Fatherhood is often considered secondary to motherhood due to the lack of an immediate bond that comes from the 10-month period of gestation that bonds mother to child. Men often have to fight for that bond to be nurtured to facilitate an equal level of attachment.
For me it was so. When I first learnt I was having a child I was ecstatic. A few years earlier I had caught the baby fever bug, and my biological clock had started to ring within my ear. My first thought was for a girl. Early exposure to books and the fact I saw my mom as a giant, predisposed me into being a girl dad. I had no qualms about the cosmic karma many men felt was retribution upon them in the form of a girl child so they could feel the same fear and anxiety that others felt when they heard their daughter was dating them.
Talie is a December born, like many in the family (on either side), just a day after my maternal grandma so I had time to spend with her over the Christmas break before my meager 5 days of paternity leave, which I later supplemented with five days of special leave to make it 10.
The abject travesty of such a situation, 5 days of paternity leave by a nation that will later bemoan the lack of fathers in the household or the fact that women tend to do it alone. If we see the need and desire for the village of yesteryear in order for us to realize the values, mores and traditions we firmly believed made a difference why have we ignored remedies? Governments have often been accused of adopting wholesale policies from metropolitan countries with nary a care as to how they’d work down here. This seems like a perfect social policy to adopt, albeit, with the requisite safeguards for us to adapt to ensure we don’t overburden the purse.
Whilst wallowing in the knowledge of ten days and trying diligently to usurp my wife as the #1 parent from the get-go tragedy struck in the form of covid-19. My sniffles and cold turned into an ambiguous then positive test for covid and off I went into quiet seclusion for 2 weeks of
quarantine where I was alone with my thoughts and longings for both wife and baby. My love for books, unusually strong Flow wifi and available friends and family helped me through those testing periods.
Then finally sweet freedom and quarantine was done but alas the damage was done, mommy was firmly number one and daddy was a bit of a stranger. It was perhaps the most trying period in my life. Scratch out perhaps. The tension was palpable and cold. I was now a stranger who tried to come between her and mommy, a third trying to mash up their pair bond. On reflection I understand how she must have felt, you disappear and now you come back full of importance expecting to take your spot? To the back of the line I went whilst I tried to assess it all.
That came in an unexpected avenue via Angel Caglin and the teacher-led innovation project she helmed via the ministry where I explored it all under the larger heading of creating locally relevant picture books and wrote a heartfelt and intense picture book about those experiences. And alongside that self-examination Talie and I moved from cold to lukewarm to her best friend when mommy is not around or busy to “aa, mommy jealous.”
I can safely say that the joy I felt when I first held her has only magnified 100 times more now even when she emphatically declares that she’s not my friend, I cherish these moments that the worst thing she can think of is that, because it is so far removed from when she wanted nothing to do with me at all. The only question left to answer is whether fatherhood is still secondary to motherhood? That as they say is for another show.