The Trials and Tribulations of a Stay at Home Dad

On my first day as a stay at home Dad, I felt like an impostor. I’d spent years watching my wife make bringing up little people look easy; from her boundless patience to her never-ending supply of rainy day games, I was sure I was a painter and decorator to her Picasso.

Still, it was the first day of the summer holidays, and uncharacteristically sunny (a uniquely Scottish sentence, if ever there was one), so I resolved to make my first day with my two girls a good one. Infused with a heady combination of hope and desperation, I ushered them out of the house towards a local ice cream parlour. Their excitement was palpable; I began to suspect that they too had been nervous about the prospect of their charmingly grumpy father being in charge all week, but the ice cream and sunshine soon had them laughing and generally enjoying their day.

Nailed it, I thought, which would turn out to be a level of optimism Hillary Clinton would have found distasteful. The first jarring comment I got was from an otherwise innocuous wee old lady, who had previously been attacking her ice cream with a kind of slurpy passion that suggested that she considered this to be, at least probably, her last day on earth.

“Did your dad do your hair today sweetheart?” she asked my toddler. “Poor wee thing. Your mum’ll fix it.” Notwithstanding the fact that she completely bypassed me to offer her withering critique of my bobble application directly to a child who understood, maybe, 12 words total, I was most taken aback by the level of presumption. I shook it off, we all know how old people’s decorum firewall seems to suffer from a lack of critical updates, and concentrated fully on the kids. (That’s not completely true. I did offer her one of those peculiarly British half smiles that seem to act as a substitute for social skills in those situations where people leave you off balance.)

The day went downhill after that. Like one of those diddy teams who go a goal up against Barcelona, I had merely tempted fate. My eldest, 7 years old and sporting a Sheena Eastonesque transatlantic accent due to her excessive YouTube toy video consumption, began to complain about the prospect of the long walk home. No longer incentivised by ice cream, she decided it was time to begin testing my boundaries; a dance, I am unhappy to report, we are still tapping out a year later.

My little one, perhaps picking up on the addition of tension to the ice cream parlour’s ambience, probably pooped. I say probably as, upon inspection, there seemed a real possibility that her nappy had been stolen, soiled and returned to her by a 50-year-old alcoholic who had recently consumed a Chicken Jalfrezi, but this is just a theory.

Frankly, after almost a year in the job, things haven’t changed much. My wife is still appreciably better at parenting, although I have improved. I’ve managed to regiment my days so the kids are fed, entertained, and educated, and our home is cleaned, air freshened, and tidied like clockwork. I take a lot more pleasure in simple things. Knowing my eldest had a good day at school, for example. Seeing her walk out into the playground at the end of the day chattering incessantly to a pal fills me with joy (although I’m careful not to show it, because that would be “like, cringe, Dad”).

Hearing my little one add new words to her vocabulary every day is a delight. Being there to observe her becoming an actual real person is increasingly important to me, and I’ve come to regret all the outsourced parenting we paid for first time round. All the moments we missed out on while stuck in a grey office skip in front of my mind’s eye like one of those movie flashback sequences, minus the sex and violence (by and large).

Sure, we have less money, and that’s from a starting position of not being that affluent in the first place. But I read once that two of the biggest regrets of the dying are that they didn’t spend enough time with their kids and that they should have worked less (incidentally, another one of these is that not enough sex was had, which, given the inclusion of working too hard on the list, suggests no one was polling prostitutes). I’m getting to do both these things. I don’t miss office politics and scrambling around for days off for in service days and countless school holidays. I get more sense of achievement from having two contented, happy kids than I ever did from paid work, and despite the household budget being a bit tighter, I don’t think I’m going to regret a single, exhausting, challenging minute with the kids.

I still, however, can’t do a bobble. So maybe that old lady had a point.