Reflections on paternity

Bretagne, July 2021

Some six months ago I became a father for the third time.?Every new arrival is special and precious, but with the familiarity of having done this twice before comes not only a less panicked and more measured parenthood but also a more reflective one.?Many of those reflections hinge on the contrasts and differences between those three arrivals.

I have been a father to a daughter for 17 years, to another daughter for 15 years and am now father to a son for soon-to-be 6 months.?I have tended my three newborn children for their first months in Viêt Nam, London, albeit briefly, and New York, each experience unique in terms of the environment into which my child was born.?I have been a new father as a young-ish man in his early thirties and man of fifty. ?I have a boy and girls, giving me a close-up look at, among other things, the baggage of the deeply rooted ideas on gender norms I carry around with me.?More particularly it has highlighted what I think of as the Seymour “curse” of elements of toxic masculinity that somehow worked its way into the male line of my family at some point as part of our inheritance.?I have children that most people would consider white and a child who, under America’s unique, baffling, yet globally influential framework of race is considered black.?I have had children with a woman that most people would consider white and a woman most people would consider black (even if she has a much more nuanced and rich understanding of her own identity that has always withstood other people’s determination to classify her in ways that they were most comfortable with).?Importantly, I have had children where I had four weeks off work to devote myself to their infancy, and now I have had a child where I was able to take six months.

And of course, I have had children at times when we were not all navigating COVID and a child at a time when we were.

All these experiences are no more or less unique than anyone else’s experience of parenthood.?But I do have some perspectives to share from all these contrasts.?I have written them down in part because I wanted to think them through.?Having done so, and reading back what I have written, I have wondered whether they are useful to other people, and I share them in the hope they might be.?I imagine, perhaps immodestly, that fathers to be, fathers who are, but also others who concern themselves with the issue of paternity and what it means for our children and our societies might find it of interest.?In particular, having been through everything up until now, I realise that I am troubled by the way it seems to me the world looks at paternity – men and women both - and I hope maybe I can encourage some people to reflect a little further on some of the consequences of the way we largely do things now, and whether there is a better way.?Not everything that follows is about that, but it is an important part of why I wanted to write and share this.

I should say that these are reflections that come from the experience of a male/ female parental unit. Coincidentally, upstairs as I give this a final read to reassure myself it is safe to share this are our visiting friends, a same sex couple with their baby a few months younger than ours. I can't say one way or another whether what I have written is in any way relevant to their experience. Maybe one or both of them will read this and choose to tell me.

Having made the decision to share this with other people, I have had to decide how. I do not flatter myself that anyone other than me would have any interest in publishing what I have to say, and since I am not a particularly enthusiastic social media user at the best of times the only place I could think to make it available to more than a handful of people was LinkedIn. It was a process of elimination, not because I felt LinkedIn was somehow an appropriate space to share my personal experiences in. I suspect in many ways it is entirely inappropriate. What I have written is intensely personal. I have tried hard to be honest and to avoid the trap of writing to come across a particular way or leave some particular impression, despite knowing that I will put this out into a space defined by people's professional aspirations. What's more, this is anyway more revealing of myself than I would ever be at work. You, the reader, are entitled of course to have whatever view you wish of what I wrote - after all I invited you to read it. But I hope you will understand that as I look at the big blue "publish" button on the top left of my screen right now there is still a part of me that prefers to keep these things to myself and not to press it. If you're reading this it's because I managed to pluck up the courage to do so after two months of reviewing and revising and trying to express difficult things and also be respectful of those who have inevitably become parts of this story, not least my children and their mothers. So please try to read as indulgingly as you are able.

With my attempts at securing your sympathies out of the way, let me start with the first of my reflections:

Old man versus young(ish) man

Maybe this is the most trivial of my observations of my contrasting experiences, and the most predictable.?It is wrapped up with the experience of anyone who has had a second or third child, in particular that it is never as scary as the first time.

Every child is different.?My son?Cai is not like his sisters Ella and Jessica were in many ways which I will not spend time on.?They are all uniquely wonderful and challenging and preoccupying in all sorts of ways.?Having subsequent children is very different from having your first.?It is not that it is somehow a breeze, as if parenting is like riding a bicycle.?Rather you know from experience that all those terrible things you feared would come to pass the first time round did not, and in retrospect probably weren’t ever going to.?And that in itself makes for a vastly lighter burden.?

Also, obviously, you know how to change a nappy, use whatever baby gadget you have learned to depend on, and various tricks and techniques to get a wriggling infant into whatever item of clothing you have decided to impose upon them.

However, old is old.?I lack the energy I had.?Various parts of me ache.?When he pulls my thinning hair I cannot be so confident of it growing back.?Lying on the floor to encourage his “tummy time” play, if not undertaken with care as to how I’m lying, can lead to pains in interesting new places.?I don’t think I’m a particularly infirm 50.?I flatter myself that the opposite is true in fact.?But the fact remains that the price of experience is creeping frailty.?

(Incidentally, it occurred to me the other day that at some point in one’s life the pains and discomforts one wakes up with become normal.?I don’t know how it happened, but I’m sure when I was in my twenties waking up with a pain in my arm or foot or whatever was cause for concern.?Now I just shrug and wait for it to go away).

This business of the physical side of being father to a baby is manageable now, but I ask myself how I will cope as a 60 year old man trying to live up to his 10 year old expectations for physical play.?

What this translates into is a determination to maintain as high a level of good health and fitness as I can for as long as I can.?There are plenty of men of my years who are fitter than those much younger than us, and men ten years my senior who are much fitter than me.?Good fortune permitting it can surely be done.?But I feel a pressure I did not before to be fit and healthy for him, my son who will have to make do with an older father where my daughters were thrown into the air and caught casually by a stronger man.?I look down at my gently expanding waistline and rather than it looking like the natural signs of an increasingly comfortable life it looks like a betrayal of my responsibilities to Cai.

Another striking difference that comes with older paternity is that when socialising with others with a small child of a similar age (as all parents do since trying to socialise with a small baby in tow is much easier with those similarly afflicted) you are likely to be the oldest in the room.?Many of those of my own age assume I am insane to have voluntarily signed up for paternity once more.?Spending time with people younger than you is hardly the most difficult of things, but it is also something I find myself aware of, like playing a game where you are a little less familiar with the rules than the other players.?Younger people are different than older people, with different cultural references, different sensibilities and mores.?My wife insists I don’t “act old”, something I try not to interpret too much.

Overall I have concluded that it balances out.?An alarmingly energetic friend of even more advanced years who had become a father for the first time at 50 assured me that it would be a breeze.?He was wrong, but only a little bit so.?It is, as Brits say, “swings and roundabouts”.?Cai has certain advantages and disadvantages from having an older father: I am indeed wiser, calmer, have more resources, have more from my lived life to share, even if I am less energetic. ?I like to think that at the end of the day he is doing no better or worse than my daughters did with me at a younger age.

There is a notable exception which is that I will necessarily have considerably less time with Cai than I will with Ella and Jessica.?Whichever of life’s milestones I accompany them through there will necessarily be a subset for which I do not accompany Cai.?My family is relatively long-lived.?I expect to be around into my 90s, but what I do not know is how long I will be mentally sharp and more support than burden.?So I may give Cai 20, 30 or with good fortune 40 years.?I lost my father when I was 14 and my step-father when I was 18 and while I appreciate that this is one of those things that life throws at some of us, it still feels unfair that I missed out on more time with them.?The odds are in my, and I like to think his, favour that Cai will do better than that.?None the less, I cannot help feeling that he will be short changed, and there is nothing I can do about it.?So that is the one downside for which I can offer no counterbalance.

Hanoi versus New York

My first daughter, while born in New York, came to Hanoi at 6 weeks old.?My second daughter was born in London, and also came to Hanoi when small.?My son was born in New York and so far has spent 6 months of his life in the city we currently consider our home.

My experience in Hanoi was one of an expatriate with plenty of money.?And there’s not much profound about the observation that having a baby is less arduous when you can afford paid help.?

However, there are some differences that are less obvious.?Vietnamese culture is extremely community orientated.?Western assumptions about the a priori centrality of the individual as the unit of society are not shared.?I find this a fascinating topic, but will not dwell on it beyond what it means with regard to babies, which is that, as in many countries, the assumption is that a baby is raised by the community rather than the parents.

Practically this means that in a restaurant where you might otherwise navigate not only getting your noodles into your mouth but also past the startlingly fast grasping hands of a curious infant, staff will happily come, often without asking, and carry your baby off to play leaving you to eat in peace.?You can leave your toddler running around in the street with other children looked after by some combination of the neighbourhood adults and the children themselves just as other adults in the vicinity implicitly leave their children in your partial care.?And this is just presumed.?No one has discussed or agreed it.?

I remember my oldest daughter at two years old running around with a group of local children ranging in age from smaller than her to, I’d say, about 8 or 9.?She was joining them for the first time and I believe her nanny had simply pointed her at them and let her go.?I don’t remember now why I was watching.?Perhaps I wanted to see what happened.?At one point Ella tripped and a young boy came up behind her, lifted her to her feet and rubbed her slightly scuffed hands together, something he evidently thought would help with the pain and which, looking up at this older boy in whom she clearly trusted, Ella decided to agree with and miraculously continued to play without the screams I was anticipating.?It felt as if Ella was a member of the group simply by being because that was the way things were expected to work.

I discussed this with other parents who had been socialised to “western” ways of doing things (by which I mean mainly Brits, Americans, Australians and assorted Nordics given Viet Nam’s then expat profile or at least the people I knew at the time) and I was not alone in being taken aback.?Personally I quite liked it, but I understand why some others did not and found it intrusive.

I should make a disclaimer here.?I do not claim any rigorous expertise on the differences between cultures in Viet Nam, New York or anywhere else.?I am only able to share what I saw and perceived.?Culture is a moving target in any case.?I am sure I am guilty of gross generalisation.?None the less, I found the contrasts I saw first-hand striking, and it does make me wonder about what can be learned about different ways of thinking about the ways in which we collaborate as communities in raising our children.

New York is of course a totally different matter, and all three of my children have spent most of their lives here.?A smiling and, more importantly, quiet child is often the object of adults’ reciprocated smiles, coos and compliments.?But once children start to become a distraction, by which I mean they make a noise, it is not unusual to be looked at like you are walking around gratuitously sounding a foghorn, as if it is the height of bad manners to do something as inconsiderate as to bring something so noisy into a public space or polite company.?

What’s more, New York parenting seems to be in significant part brutally competitive.?Goods, in the broadest sense, for children are scarce and differ markedly depending on what you are able to pay for them.?From the moment your child is born, or even conceived, securing a good nursery spot, finding the right nanny or even getting onto the books of the right paediatrician are all struggles you brave not alongside other parents but against them since there is not enough of what every parent wants for their child to go round.?What’s more there couldn’t possibly be, because every child’s success will often make another child’s parent alarmed that their pride and joy is missing out in comparison.?It is exhausting and something that never crossed my mind in Viêt Nam.?Again, I realise that my experience there was that of an expatriate parent, not a Vietnamese parent, and I don’t doubt for a moment that Vietnamese parents want the best for their children and would be prepared to fight for it.?I am only saying that the contrast is striking to me in terms of the different cultural environments my children grew up in.?

I conclude that my comparative experience, albeit one that may be distorted by the dynamics of expatriate living, is that places like New York are not great to raise small children in at least not, perhaps, unless you have an awful lot more money than me.

Delivering while black

I am going to make some observations that relate to race.?I feel I need to, but I also hesitate to.?Right now it’s hard to think of a more sensitive subject where it’s possible to misstep and cause offence, even more so perhaps when observations are coming from a white man.?I can only say that I am trying my best.

I understand the terms “black” and “white” when applied to people in ways which may be different to how others understand them.?For example, like many Brits I was initially puzzled by the way President Obama was referred to as black in the US despite having a mother generally considered to be white (the reasons why have now been explained to me and are rooted in concepts arising from the specificities of US history such as the one-drop rule).?I find discussions on race to inadequately distinguish between race as a biological concept and race as a social construct.?When working on gender equality issues we are always very careful to distinguish between the biological concept of sex and the social construct of gender.?Let me say then that in what follows I use the terms black and white in the social construct sense, not any biological sense.?I am not interested in any physical differences between people, but rather am talking about the way in which they consider themselves and the way others consider and treat them.?I am talking about a thing that exists in people’s heads, not about any things that happen to be characteristics of their bodies.?

I am just a sample of one, and an indirect one at that.?But I do feel like I saw a difference firsthand that both American black women and data on things like maternal mortality attest to.

My first daughter was born in New York.?She had the umbilical cord around her neck resulting in a somewhat rushed trip to the hospital, induction and eventually an epidural.?My second daughter was born by caesarean because she was “in distress” (my quotation marks reflect my ignorance of proper medical terminology) and needed to come into the world in a hurry.

In both cases my sense was that my white ex-wife was treated extremely well with full regard for her comfort.?I would not presume to speak for her, but at least from my perspective I recall clearly how pain management was taken very seriously; when someone you care about is in pain you pay close attention.?To the maximum extent possible she was consulted and informed to enable decision making and ensure that she got what she wanted.?

My son, by contrast, was born to a woman considered black in the US.?She went into labour and was quickly in a lot of pain.?We were told not to come to the hospital.?It was too soon, they said.?She should wait rather than end up going through labour in a hospital rather than the comfortable and familiar environment of her home they said.?

After a couple of hours (bizarre ones since it was 6th January 2021 and we watched the extraordinary scenes from Washington DC of a mob storming the seat of Government play out) her pain was too much and we made the decision to go to the hospital.?We arrived and despite what to me looked like her obvious and manifest suffering there was no sense of urgency among the staff.?She was unable to talk normally because of the pain.?During this time she was examined in exactly the same way as, in my opinion, a person not in pain would have been, including a particularly brutal COVID test that had her bleeding from her nose.?There was some consideration of sending us back home but eventually it was decided that we could stay (something that in retrospect seems extraordinary to even have been in question given how much pain and distress my wife was in).

It was some four hours later, I believe, that she received pain relief.?I tried to advocate for her, in some ways using my privilege as a white man.?I made friends with a senior doctor there, a fellow white man of around my age that I was easily able to connect with.?He helped but he was not in charge of our case.?I did not shout at the staff perhaps as much as I should.?This is partly because I’m socialised not to complain and partly because I know that complaining can be counterproductive and one should always be cautious when berating those upon whom one ultimately depends.

It turned out that my wife had a placental abruption which is associated with very painful labour and dangers and significant distress for the baby.?

Again, this is a sample of one.?Hospitals are different, doctors and medical staff are different.?It would be foolish to read too much into my comparative experience.

None the less, I strongly suspect that my black wife received different treatment to my white ex-wife.?I believe she was not listened to the same way when she said how she felt.?I believe her pain was seen as somehow less important.?And I believe her views were considered less relevant.?I cannot prove that categorically but I can say categorically that this was how it appeared to me.?

I look back and wonder what I might have done differently.?Ultimately I suppose things worked out well.?Maybe I should be grateful, particularly because I am sure that the medical staff at the hospital handled the far from trivial job of assuring the safety of my wife and son despite the placental abruption most professionally and expertly.?But I cannot bring myself to let that lead me to ignore that my wife may have received lesser care because of racism.

There is a whole discussion here about inequality and racism in health systems.?I defer to others more expert on that except to say that as someone who has been the father to children born to a white mother in New York and London, and to a child born to a black mother in New York, well, yes, what people say about inequality and racism in health systems does look to be true to me.

To be clear, at the end of these three experiences I held three healthy, beautiful babies.?There is a huge element of all’s well that ends well.?And there are many other factors that could have influenced the ways in which these experiences played out.?But the difference sits uneasily with me still.

The Seymour “curse” - fathering girls v fathering a boy

I am perhaps about to do more soul baring than is comfortable for me and perhaps comfortable for others.?I see no way to communicate this observation without it.?I realise that to many I present as a typical British man and such soul-baring is most definitely not conforming with stereotypes.?But I am also a Jewish man and we are far less repressed about such things.?Dissecting and ruminating over whatever collection of assorted angst we happen to carry around with us is one of our favourite pastimes.

I want to talk here not about the ways in which I, like I suspect almost everyone, am socialised to believe in various assorted gender norms that might cause me to treat my daughters differently to my son.?These are indeed relevant and might include how I react to them hurting themselves, the way I talk when they behave badly and so on.?I like to think I have done quite a good job of parenting without being overly gendered in the values and beliefs I have passed to my daughters but perhaps I am not the best judge of that and they should ultimately be the ones to say how well I did or didn’t do.?One day my son will be able to do the same.

Instead I am talking about something else, something related but different which is a little darker and a more uncomfortable.

The Seymour “curse” is my name (and mine alone) for what I think of as the intergenerational legacy of violence passed down from to me.?I have speculated that it has at least its seeds in a number of generations back. That may be unfair of me. I will probably never know.

It is a way of thinking, a fluency of anger as a response to perceived threat but also sleights, and an equating of anger with violence.?I do not mean to imply anything necessarily particularly extraordinary.?This is a normal element of understood masculinity for many if not most men, and it takes only a brief perusal of the news to find one of the incessant stories of its expression from road rage to bar brawls and so on.?In the case of my family it was perhaps exacerbated by certain experiences my grandfather had in World War II, perhaps by my father’s struggles coming to terms with his sexuality (something that would, in my view, ultimately kill him as one of the first victims of AIDS in the U.K.), but again I would not claim that there is anything particularly extraordinary in my experience.?Sadly I imagine the majority of men could tell a similar story of the masculine dynamics of their family.

For me to pass on the “curse” I would need to impart to my children that undercurrent of anger, grievance and recourse to violence, something which I have worked hard to reject and which I would of course hope would be alien to my children so that they would not even think of it in the first place.?But knowing that was not the same as being confident that I could actually do it.

That is in large part why in my early twenties I remember fearing parenthood.?I worried I would pass my various failings to my children, the Seymour curse included.?Absent confidence that I wouldn’t it seemed wiser to avoid the risk altogether.?What changed my mind was meeting a woman I was confident would be a good enough mother to compensate.

It turned out, I like to think, that she didn’t need to.?But I also have to wonder whether that was because my first children were girls.?With my daughters I rarely felt the Seymour curse lurking in the background.?There was no nagging part of me insisting that they should learn to protect themselves by reacting hard, fast, first and aggressively to threat or insult.?It was almost easy.?I was confident that not only had I successfully suppressed the Seymour curse in myself but, even better, it could die with me.

And now I have my son.?I feel that little tug.?The flash of shameful anger when this tiny baby defies me.?The urge to ensure he is tough, strong, able to dominate and impose himself.?I know intellectually that both are wrong but I feel it none the less.?At least, I tell myself, I recognise it, and that this is surely a prerequisite for managing it.?And I am confident that his mother is more than capable of not only protecting him from the worst I could offer and more than compensating for where I may fall short, but also letting me know when I need to do better.?She is a love machine.?Cai is very lucky.

I have a vague recollection of a conflict with my father when I was small.?I must have been about five because I know my sister must have been about two.?We were on the upstairs landing of the house my sister and I grew up in in the suburbs of South London.?I had, as so often happened, offended my father somehow (I do not recall how) and he was preparing, as also often happened, to discipline me, which is a euphemism for hitting me.?I remember this in the way of many old memories, unsure of whether this is the memory itself or rather the recollection of a recollection.?

My diminutive two year old sister had come to rescue me. She held in her hand a piece of buttered bread with jam on it.?She threatened my father that if he did not leave me alone she would throw her bread and jam onto the carpet, something she knew to be one of the great transgressions of our household’s strange fixation on cleanliness demanded rather than practised (I remember a lot of talking about how it important it was that everything was tidy but not that we were as a family very successful at it).?And this two-year old defender of her older brother prevailed and my father relented.

I share this not because it is maybe an interesting story, nor because I realise I should more often remember my sister’s bravery and support, nor even as some anecdote to somehow lay claim to a tough childhood.?Rather I find this episode to be one that confirms my instincts as to the gendered dynamics I grew up with.

The salient point here, which I suspect most will already have identified, is that my father treated me differently to my sister in a way that conformed closely to the concepts of masculinity he had been raised with.?A central consequence of this was that violence was appropriate for me (a boy) and not my sister (a girl).?As a general rule he hit me and he didn’t hit her.?And that is why a two year old girl could defy him safely and save me from a punishment she herself would not have been subject to.

I am neither inclined nor interested in dwelling overly on my father.?Suffice to say that he, like many fathers before and after him, burst with love for his children.?But importantly that was never incompatible with this perpetual pedal note of violence and aggression.

And now here I am, hearing that pedal note again as the new father to a son.

Interestingly, both for my father and with me this has never been an impediment to affection.?I can kiss and hug and coddle my boy with the best of them.?This is not an issue of emotional constipation.?

Rather, my point here is to observe that for fathers who were raised similarly to me and had a similar relationship with their fathers as mine (of whom I suspect there are many) it is possible, perhaps probable, that fathering a boy will be profoundly different to fathering a girl specifically in terms of the risks of passing on those elements of toxic masculinity that we ourselves inherited.?We need to be aware of that if we are to be alive to it.?And may it end with us.

I have met fathers I suspect may be unknowingly in the same boat.?I see them proudly talking about how manly their little boy is, how strong he can grip or run or even hit, and also talking about the importance of discipline and the imperative of smacking/ spanking/ hitting/ assaulting because that is what they experienced as a child and they are convinced it is the right way, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge all the evidence and even the simple logic that hitting children is no more acceptable than hitting anyone else, that it is pointless, destructive, unhealthy and cruel to bring violence into the way a parent interacts with their child.?I wish I knew a productive way to talk to them but I have found that I don’t.?It’s one of the symptoms of our illness that we reject being told we are doing something wrong.

I suspect the only way men with my condition learn is to hear about it from other men similarly afflicted.?I am admiring of work by men to address these things with other men, things like Robert Webb’s “How Not to Be a Boy” or Idles’ “Joy as an Act of Resistance”.?We need more of this.?I wonder whether we also need more understanding.?It is not fun to be like this.?Maybe we are more damaged than toxic, and that would seem to imply a different way of dealing with us.

As Cai and I grow together I will need to find ways to manage this. It would be foolish to claim to have my plans formed for how I will firewall him from the worst of me when he is 5 or 10 or 15. I don't know. I just know that I will do whatever I can.

Incidentally, I know that many mothers will tell you that there is such a thing as toxic femininity, that men do not have a monopoly on messing up their same sex offspring and that every mother needs to avoid passing certain things on to her daughters.?That may be true, and I have read, in an effort to understand the situation of women I have been close to, compelling work that suggests this is indeed the case.?But I will not go further into this beyond saying that all of us who care about the women in our lives might benefit from educating ourselves on an issue which perhaps merits more open discussion.

Black child versus white child

I have had the mixed pleasure of living in the United States for some time now.?I mean that quite honestly.?I realise that sometimes “mixed pleasure” is snarky code for “no pleasure at all”.?That is not my intent.?There are many wonderful things about the United States and its people.

I am not American.?My wife points out that I am in fact studiously “not-American”.?Despite living in the US for a long time my accent remains more or less the same as it always was.?I will continue to point out that there is an “h” at the beginning of “herb” and have for many years now waged a one-man losing battle against American pronunciation of words, occasionally shouting “schedule!” the right way at the television when provoked.?I religiously follow the fortunes of my local childhood football team form South London.?I read UK news from UK news outlets rather than US news or US news outlets.?My cupboard is never without Marmite.?I refuse to start my day without tea.?And no amount of cajoling by American dentists has convinced me to straighten my teeth.

Technically the US is my “host country” as an international civil servant.?But that does not do justice to the intimacy of my relationship with the United States.?While I remain steadfastly and determinedly more Brit than anything else, it is still the case that I have spent almost a third of my life in New York.?In fact more or my adult life has been spent in the US than anywhere else.?What’s more, my wife and two of my children have US citizenship.?I have skin in the American game now.?

While I can happily talk about all the positives of this country, I struggle to find positives in its race dynamics.?I am a white man, again in the sense I explained before.?My own sense of my identity and the way I have been and continue to be treated are significantly influenced by the concepts of whiteness around me.?Yes, I am Jewish and in South London in the 1970s that made me part of a small minority and anti-semitism was a very real part of my growing up.?I need no educating on the experience of discrimination. But that is a different thing to the experience of people considered ?black by American society.

I have tried, for obvious reasons, to understand this cultural construct of race as best I can.?One of the things that I have done, naturally, is compare and contrast my own experience of anti-semitism, and I see important differences.?I find it interesting that at school I saw what feels to me like examples of those differences.?For example, I remember a boy of Caribbean descent who had come to my school and had a very hard time since while we had a lot of students of South Asian descent and that was familiar and unremarkable we did not have many students of Afro-Caribbean descent.?I recall our history teacher shouting “shut up you overgrown Mars Bar” at him.?And that teacher was rewarded with laughter from around the classroom.?This was not an unusual occurrence.?I remember at least that at the time I did not laugh.?

I would distinguish this from the antisemitism of that time and place.?I remember my German teacher (and why did it have to be German of all subjects) teaching us to count with a game involving passing money back and forth and her making the joke, after one boy’s successful German-language accounting, that “of course if it had been Seymour’s ancestors they’d have charged interest and you’d be wrong”.?Cue that laughter again.

I raise this because to me it instructive to compare how teachers would abuse me as a Jew compared to a black boy.?It reveals something about the specificities of that discrimination and prejudice.?As a Jew I was untrustworthy, avaricious, an object of suspicion to be kept at arm’s length or perhaps made timid and harmless through violence.?As a young black man my fellow student could be ridiculed, made lesser, compared to a 5 pence chocolate bar.?He was devalued.?If I was to be mistrusted, his dignity was to be discounted, someone of lesser value whose treatment should not be judged against the same metrics as white boys.?

This is not my entry into the discrimination Olympics.?But just because all discrimination is bad it does not follow that all discrimination is the same.?Just like all violence is bad, assaults and injuries vary, and we need to understand that if we are to prevent and respond.

My son Cai is a Muslim, Catholic Jew with African, Celtic, Eastern European and other heritage and U.K., French and US nationalities.?My bisexual daughter insists he will be gay.?Who knows.

But in the US he is, or at least will be, “black”.?Everything else is secondary.?

This is not an essay on the race dynamics of the United States.?As the father of a boy who is considered black here I have done my best to educate myself.?I’ve worked really hard in fact.?I find the discourse frustrating.?I am a believer in ideas of solidarity over identity politics.?Even more frustratingly I find the way that American cultural hegemony drives a belief that American race dynamics are universal infuriating.?I don’t believe they are.?But I am no expert.?If you want to understand better ask my wife, not me, who, if you are very lucky, will explain as patiently to you as she has to me.

What I can say is that I do not wish for my son to grow up in an environment like this.?It would be undesirable enough no matter the racial designation imposed upon him, now that my eyes are more opened to it.?But it is even more unthinkable given that he is viewed here as black.?My wife and I are clear that when we can we will leave to do our best to ensure that Cai does not grow up in a toxic racial space.?That is not to say that there is some post-racial Nirvana we can escape to.?But we feel as his parents that there are places better than here and we owe him a childhood in one of those better places given that we have the privilege of offering one.

What exactly am I concerned about protecting Cai from??One obvious concern is violence.?But it is not just that black boys in particularly are subjected to violence from police and others, although they are.?Nor that by every indicator he is statistically probably going to be disadvantaged in educational outcomes, employment and more.?

Rather it’s the psychic toll of being perpetually othered and made to feel lesser.?That being othered is everywhere and incessant here as in many other places.?This society seems to me to be what I call “caucasonormative”.?What I mean is “white” is the norm and “black” is the other.?Consider for a moment what happens when you accidentally cut your finger while sealing an envelope.?You get a sticking plaster.?A skin toned sticking plaster.?Except for Cai what is called skin tone is not his skin tone.?It’s someone else’s skin tone.?“Skin” does not mean his skin.?

Consider also my little brother, my wife’s (much) younger brother’s terror when confronted by police.?He is black and was 15 when we were in our new car and my wife was driving.?The headlight controls were unfamiliar to her and she inadvertently left them off, resulting in a local policeman stopping us to tell her to turn them on.

My wife is far more cautious with police than I am.?I should say the police officer was courteous and didn’t do anything wrong.?But when he asked for her licence she still made sure to check with him if she could reach for it in her bag and did so with her hands as visible as possible.?She was cool and calm but I know her well enough to realise she felt a very real potential threat even of deadly violence.

My little brother on the other hand was terrified.?When the police lights flashed behind us he became immediately panicked and agitated.?And it’s not unreasonable that he did.?He was in upstate New York in a predominantly white and rural area and he is well aware of what can happen to young men who look like him at the hands of the police.?Sat beside him were my two white daughters of a similar age who were not concerned in the slightest.?Their lives have taught them that as young white women growing up mainly in New York State people in positions of authority treat them respectfully and appropriately.?That is not my little brother’s experience.?In fact this was a shock and informative to my daughters who could see that aspect of their privilege highlighted in front of them.?

As an aside of course my daughters face discrimination that my brother as a young man does not, including the relentless sexual harassment that seems endemic to Manhattan and Brooklyn.?They have grown up in exciting places and I like to think Manhattan and Brooklyn’s extraordinary levels of cat calling and casual misogyny (I recently counted that I have visited over 70 countries and I would say the street behaviour towards young women in Manhattan and Brooklyn is among the worst I’ve seen) are outweighed by the opportunities and positive experiences it offers.

As another aside my wife and I of course experience racism in the form of people who object to a white man and black woman being partners.?What I had not anticipated is that the abuse and antipathy we experience, which to be fair is not that frequent but still happens, comes mainly from white women who are upset with me and black men who are upset with her.?White women let me know they are disappointed and advise me, sometimes angrily and assertively, that I could find myself a by-definition superior white woman and so why would I settle for a woman like my wife (I am fortunate that my wife is not only better looking than me but also a graduate of Harvard and Columbia universities and has a very respectable job in the United Nations so it takes a remarkably cock-eyed perspective to conclude that she’s the one who’s sold herself short).?Black men are upset with her for her betrayal, and sometimes call her the names men seem to think most hurtful to women that imply she is promiscuous (as if promiscuous is the worst thing for a woman to be).??There have been black men who have directed their anger briefly at me but it has been brief, and the comments have been about what they would do to my wife, not me.

These are not things Cai or any child should see.?We do not want him to internalise these attitudes and behaviours or come to think they reflect on his family or him.

I could go on.?But the reality is that we have concluded that this is a place that is not good for him.?So we will take him to somewhere else that is at least better.?

COVID

Of course having a baby during COVID was very different.?But at the same time it wasn’t that different in that we had the privilege of access to quality healthcare, reliable services and the advantages of being able to pay for what we needed as I had had with my daughters.?That is vastly more defining than the inconveniences of COVID.

None the less, those inconveniences were real.?My wife being COVID tested during labour was not enjoyable.?That Cai’s first sight of his parents was of forehead, eyes and mask felt profoundly wrong.?Wearing a mask when heavily pregnant is no fun either, but ultimately bearable I am informed.?

Counterbalancing that was that when COVID hit I had a job which allowed working from home.?That removed the need to commute and allowed me to, for example, make all the meals and so on in the run up to the birth.?Overall I cannot say that child birth during COVID was on balance that much more difficult because of it, but it there were significant challenges: family could not be with us, I could not attend pre-natal visits and there was a perpetual risk that if I contracted COVID my wife might end up giving birth alone.

However, what COVID has unambiguously done is robbed us, and most importantly Cai, of normal early childhood interaction.?COVID vaccination came when he was about four months old.?But until then he needed to be protected. ?Various paediatricians were emphatic that Cai catching COVID was potentially extremely dangerous for him.?

My daughters came into the world surrounded by people.?Friends and relatives visited and somewhere, like most other parents I imagine, I have picture after picture of smiling people cradling my sleeping baby daughters in their arms.?They were relentlessly kissed, cuddled and cooed at by an army of people other than me and their mother.

Cai was not.?Our paediatricians advice was that no one who had not quarantined should be near him and that is a lot to ask.?Painfully his own sisters, grandmothers and uncles could not freely see him.

It is hard to know what the implications of all that will be for Cai.?He is a relatively happy boy and amazingly social.?He seems to be able to recognise and respond to a smile through a mask, perhaps reading the eyes??He doesn’t look like his social development has been impeded.?I wonder whether it’s ideal not to be exposed to whatever immune-system-stimulating germs a baby normally would be but I am not in the least bit qualified to say.?He seems healthy.

He is of course completely unaware of any of this being out of the ordinary.?His mother as a first time parent is monomaniacally preoccupied with him in the way only new parents can be and I’m not sure has the space to worry about such things and that is a good thing.?Our world of three never was and never will be short of love or attention for Cai.?But for me I do feel a great sadness that somehow this time it has been an infancy played out on a smaller stage.?I miss all those people and the social scaffolding of a newborn’s arrival.?Perhaps I can compare it to a wedding.?You would be no less married without anyone there to witness it and celebrate it.?But it makes a difference.?

In the grand scheme of things this is a smaller loss than many suffered as a result of this pandemic.?That makes me feel it no less acutely.?Perhaps it is more my issue than Cai’s.?

Parental leave and going back to work

As a manager I have had a number of women in my teams who have become mothers and taken maternity leave.?In the past the organisations I’ve worked in have offered women four months of paid maternity leave.?That is also what my ex-wife was afforded.

Those four months are of course more than many mothers or even most mothers get.?But I have still always thought that it must none the less feel hopelessly inadequate, and that handing over a four month old child to the care of another person upon return to work could only be wrenching and terrible.?While it has never been within my authority to extend paid maternity leave I have always given the mothers in my team up to a year off with their job safe.?That’s not as trivial as it might sound since it generally means either I have to find money to replace them for that time, ask others to take on their work, take on their work myself or convince my boss to accept that my team will not do things she’s used to us doing (almost all my bosses in my career have been female).?But I have always believed that should a mother wish to spend more time away from work to be with their child that I have no right to pull them back to work.

In the case of my daughters, my ex-wife ended up taking most of two years away from full-time work.?This was vastly easier because we were in Viêt Nam where costs were much lower and our household could comfortably function on my salary alone.?I don’t know that this would have been possible in New York.?

None the less, she, and my daughters, benefitted from her being there for a long time.?I think it was wonderful and a massive opportunity that few people get and I am pleased for her and them.?

As for me, I had with my daughters the four weeks paternity leave that my organisation offered fathers.?In other words, I was there for a month and then back to work.?Four weeks of course passes in a blink.?In the case of my second daughter a Caesarean section meant that the second time?around I also had her bed-ridden mother to look after.?It was a lot of work.?As any parent knows, the first few weeks back home are really more a shock than anything else in the sense that it’s when the baby is at its most demanding and you are at your most depleted.??It is less a precious time and more like one of those reality TV shows where the unsuspecting and ill-equipped are dropped into a jungle or some other hostile environment to demonstrate their inability to cope.

And so after four weeks of sleep deprivation, vomit and baby excrement it was back to the office.

It feels ungracious to complain that this is not enough.?Four weeks is more than most fathers expect or get.?But surely that is indeed not enough.

By contrast, with Cai I found myself with an employer which had recently amended its parental leave policy to allow me four months paternity leave.?To this I added two months of accumulated annual leave making six months of de facto paternity leave.?

It is hard to describe just how different this is.?I have thought long and hard about it and have tried to discern the main impacts.?

In my kind of work, there’s a massive qualitative difference between being away from work for a short period of time where people don’t adapt to your absence and being away so long that they have to.?Six months is very much in the latter category and it basically means you can, if you choose, truly detach and turn your attention elsewhere.?

I should also add to my list good fortune a boss and colleagues who respected my parental leave completely.?I was allowed to devote myself completely to my son and my wife has only had to chide me a handful of times when I’ve let myself be sucked into work emails.

This ability to give my time, focus and energies completely to our team of three as we have navigated our first half year has been different.?With my daughters I knew I would be back to work soon and never really surrendered all my attention.?It was like I was throwing myself into short-term duties knowing that at the same time I would need to prepare to return to my usual duties before too long.?In the case of my oldest daughter I was starting a new job in a new country immediately after my paternity leave ended, with all the preparatory reading and invitations to meetings I ought not to miss to help me get up to speed.?I do not recall being so present for my daughters even when I was there because work was never truly absent from my thoughts.?I don’t feel like I did any less in the first four weeks of any of my children’s lives.?If anything the combination of a caesarean birth and breastfeeding issues I suspect meant I worked hardest with my youngest daughter of all my three children.?But there was a difference in terms of how it felt, like I always knew I would ultimately go back to my day job.?

That is not to say that going back to work means you never do anything again in terms of child care.?I certainly did.?For example, I put my oldest daughter to bed every night with stories and songs until she was almost two, something that took a long time given that as a new father I could not bear the thought of leaving her crying (subsequent children kicked that sensibility out of me).?I would do the story, sing songs, carry her in some sort of dance/ shuffle/ step in endless circles around the bedroom, then, once she had finally fallen asleep in my arms, deposit her into her bed like an unusually volatile and fully-armed nuclear warhead and creep backwards like a regretful ninja to the bedroom door which I would open so slowly that its angular movement could only be registered by specialist scientific equipment and gradually open the door (having repurposed said specialist scientific equipment to now register the smallest changes in the angle of the door relative to its frame) at which point through some diabolical baby sorcery Ella, who had until then been the picture of a comatose infant, would decide that she was not done with me, start screaming again and summon me back to begin the whole process once more.

So yes, it is not as if I went back to work and from then on upon returning from the office I placed pipe in mouth and slippers on feet and settled into a comfortable chair until bedtime.

But let’s get real.?If you have to begin your commute at 8 and need time to get yourself appropriately washed, shaved, dressed and fed before that, it is a challenge to build in time to do much by way of child care in the morning.?And if you return at 6.30 or 7 in the evening and your child’s bedtime is 8 or so, how much can you honestly do even with the best will in the world??That leaves the period during which the baby is largely (hopefully) asleep. ?And yes you can help at night although during any period where babies are exclusively breast fed your value is necessarily somewhat limited.

My point is, let’s not pretend that going back to work doesn’t effectively torpedo your ability to be somehow equally engaged in child care compared to a parent who is not working.?And let’s be equally clear that the decrease in your engagement means an increased burden of care for the other parent unless you have the resources to hand this burden over to paid caregivers.

Longer parental leave means that I have been a fully dedicated member of team Cai not only through those first four weeks but also through many more stages of development occurring within the first six months.?With that comes a vastly better appreciation of what looking after him actually entails.?During the first four weeks babies have certain demands but, even if Cai was on the more awake end of the spectrum, they really care mainly about eating, expelling waste and sleeping.?You don’t need to do that much with them.?They don’t get bored so easily.?But at five plus months Cai became a beautiful, wonderful, tyrant – the most gorgeous one who melts my heart incessantly, but no less a tyrant for it.?He remains exhausting in a wonderful, special and simultaneously devastating way, an explosion of things that knock you off your feet every time you think you’ve managed to stand up.?He wants to see everything, feel it and usually stick it in his mouth.?He is relentless.?There is no point at which he seems to decide that he has explored enough and wants to sit quietly and have a think.?He resists sleep, seemingly looking around as if he is worried he is about to miss something if he closes his eyes.?It is profoundly draining for all that it is deeply joyful.?I suspect I am saying nothing unique to Cai, and I would likely say exactly the same things about Ella and Jessica had I not had much shorter paternity leave.

Had I gone back to work after four weeks I would not, for example, have had the experience of looking after Cai on my own when he was older and more active while my wife went to a medical appointment or to get her hair done.?These spells of solo childcare with Cai of two to five hours or so have left me with no illusions whatsoever about what my wife deals with now I am back at work and she is still on leave.?When she is gone a long time I want nothing more upon her return than to hand him to her and go to lie down in a darkened room.

Another difference is that longer parental leave allows for the establishment of more routines and routines are the skeleton of a baby’s day and life.?This is less apparent in the first four weeks and so I really have no recollection of having any real routines with my daughters aside from bedtime routines.?But with Cai we have all sorts of little routines I am part of.?For example, in the morning I have had a routine of taking Cai around the house and we check everything is still as we left it together (for example, we make sure the back garden is still there through all the different windows at the back of the house).?We have had a daytime nap routine where I take him in the front carrier, place a tea towel over his head and essentially hop around for two hours to keep him asleep.?For a little while we had a routine of an afternoon walk in the pram.?And every night we have had the routine of his bedtime story and lullabies.?Of these things are early childhood made.?My longer parental leave has made this possible in ways that shorter parental leave did not.

Naturally, four hands are better than two when caring for a child.?I will not say that longer parental leave has made me better able to support my wife.?We support each other and we support Cai.?She is understandably concerned about how she will manage on her own with me back in the office.?He demands so much energy.?And then there is the practical needs one has to somehow try to eat and use the toilet or scratch or exercise or whatever, all things that aren’t possible with a baby like Cai who seems to have a limitless appetite for interaction and distraction.?How do you do these without a partner to hand off to??So there is clearly a huge benefit to all three of us just from having team Cai made up of three members all day (including two with enough dexterity to grab hold of an object and then place it gently where it should be without either licking or throwing it, and I leave you to guess which two).?Cai gets more attention from two less exhausted and frazzled adults who love him.?And let’s also be honest that displays of affection come more easily when one has not just been yelled at relentlessly for an hour then vomited and urinated on, so I have no doubt Cai gets better versions of us when we are able to share the work.

Lastly I want to turn to a final two observations that are a little painful.?They are painful in the sense that they highlight things for me that have been possible for Cai as a direct consequence of longer paternity leave that I know were not possible for my daughters.?And by extension these are things that I realise are not possible for most children.?I find that tremendously sad.?

So let me start then with what I think of as “parent one, parent two” syndrome.?It is clearly a social norm that mothers are thought of as parent one, and fathers as secondary parents.?If you don’t believe me, look at the way societies view families where the father is the caregiver and mother works.?Consider the pressures placed on women to be a certain kind of mother and the far lesser pressures placed on fathers.?Consider the way that courts generally default to maternal care in the event of parental separation.?Or watch television even briefly.?We assume that the primary parent is the mother and that the father, however important, is not as important to the child’s nurturing, or if he is it is as a provider of things or an enabler, not a direct frontline worker.?The dying man on the battlefield calls for his mother, not his father.?Mumsnet has a million users but there is no real equivalent for fathers.?My daughters’ grandfather never changed a nappy in his life despite having three children and he was in no way unusual.?

What’s more, in my experience this is what some people prefer.?Many men have no desire to be a hands-on father.?They prefer to earn the money and leave care work to the mother.?I wonder whether this is because they have been socialised to see earning money as masculine and caring as feminine.?I also wonder if this is really what makes them happy.?I think I can respect that decision and question it at the same time.

It’s also my experience that some women have no interest at all in sharing the primary parental role with a father.?I believe if you look closely you see many telltale signs of this in terms of how mothers mediate their children’s relationships with their fathers.?I also wonder here whether women are socialised to believe that not to be “parent one” and instead to have a child who is raised in a more shared way is somehow a failure of their womanhood.?Again, I respect people’s decisions even if they are not ones I would make.

However, my sense is that more and more fathers and mothers are rejecting this idea.?Certainly my wife has no interest in being parent one and believes in Cai having two equally “proximate” parents.?I know that there is a range of evidence that it is better for children to be raised with more engaged fathers. ?I have had the opportunity to see research, for example, on the positive impacts of fathers being present at their child’s birth or reading to their child.?I don’t know of research on the benefits of more equally engaged fathers and mothers.?It certainly feels like it is better to me, for many of the reasons I have already explained.

If a father goes back to work after a short period while the mother continues as a full-time carer (or vice versa) then parents are robbed of this decision.?And this is not a small thing.?Childhood is inherently formative.?Your experiences during infancy shape you.?If after a few days or weeks your father largely disappears from the scene, reappearing only last thing at night and then at weekends, while your mother remains at your side feeding you, changing your nappy, playing with you and comforting you, then this will surely establish long lasting patterns of thought and behaviour.?Babies are extremely intelligent and very good at what they do.?If we show them through our actions that their mothers are their primary carers and that their fathers are comparatively peripheral then that is not only what they will absorb, it is what they will adapt to.?It is how we will mould them.?And this will shape their lifelong relationships with their parents.?

That is to say, a practice of men going back to work significantly before women hardwires this arrangement of parent one/ parent two.?I personally do not believe that there is anything that can be done, no amount of bedtime stories, accompanying doctors trips or guilt-purchased soft toys that can undo that reality imposed by markedly different parental leave policies, that decision seized from the hands of parents who may wish for something altogether different.

I can attest to this.?It is a very painful thing to say but if I am honest I am “closer” to Cai at six months than I was to my daughters at that age.?I know him better and he knows me better in turn.?He smiles no less blindingly when he sees me than?when he sees his mother.?He turns to me when sad as easily as he does his mother.?When bored he seeks our daddy play as often as he does mummy play.?When scared he wants me no less.?And that was not true of my daughters.?Of course it was not.?To them I was largely not there.

I loved them no less.?I wanted to be with them no less.?But I had no way to maintain the level of closeness I have with Cai because, at that time, work told me I had to return after four weeks whereas their mother was given four months to be with them and managed to extend that to the better part of two years before work fully caught up with her.?I try to understand why it is unreasonable of me to resent that and I find I can’t.?I keep coming back to the idea that this is wrong but inexplicably normal.?

In fact, my experience was that it was only after I separated from their mother and they became teenagers that the relationships with my daughters truly began to repair themselves in this specific sense of my perception of being a secondary parent.?My youngest daughter says she doesn’t remember me being around much when she was small, something I find truly heartbreaking.?But now they spend only a little bit less time with me than their mother and as young adults seek out time with me and my support and advice as readily as they do their mother’s.?They have asked to spend a more equal proportion of their time with me, something which I find deeply touching and which I believe reflects a different way of thinking about me as a parent to that with which they were in effect raised, not deliberately but by circumstance.?I am blessed with a wonderful relationship now with my daughters but it feels like it took work on all our sides to get there given some of the disadvantages of the entrenched dynamics that came from the different situations of their mother and me in their early childhoods.

Finally, I have a speculation.?As I said, I do not love Cai more than I did my daughters, but this paternity leave has meant that I am closer to him at six months than I was with my daughters at a similar age.?As I also said, I believe early childhood experiences to be formative.?So what does this mean for my long-term relationship with Cai versus my long-term relationship with my daughters??Will there always be a greater attachment that comes from this time??Or will these things even out??Or is it impossible to say, life too capricious and serendipitous for these things to determine much?

My guess, for what it is worth, is that this will make a difference perhaps less in terms of how I feel towards Cai and more in terms of how he feels towards me.?Whatever happens from here on out, I believe he is now used to me as an equal parent and that will shape our relationship forever.?He will know what was no less true for my daughters but was necessarily less apparent: that I am always there for him in every way I can be and this will never change.?It will be far harder for him to come to doubt that, far easier to trust in it.?I hope that he will be the better for it.?I know I am.

I suppose we will see.

A plea

Overall, these six months have taught me a great deal and highlighted things that have not always been easy.?My disclaimer stands: everyone’s experience of parenting is unique and just because mine leads me to see things one way it says nothing about the way those with their own experiences may see things.

None the less, when I look around me, and taking into account the experiences I have had, it is very much my conclusion that we are hurting ourselves in the way we view the role of fathers.?By in most cases obliging either directly or indirectly fathers to quickly return to work after a child is born while mothers remain as carers we make life harder for mothers, deprive children of the closer love and care of their fathers and virtually force family dynamics of “parent one/ parent two” which are rapidly if not set in stone then set in something highly durable.

Most importantly, I cannot believe that this is best for children.?In 1924 Eglantyne Jebb, the founder of Save the Children drafted a Declaration of the Rights of the Child which would be adopted by the League of Nations.?She asserted in it that humanity “owes to the Child the best it has to give”.?65 years later similar sentiments were expressed in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.?One of Nelson Mandela’s most memorable quotes is that “there can be no keener revelation of a society‘s soul than the way in which it treats its children”.?I think we all agree that when we decide how to do things that affect children we have a clear duty to do those things in the best interests of those children.?

So let me end with a question.?When we as nations, institutions, businesses, professionals, parents and human beings in general accept an arrangement whereby fatherhood is established in policy and practice as the lesser branch of the parental tree, are we living up to our obligation to do the best by our children??This father’s experience is that we do not.?And when I think about the differences in the ways I have been able to be a father to my different children, this is something that I can celebrate for my son and something which, for my daughters, makes a part of me weep for myself and for them.

I have written these words in snatched moments while Cai has slept or been feeding.?It has taken me some time.?I type this now on an iPad perched on a high piece of furniture with Cai strapped to my chest.?He has just woken up and given me a heart-melting smile.?I defy anyone to see that smile and not devote themselves to him and him only.?I must go now.?