Daddy Blog: How Being A Dad Has Changed Me

I have a friend who prides himself on not changing his life in any way when he had a kid.

And I mean in any way. He was adamant that having a baby wouldn’t curb his social life, wouldn’t change his priorities, wouldn’t get in the way of his cycling hobby.

Wake up, mate. Everything changes. Or at least it should.

I’m a dad to two very young kids. I’m not going to be out gallivanting every night when I should be at home participating in bath time chaos and bedtime stories. Nor do I want to.

[Copyright: Yahoo/Adam Sparks]

The thing is, when one (me) becomes two (her), then three and then four (the offspring), in three short years, you can’t put yourself first any more.

First, your good lady wife comes first. Then she, too, is bumped for the mini-mes. That’s just the way it is. The kids are more helpless than any other baby mammal, totally dependent on us, on me, for their survival, their comfort, their every whim.

My mate disagreed.

He’s now divorced.

A lot of the ways in which I’ve changed are obvious: the overwhelming sense of responsibility, the discovery that I can weep like a big girl’s blouse when the occasion demands.

But there’s a whole bunch of things that have surprised me. Some of them are pretty useful life skills to boot.

Like lateral thinking. And dexterity. On the first morning after my daughter was born, I took her downstairs with me when I went to make a cup of tea. Bleary-eyed, I faced a conundrum. How to complete this simple task one-handed and holding the most precious cargo of my life? It was surprisingly taxing; it almost stumped me. Almost.

These days, I laugh in the face of my amateur parenting juggling skills. It’d take more than a teabag, a kettle and a milk jug to flummox me now.

Never mind cups of tea. These days I can take on a herd of llamas and alpacas while carrying the baby [Copyright: Yahoo/Adam Sparks]

Or there’s my poker face. Never before could I have imagined uttering a phrase like ‘winkie pocket’ without cracking a smile. But then, I probably wouldn’t have ever imagined uttering a phrase like that at all.

But when you’ve got a two-year-old, fascinated by the anatomical differences between boys and girls, and who asks a LOT of questions, somehow you can quite easily find yourself in a bizarre conversation where the zipper on your jeans becomes a winkie pocket. Totally innocent. If a little weird.

Or how I actually make a pretty convincing bad cop. I’m forever saying no, stop that, don’t sit on your brother, of course you can’t have an ice lolly for breakfast, it’s not a good idea to take your pants off in public.

I hear myself and think wow, I’ve suddenly turned into a parent. My own parents.

And best of all is the realisation that I no longer give two hoots about other people’s opinions of me. That mate who didn’t let parenthood change him? I know he thinks I’ve let him down, that I’ve neglected his friendship, nay, the brotherhood, now I’m not so readily available for beers.

So be it. My family come first now. And I wouldn’t change that for the world.