Reflections on daddying

I was trying to resolve the paradox of parenting for two friends of mine recently (who don't have children) - how you can moan endlessly about the struggles of having children, while almost in the same breath exhorting friends to hurry up and have their own because having children is wonderful and magical and amazing!

I don't think I did a great job of explaining anything to them - it is hard to understand. I often feel surprised by things I see in myself that come out in parenting - intolerance, patience, selfishness, generosity, mood swings, durability, anxiety, serenity... like at a deep level I am being subtly guided by a suddenly slightly unfamiliar force that takes a little getting used to.

Take two examples:

1. I was enjoying my breakfast of coffee with toast and jam one morning this week, and of course Timmy was helping me out with the toast. I realised that everytime I gave him a bite I carefully, and without thinking, manoeuvred the juiciest, fattest blob of jam I could into his mouth... A very unusual instinct for a man spoilt and selfish as I can be in some ways.

2. At dinner with Stephen on Tuesday evening I was really enjoying a fresh and beautiful piece of lemon sole which I don't have very often. Timmy went out to the toilet and, without going into explaining why this happens with 3 year olds, I got up from my lovely delicate supper four times to wipe someone else's backside - and of course still really enjoyed my meal. Not defiantly, not self-consciously, not self-righteously - I just did, and that surprises me!

I sometimes think about this sense of the limit of the conscious 'me' - that I can 'observe' other parts of me that I don't know and that feel somehow detached from the 'me' I see, hear and think about 99.999% of the time. As if I'm riding a horse, or sitting in the back of a car being driven by someone else.