Dad Sharing Baby Stories

As men, happily, we have the gift of compartmentalizing different parts of our lives and, indeed, our personalities, so that none of them ever have to meet. In this box over here is Nurturing Dad, who is warm and loving. In the box next door is our old friend from the Equal Opportunities Commission report, Enforcer Dad, and in other boxes are his mates, Entertainer Dad and Useful Dad. And then in the furthest box, just beyond normal vision, is the one no one acknowledges, the one that dare not speak his name: Competitive Dad. 
 

Dad Sharing Baby Stories

We are the sum of our compartments, but each compartment is independent and may rarely have contact with any of the others. What would Nurturing Dad and Competitive Dad talk about? Nurturing Dad loves taking photographs of his baby; Competitive Dad only wants to know what camera he has got. If they met at a party they would stand there holding their glasses of wine for a few seconds and then wander off to talk to someone else. Maybe some of your 83 other sub-personalities - including Eight-Year-Old Boy, sulky Masturbating Teenager and Disgraced Pensioner - could bring them together, but somehow I doubt it.

It is Nurturing Dad who picks up that big hardback parenthood manual, the one with all the color pictures of men with beards massaging pregnant women with foul smelling oils, and reads it seriously, hoping to pick up tips. It is Useful Dad who bought the book in the first place (for his partner, not for himself), and it is Entertainer Dad who will help his small child cut it into tiny pieces in about three years' time. 

Competitive Dad flicks through the pages, idly looking for photos of breasts, until he finds a really good table, or possibly a chart, and then he gets interested. Is his baby advanced for his age? If average babies walk at around a year, Competitive Dad will want to tell his friends that his baby spontaneously broke into a sprint at eight and a half months. It varies. 

I have a Competitive Dad friend who rings up mainly to tell me how clever his children are. As I tend to stop listening, I can't give you many details, but I do have a mental picture of them in their local library, the four-year-old translating Socratic dialogues for fun while the older boy moves the books from shelf to shelf because he has thought up something more efficient and elegant than the Dewey decimal system.

But who am I to talk? This morning I took my boy up to the road so he could do his favorite thing of the moment, viz. point at lorries and diggers and cars and shout 'Lorry!' or 'Digger!' or 'Car!' as appropriate. Then suddenly he shouted 'Grandma's car!' Speeding past was the same make and model of car as the one my mum has, but in a different color. I hadn't recognized it, but he had, and he isn't even two. 

As I write this story down an hour or so later, it now seems amazingly pathetic, but the four people I told in the meantime all responded brightly and indulgently, as though this was a genuinely impressive achievement. And the half dozen or more people I will tell in the pub this evening may react similarly, before racing off to take urgent phone calls. To find out more, you can check out Dad Sharing Baby Stories.