you the overwhelming sense of being alive except through a choked back voice somewhere in the back of your throat and a tear rolling down your cheek as your child crinkles their eyes at the world and lets out their first gargled cry. You won’t get that any other way than through living the experience.
 
Nobody is doing a very good job selling the joys of responsibility to the young men of my generation. As a consequence, many of them are unhappy, missing out on something they don’t even know about. If you are not a parent you won’t realise the pride of hearing your child count to ten. You won’t understand the whole new perspective you get on the wonder of language, as you watch your child grapple with each syllable. Responsibility is being tainted as some evil force, as society continues to fetishise single life and apartment living. Young men need to be told that fatherhood is not a burden. Certainly, it is a wild beast that tests your limits and teaches you more than you ever thought you could know about yourself. But, it is a warm constant, full of more reassurances and moments of wonder than you could imagine. And all it costs young men is their singleness: that suppressed lonely feeling between relationships, all that spare time we call ‘freedom’ yet waste on Playstation games, reality TV and just thinking about doing something.

Fatherhood teaches you to be a bit more effective with the few childless spaces that appear from time to time. It enhances quiet moments of solitude, but more importantly lets you build spaceships out of Lego and read about dinosaurs all over again.

I’d like to see young men re-writing all those five-year plans and giving a little space to the possibility of fate tempting them into fatherhood. I’d like to see men, as a collective force, redefining their role to bring them into line with the work feminism has done for women. I’d like to see all men feeling confident enough in their ability as fathers, and giving some long-overdue attention to the balance of work, community life and vibrant family activity. It is only one life, and fatherhood is something that should be embraced, not feared.

Daniel Donahoo is a Castlemaine dad with two young boys

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