36 marieclaire.com.au
M
y day begins around
5am, when my not
quite two-year-old
son, Thomas, wakes
and starts shouting,
“Daddy!” I climb out of bed and go to
him, to shush and to stroke him and to
whisper that it is still sleepy time. This
might win us a further 45 minutes of
dozing, but after that he really is up and
we lock into our weekday morning
routine. Milk. Nappy. Stories. Clothes.
My girlfriend tends to our two-month-
old daughter, Willow, and we pass her
back and forth like the ball in an
elaborate rugby move so we can get
dressed, go to the toilet, send emails. At
7.45am, Thomas and I head off to
daycare, where I inform the carers that
while he has a rash, I took him to the
out-of-hours GP at our local hospital
yesterday, who identified it as
molloscum contagiosum – very
common and nothing to worry about.
Then I go to the office, where I
begin to exchange text messages with
my girlfriend. I tell her how the drop-
off went. I post a picture of Thomas
eating a banana on Facebook. Around
lunchtime, my editor approaches me
and asks if I’d like to go to Los Angeles
to interview a supermodel. I feel
a wave of anxiety. I do not want to go.
I want to stay here, with my children,
to take photographs of them eating
bananas and to remain the constant,
loving, looming presence the past two
years have seen me become. So I make
a weak excuse.
Sometimes, as Thomas whimpers
himself to sleep, I loiter in the corner of
his room, just so he knows I’m there.
And it’s during these moments that I
wonder if my behaviour is perhaps a bit
... much? I am, in every other aspect of
my life, moderate, measured and
frankly kind of boring. But as a father
I’m verging on obsessive. Am I happy?
Impossibly so. But I’ve also developed a
kind of tunnel vision. Am I doing
enough to help my girlfriend? Can I
ever do enough? My family have become
this psychological velcro from which I
can never quite tear myself away.
And I am not alone. According to
the Australian Bureau of Statistics,
around 30 per cent of dads now take
advantage of flexible work hours tolook after children under 12, compared
with 16 per cent two decades ago.
I see lots of dads like me, blokes in
their mid 30s at playgroups, in parks
and cafes, carrying bags crammed with
nappies and wet wipes. They – we – are
not the “latte pappas” of Scandinavia,
with their beards and never-ending
parental leave. Nor are we stay-at-
home dads, although many of us would
no doubt secretly love to be. But no,
that’s not us. Rather, we are simply the
first generation of fathers to have
the means, motive and opportunity to
take on more and more family
responsibilities. We have more flexible
working hours than our own dads
did. Some of us have access to decent
parental leave. Also, most important of
all, we have wives and girlfriends with
careers just as developed as our own,
who very much expect our support. We
are honestly not asking for medals.
We are just stolid, slightly stressed,relatively competent men committed
to sharing in as much of the grunt work
of parenting as we can.
So what should we be called,
“Mummy daddies”? “Daddy mummies”?
“D-ummies”? Oh man. It’s D-ummies,
isn’t it? We’re all D-ummies, which I
suppose is kind of ironic given how
earnest and po-faced many of us can be
about our new role.
One thing we can say for certain,
however, is that D-ummies have only
become widespread recently. The
first-ever State Of Australia’s Fathers
report, released in 2015, involved the
interviewing of more than 1000
fathers. It identified significant changes
in parenting attitudes among fathers,
with 70 per cent of the dads surveyed
reporting that they spend more quality
time with their children than their
fathers had spent with them.
“It is very new,” says Adrienne
Burgess of The Fatherhood Institute.MODERN FAMILY
Machell eschews
flashy work trips
for daily Daddy
time: taking two-
year-old Thomas
to the doctors and
daycare. Richard
Turney (opposite,
with Nico) admits
that D-ummies feel
a constant need to
prove themselves.