The extremes of paternity
A child gets sick, another travels with his mother. Exhaustion and the usual daily errands. Where does the couple’s relationship figure in the midst of that? Exaggerations of a father.
Sometimes it seems like paternity has thrown me into an infantile or adolescent state, where everyday events blow up to the extreme. At least, there are moments like this. And when it happens, it feels like it always happens. It’s clear though that it has much more to do with the intensity of said blow-ups, rather than the frequency with which they happen.
This is something quite in character with Lorenzo at this stage of his development. At four, my eldest son experiences the every day with the seriousness of the absolute. He delivers this with a sense of those extremes: “We never play, ever!” is one such call to the heavens, after at least ten hours of activities with his friends.
Lorenzo also builds sentences about other themes — food, waiting, storytime, going back to Argentina, etc. — with an extremist architecture: always, never, all, nothing. I’m wondering if it’s contagious — but luckily, he does not seem to share as many fears as I do.
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One week, Lorenzo was down with a fever. It was a Sunday, and he had had a high temperature for six days. Just as it looked like he was on the mend, he had a terrible night: at 3 in the morning, he woke up, complaining and trembling. He was delirious, and he was having trouble breathing. I got scared.
Lorenzo had a fever of 39.6, although he had taken paracetamol hours earlier. Which hospital do we take him to, was the first alarm bell, a true worry considering we have not spent too much time living in Greece, a country which is not our own. These are the kind of things I know how to manage blindly, instinctively, when I’m in my home country.
Then came the guilt, a useless recourse to change the situation: “Why didn’t I just play with him all day long?” I asked myself, accusingly. These were the enunciations of a drunk man, with regrets, promising through a bad hangover he would not go back to the bottle. Promises arose, like a lucky formula to exercise the fears: “From now on, I have to be infinitely patient. I have to play with Lorenzo every time he asks me to”.
It’s obvious where my new mantras were coming from: the place of horror which I was sending myself to, trying not to imagine that my young son could suddenly die. Rationally, I know it is an exaggeration, and that it is highly unlikely he could die from the flu, but in the same vein of knowing that yes, actually — it is something that could happen.
By nature — as it were — ghosts are not rational, but dramatic and terrifying. The thought comes from the school of “Maybe it’s the beginning of a fatal illness”.
As a father it is inconceivable that one of my two children could die before me, just as I could not imagine dying before my parents.
A throwaway thought: giving Lorenzo all of the things he wants or playing until the end of time is not only not going to cure him or stop anything else bad happening to him, but it is also unreal and unhealthy in terms of forming his personality.
None of this really mattered to me when I saw Lorenzo coughing his lungs up. He seemed to be choking as he was shivering. Suddenly, he hugged himself into the foetal position to find some relief. This is when the guilt bubbles over, as if I were the one who caused this attack of bad health upon my otherwise happy child, as if I were the one who therefore had to cure it.
The box of paracetamol comes rattling back out, Lorenzo calms down slowly, and falls back asleep. I could only find my way there at dawn; and Lorenzo woke up as if nothing had happened during his night of torment.
He didn’t need to take any more paracetamol; the fever had broken. My promises are becoming diluted day by day. I lose patience when Lorenzo screams my name for the thousandth time; and when he enacts a sequence of actions with the singular purpose of catching my attention, to play with him, while I try (and postpone) doing the things I need to do for work.
After a week where caring for my son was the reason for waking up each day, I want time to myself. In the few hours I get where I am not with Lorenzo or working away at another task around the house and garden, I am working. I work for a few hours to get that stuff which is accumulating out of the way — all of the deadlines which I am missing.
The weird thing is that it means working is not only satisfactory, but it's freeing: what an absurd thing, to find freedom in work. I want to work because it makes me feel better than spending the day looking after an under-five.
I know: looking after a child doesn't have near the same level of recognition and social prestige that having a job does. For a man, validation is more in the system of being in production, rather than in care.
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I read a few excerpts from “The Mandates of Masculinity as a Risk Factor”. This Spanish-language booklet delves into concepts of masculinity and its multiple frameworks for understanding how the duty of being “masculine” is installed and made natural; a way of making visible the different ways in which gender equality is created.
Page 16 mentions four mandates of masculinity, a sort of guide to follow, to reach this ideal of masculinity: be a provider; be omnipotent; be powerful; be a protector.
It also says that virility can be analysed when taking work as the construction of the masculine identity into account: “The man tends to fuse himself into his profession and occupation, thus reinforcing the role of provider”.
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My daily duties have me set on auto-pilot. Fatigue is the backdrop since we have not slept well in four years (since we became parents); so the day-to-day tasks become a kind of loop which guide us through routine.
Change the children; prepare their breakfast (which is sometimes devoured, and sometimes goes untouched); brush their teeth, put their shoes on, go to kindergarten (always later than we want). And the kindergarten is another chapter of which I’ll share just a taste of what it’s like.
“Why do I have to go to kindergarten? I always, always have to go. I don’t want to go. I don’t like it there”. What Lorenzo says is not true, but he repeats this mantra at least once a week (and sometimes, daily).
It’s not true, because between our travels and holidays — and illnesses — he skips it often. It’s not true, because every time I go to pick him up, he tells me on the way to the car how much fun he had with his little friends, and that he’d like to see them for longer next time.
Once again, I feel guilty. Though I have some doubts, I know that I am not harming him. What I also feel bad about, since the first day we brought him to daycare, is that I am also looking forward to living my life without him for a little while. Saying it like that is politically incorrect, but believe me when I say it’s much easier to put bread on the table than to look after a child.
As the Venezuelan psychologist Carolina Mora advises, Irene and I do tell Lorenzo that while he is away, we can work and do other things that we’d like to do too.
I try not to depict it as this or that. I like being with him. I also like working. I like having alone time for my own activities too. I also tell him that he is very lucky because both parents work from home, which means that we spend many more moments together than other children — and parents — can only dream about having.
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In the middle of this sometimes-swirl of tensions, and though we may sometimes have moments where we lose sight of it, life as a couple also continues. Irene and I have been together for almost 11 years. And that’s where we can sometimes find ourselves in danger of growing apart from each other too.
When we’re low, the fact emerges that we haven’t hardly — been out alone on a date. It’s maybe happened twice in just over four years — and it’s always been for less than six hours in total, and even then we’ll be arguing for half of that time.
In those moments it’s easy to ask ourselves why we’re together if we’re having such a bad time of it, since it all has to clearly be so hard. But I always end up realising that the couple becomes the scapegoat, even if it is not the cause of this ill-feeling: we are who we are, and the way we live has an impact on our relationship and our family life. In any case, we should be thankful for our partnership at the core.
I was speechless a few weeks ago when someone who doesn’t have, and doesn’t plan on having, children told me, insolently and arrogantly, that it surprised them when parents complain or suffer: “You knew what you were setting yourself up for, so why are you whingeing? Surely you were warned?”
Now that I am writing this I realise I’m more annoyed that I just didn’t respond in kind, with the same aggression. By keeping the fire of my anger inside, I ended up getting burned.
I could have told them that life — in general, and in particular with family — isn’t an Excel sheet where you can anticipate and programme schemes and logic to exert absolute control over certain situations. Quite the opposite: life as a couple with children is like taking a Tagada ride with no harness or restraints.
And of course, when things are going well, when all is said and done, you can feel the warmth and shelter of being in your relationship. There are shared looks and smiles, there is complicity. There is quiet. There is the desire for more. The wondering why we can’t have more beautiful moments together. We come back to the idea of having a third child, a topic which lingers over our relationship in the tough times as well as the good. It’s illogical, I have said it before, and we know it. But denying this desire won’t make it disappear.
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On the morning I am writing this, Irene has taken our seven-month old, León, to Bucharest with her. And after a week off with the flu, Lorenzo is back at kindergarten. I haven’t gone back to the house to work. I am alone at the beach outside our home. I meditate. And then I sit down to write this. It’s obvious: I need to do this more often.
Irene and I have spent two decades travelling, often. Our relationship is a product of this itinerance, and our love story began between trips. Nonetheless, and almost always, we’ll have this pre-trip stress that pops up, never mind whether we are travelling alone or together.
Sitting on the beach, I remember a request from the night before, when Irene was packing, and when she asked me to “help her” think through a logistic detail of her forthcoming work trip: did she need to take the baby’s car seat with her? If she did, then how would she be able to protect the baby from the heat and rain, which the weather app promised her awaited them in the Romanian capital?
I told her to take the car seat; safety in the car trumped safety from the sun and rain, which could be handled through other precautions. I was slicing up a vegetable pie as I replied — a part was for the freezer, another was for my sustenance that week — and felt that Irene was getting annoyed.
She said she told me to check out a different stroller, which had a clip-on to protect from the sun, rain and wind. Maybe I could take it out and put it on the car seat. I told her, you only told me to think this through with you; she replied, no, that was after you didn’t hear me asking you to look at a set-up for the other seat, and that’s why she had asked for “help” to think this through, as a top-up request.
I remained convinced that the conversation had not gone this way, in much the same way that I am certain she was right. When Irene and the baby got to Bucharest, she texted me: “Thanks for ‘helping me’ with the car seat”.
And it clicked that the whole scene was just pre-travel-with-a-baby nerves. She was thanking me for being paternal. And looking after our family’s well being is not “helping her” — it’s loving each other.
We showered together that night before Irene left, and we cuddled in bed. Finally, I am going to sleep well for a night, I whispered, knowing full well I shouldn’t say such a thing (yep, I am superstitious).
León had a bad night. It was one of the few times when breastfeeding and his mother was not calming him down. It was one of the rare times when my arms were more effective than his mother’s. He fell asleep. I put him down; he woke up. I picked him up; he fell back asleep quickly.
I spent some time with León in my arms that night. I asked the darkness, the only one up at that hour, does he want to be with me because they’re off tomorrow? And those nightmares took shape, the ones which you burrow deep: What if something happens tomorrow on their trip, and this is the last time we’ll be together, and happy?
I lie there with León gripping my pyjamas, his other hand on my face, looking for contact though he is asleep, as if he wants to reassure himself that I am there with him.
And when am I going to get a good night’s rest? That moment — with León clinging on, in exhaustion — feels like forever, but it’s just a moment, and this is just a phase. It’ll go quickly. Parenthood is full of extremes, I think.
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Many thanks to all those who are following me, either by reading, commenting, sending emails or sharing this newsletter with others.
I’ll be back in your inboxes in a few weeks, as usual.
I hope you are all well.
A hug,
Nacho.
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📣 Nabeelah Shabbir, a member of this community and a friend, edited and improved this newsletter with lots of love. Thanks, Nabeelah! 🙏 If there are mistakes, they are my fault, not hers! (and you’ll forgive me for them!)