I enjoyed reading this book as I was in the final month before our second daughter arrived. It was a good chance to sit back and reflect on the whirlwind that has been the first three years of my daughter’s life. Now that she’s three, parenting has definitely challenged me, so it was great to read Kevin Maguire’s account of a dad many years ahead of me. Kevin is also someone I’ve gotten to know through writing and sharing online over the past many years. His journey has been similar to mine in becoming a node in a network of people across the world who feel permission to share and talk about such a vulnerable topic as fatherhood:
I committed to writing once a week and seeing where it led. If nobody read it, that would be fine. Still, I’d do it for a year. What happened soon after stunned me: emails flooding in from fathers around the world, each one carrying a similar message: “I thought I was the only one.” Men I’d never met wrote paragraphs that could have been pulled from my own diary. Fathers from different continents, cultures, and backgrounds all described the same feelings of disconnection, despair, and the crushing guilt that came with it.
I specifically loved this idea of “the tunnel.” The last year has been a lot more challenging than expected as we have been in the thick of helping a toddler adjust to increasing awareness and emotions.
Martin, a FOK and close friend, once introduced me to the idea of the Tunnel—a place where all parents reside while their children are under five. Dads in the Tunnel can cycle through bliss and despair on a turnaround that would give nonparents whiplash. I’d never suggest wishing those early years away, but know that once you’re out the other side, it will be different. It won’t be any easier, but the problems shift to demanding more of your mind than the early years demanded of your body.
Alas, if you are looking for a reason I’ve been writing less, it’s because I’m in the tunnel.
More highlights
All those years spent building walls between yourself and the world? Now you’ve got to tear them down, for you and your kids. If you’re heading into fatherhood unaware of the emotional turbulence to come, then buckle up, buddy, because this ride is gonna get bumpy as hell.
I’d done what dads had always done, ad infinitum: Go to work, come home, be the best dad you could with whatever was left in the tank. We grow up witnessing these behaviors, internalizing them, and allowing them to ossify into absolute truths.
Kevin also quotes Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Boyhood Island:
I am alive, I have my own children, and with them I have tried to achieve only one aim: that they shouldn’t be afraid of their father. They aren’t. I know that. When I enter a room, they don’t cringe, they don’t look down at the floor, they don’t dart off as soon as they glimpse an opportunity, no, if they look at me, it is not a look of indifference, and if there is anyone I am happy to be ignored by it’s them. If there is anyone I am happy to be taken for granted by, it’s them. And should they have completely forgotten I was there when they turn forty themselves, I will thank them and take a bow and accept the bouquets.