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| Competitive Dad Syndrome |
The staff there were really glad to have a man around and really encouraged the other mums to interact with me. But there are moments of hurt. When R was three months old, Astrid went to Spain on a job; so I looked after him for three weeks on my own.
The day after she got back we went to a party. All the women there immediately talked to Astrid about R. I wanted to tell them how he was eating, wanted to have a row about R, wanted to talk babies basically and no one would enter into a conversation with me. Presumably the assumption was that I knew nothing. Or wasn't interested. The joke was I felt so isolated I spent the party in the front room with all the kids, playing with them. Then, when the party was over, the mums trolled in and rounded up their kids. No one seemed to notice I was there, looking after them. Heigh ho. Ah, poor dads.
Competitive Dad, Baby Bore
No, no, no - you're thinking at this moment - that's not me. Competitive Dad ... Baby Bore ... no, no, not me.
Are you sure?
A couple of years ago, when I was first thinking about writing this blog, I was sitting at my desk one morning, staring out of the window, and vaguely wondering whether I should go down to the kitchen and get a biscuit. (The blogger's life in a nutshell.) Then I spotted a man pushing a pushchair on the other side of the street. The expression on his face was beatific.
He was a proud father and no mistake. I was impressed. How refreshing in these cynical times that a man should feel so enriched by the mere fact of fatherhood. He was a turkey cock of new fathers, displaying his progeny with swollen chest and ruffled feathers. I hadn't seen anyone look so thoroughly pleased with himself in years.
And then I worked it out. The child in the pushchair was turning his head and shouting, 'Daddy! Daddy!' and Daddy wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention. Daddy wasn't proud of his child. Daddy was proud of his child's pushchair. It was one of the first three-wheeler models, big and nasty and expensive, a hot rod of pushchairs, and a precursor of what we now know as ATPs (all-terrain pushchairs).
It had clearly cost him a fortune, and he may have been wondering whether to have go faster stripes stuck on. He was a man with a vehicle. He wanted other men to see him and admire him, he wanted women to fall over him. Who needs a Porsche, when you are piloting the Rolls Royce of pushchairs?
There is something of this man, this sad, sorry tosser, in all of us. He had no real need of an all-terrain pushchair, as he was not planning to propel his toddler across wasteland or open countryside. He lived in suburbia, and rarely walked further than the newsagents. And yet his drive to compete had found a new and unexpected outlet. He knew he was one of the first people to buy one of these things, and that other people would see it and want one too. When I say 'other people' I naturally mean other men.
When you see a woman with heavy shopping irritably pushing an ATP along a high street, you can bet your trousers that a man bought it for her. Most mothers prefer foldaway buggies, which smaller and far more practical, but useless on swamp and tundra. How stubbornly unromantic women are, how limited their horizons. To find out more, you can check out Competitive Dad Syndrome.