A diary of fatherhood
Fragments of 2024. Questions, doubts, challenges. Imaginary friends, linguistic habits, privileges. Reflections and anecdotes. Setbacks in raising children.
I’ve spent almost six years writing about my children. Partly, I write about them because I am trying to understand what fatherhood means to me. It’s an exercise in building temporal responses to it, a sort of permanent essay. It’s me making sense of what tends to fade — like our dreams when we wake up — and which helps me to keep track of it all.
I know: I never get anywhere. I’ll say something today, and tomorrow I am fully capable of changing my mind. I write on my phone, in notebooks. I generally do it enthusiastically, like a need to free myself from what I have inside.
It can happen that something which I think only happened to me, has happened to more people. I’ll speak of something which seems to be mine but doesn’t belong to me alone. And while I can sometimes be embarrassed to put it all down, warts and all, it’s better not to leave me with something which is not just my own.
I rarely come back to read these anarchic, disorganised diaries. Maybe I could publish a book out of them one day. Or organise and publish them on Recalculating as installments.
Sometimes (too many times) I analyze and go over a situation or a sentence for far too long. It doesn’t take an effort, it comes naturally to me (as in life). OK, I guess I better take this one to therapy, right? (Therapists, I am all ears).
It’s not always like this. Other times I just want to remember a moment, a scent, a sentence, a feeling which I can’t capture in a photo.
The year is about to end. This is the penultimate newsletter of 2024. I’ll share some notes from my phone from over the year, in the style of a personal diary.
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January 2024
Lorenzo told me something unlikely: “The gym teacher told me she doesn’t like how I speak Greek”.
At five years old, Lorenzo manages his four languages that he is immersed in with ease: Spanish, with me; Italian, with Irene; English, which he picked up aged 2 at nursery; and Greek, having spent the past four years in Greece.
Lorenzo asked if he should tell the headteacher what the gym teacher had said. Of course, I told him in support, sure that the conversation could only clarify the matter.
It didn’t seem like something a teacher would say, at least not in what would have been meant: that she didn’t like the way Lorenzo spoke because he didn’t master the language well. How do we get rid of this pressure that children feel like they are under?
I’ve never spurred my kids on to be the best, the strongest, or to be very competitive with others, and Irene, much less. But here he is, a lad of five, craving to stand out.
Try as one may, a parent’s potential for meddling in their kids’ lives is far more limited than they might think.
It seemed to me that the teacher might have been trying to tell Lorenzo that she hadn’t liked something that he had said, or the tone of it. I also don’t like the way he speaks to me in Spanish sometimes, with a demanding tone, and probably very in sync with his age group (no one speaks at home like this).
Take, for example, the screams for WATERRRRRRRRRR! as if our little man has stepped out of the boxing ring and is about to go in for the fifth round.
When I have the mental means (well, physical and emotional too), I’ll crack a joke, and respond: “What? is water leaking from the roof?!” Or I’ll play with the word in Spanish as he says it, “Aguaaa!!!!”, and repeat other words beginning with A ( “Árbol, auto…”). Sometimes he’ll giggle, other times he will get mad. There’s no recipe, and they’re often duds (or dad jokes).
Lorenzo doesn’t have too many tools available to him to confidently talk about what has happened. His narrative capacity is limited, of course, because he is five. Nonetheless, I try to feel how Lorenzo might be feeling. Sometimes he’ll feel a certain way even though it’s not what he will have been told — and it’s something that’s universal and happens to us all.
I tried to explain to him that there are misunderstandings. We think we hear or understand one thing, but actually it’s not what was said or what was meant to be said. I was surprised that Lorenzo didn’t think this was boring, but instead wanted to hear more about it, as if I were telling him a story.
I called on my words and tried to come up with a less abstract example:
“Listen, little one, pay attention. I can say: ‘I don’t believe you!’ It can be an expression of admiration and doesn’t doubt the truth of what is happening. It’s a way of telling you that ´I don’t believe you’ because it is incredible. Like in the context of ‘Wow what a goal! It’s a great goal!’ Or I can also say ‘I don’t believe you’, for example, when you say you’re going to wash your hands, because many times you say you will but you don't.”
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March 2024
Once a week since September 2023, we’ve had the nanny Isidora come around so that Lorenzo can practice his Greek. For an hour, they play in Greek, which Lorenzo also does twice a week at football and in his new school.
Just over a month ago, Lorenzo wanted this arrangement to change, for Isidora to stop coming by. I found it hard to understand, not only because I find her to be patient and very caring, but also because I thought they played well together.
Last week, Isidora came because we needed her help. Lorenzo loved playing with her for two hours. And when she left, he asked: “When is she coming back? I wish she could come all of the time”. And that’s hard to understand too, right?
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April 2024
The writer and coach
, who runs the popular newsletter , says about all dads who have children above the age of five: “Your kids will get older. You think you won't miss these moments. I promise that you will”.Lorenzo used to call music “mú-cala”. He would call himself “Teté”.
I remember his imaginary friends Bandó and Baidui. One was good, the other was naughty. He’d break all of Lorenzo’s toys. His ending was dramatic; apparently, he ended up dead under the wheels of a car…
Today I asked Lorenzo how Bandó and Baidui were. I felt (or imagined?) a kind of electricity running through his body, an emotion which shone bright in his eyes. “Baidui is dead,” he said, smiling. I don’t know what this all means for him, but I liked it.
I keep thinking about pulling together a document with Lorenzo’s sentences and questions — and of León’s, who speaks more now. In the meanwhile, I’ll keep some of those smashers going in my diaries, like this one from Lorenzo:
“Before I was born, when I was a star, I loved you already.”
“No-one else is going to live after us, right?”
“I always want to live with you. Can I?”
“Who was the first person in the world?”
“I love you more than the last number.”
Maguire’s advice goes for parents but also for life in general: “However long you think you need to do anything, double it. Whether it's bathtime, bedtime, dinner time, getting out of the house, taking a walk, or colouring a Marvel PDF printout, I found that the majority of parenting stress comes from my kids not doing things according to my timetable. Whenever I can let go of this, I'm a better, happier dad.”
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June 2024
School’s finally out for the summer. It ended with a theatre show to mark the end of the school year. Each child had a speaking part, in English and in Greek.
At the end, we greeted other parents. Some were surprised: “How can it be that Lorenzo speaks the same or even better than my child in Greek, if you’re not speaking it at home?”
The gut reaction is one of paternal pride: “What a wonderful, smart kid I have!” Putting the pride and fatherly ego to one side (if my kid is fantastic, am I too?), I think about it honestly: I don’t think that my kids are geniuses, nor that they should be praised in particular for being multilingual (something which Irene wrote about in her own newsletter back in the autumn of 2021).
When I am congratulated for the linguistic excellence of our kids, I want to cool down the compliment and I joke back: “Lorenzo is not that clever nor does he deserve such praise for speaking four languages. It’s more that he is enjoying the result of being a very privileged kid”.
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July 2024
Irene was off on a trip, and many new questions came into play: how was baby León going to sleep when he had never known bottle nor dummy? How was he going to sleep without the breast at 21 months? What was going to happen to Lorenzo, aged five, to have to wait for me to put his little brother to sleep first?
The context for that is that ever since he stopped breastfeeding, I’ve spent three years reading to him at night and going to bed with him every night, while Irene settles León.
You make plans, your mind fills up with questions, fears and doubts. Fatherhood throws everything back up in the air.
León used to spend an hour and a half at Irene’s breast before he drifted off into his dreamlike state. It was an incomprehensible martyrhood. I feared, and especially for my back – would I have to hold him for so long until he slept too?
But what happened instead? Throughout the week, León sat on his bed, docile, to put his pajamas on. He would hug me and fall asleep, and I didn’t need to walk or rock him. These mysteries of babies destroy all of the theories, and constantly pose us with new challenges.
One thing is for sure. I’ll never forget the nights in which he slept this way, his head nestled on my shoulder, hugging me strongly around the neck. I had his fingerprints on my skin until that precise moment when his little body drifted off, relaxed, and I knew he was sound asleep. Those were intimate, beautiful moments, of relief and joy, and which I could dedicate an entire essay to alone.
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August 2024
Today, Lorenzo said: “I am sad because Alexis is leaving and I won’t see him again”. One of his closest friends was moving to Italy, where his grandparents live. Then, Lorenzo said: “I want to put a piano in the house”. A sudden wish, like yesterday, when he said, “I wish we had an enormous pool the size of our garden”.
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October 2024
On the way back from school, the light turned red. Lorenzo doesn’t get the things which are second nature for adults. I tell him that the man standing knocking at the window in traffic is asking for money.
“Does he not have money because he does not have a computer to work like you?”
I thought of
, who writes the , and about her post “When kids ask about people they see in crisis”.Zulkey talks to specialists in social work, paediatrics, public and psychological health to get advice on what can be done, and how to guide children in a world which can be terrifying, sad and unfair.
She writes that children as young as Lorenzo can understand these kinds of issues: “Understanding structural inequities helps kids displace false narratives around individual culpability that might be driving outcomes like being unhoused or having a mental health crisis.”
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This is us for now. If you know strategies that work well for you or have ideas triggered by this text — tricks? resources? — please hit reply and share!
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I love it when you send me suggestions or complete, criticize or correct some idea. I also love it when you share your own experiences. From the bottom of my heart, thank you so much.
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With love,
Nacho
🙏 Many thanks to Worldcrunch for translating and editing this newsletter.
