10 Things I’ve Learned in My First Year of Fatherhood

My daughter turned one last week, which is a milestone because she’s relatively unscathed. (Twelve months ago, someone put a defenseless creature in my hands and I honestly thought I’d accidentally break her—forget to support her neck, leave the bleach cupboard unlocked, that kind of thing.) A year in infancy isn’t like a year in adulthood; everything is very first-time-y. I spent 12 months waiting for milestones—the first word, the first unassisted stand, the first birthday—but found myself falling in love with the ordinary days and the ordinary things, including the way she looks around a room to check I’m still there. A year ago my daughter was a brand-new total stranger, now she’s a one-year-old who has no nostalgia and yet somehow creates it everywhere she goes. For the first year of parenting, nothing quite makes sense, and yet there’s some striking clarity within it all. Here are some other things I know, or I’ve noticed, though I’m not sure we can call them facts, per se.

You learn very quickly that your previous definition of “busy” was adorable and quite sweet. There’s always on and then there’s always on…with a baby (a one-year-old can detect the sound of an adult sitting down from several rooms away). Parenthood means repeatedly packing for an all-weather, all-terrain expedition—that’s only to the local park—and forgetting something crucial (sometimes it’s milk, sometimes it’s the baby herself). Your brain isn’t gone, it’s just morphed. I read a brilliant study about a new father’s brain reconfiguration, but I have forgotten all the findings.

The most powerful person in my household cannot say the word “household.” My daughter has the negotiating style of a tech billionaire and none of the vocab or platform; she just gurns and gestures in an about-to-lose-my-shit way that I’m meant to interpret. In order to aid her speech, I spend large portions of my life describing exactly what I’m doing out loud: “Daddy is tying his shoe”; “Daddy is sitting down several rooms away”; “Daddy is trying to remember everything we need at the park.” I monologue more than a Shakespeare play.

The parenting industrial complex would like you to believe a wooden rainbow designed by a Scandinavian cult costs £85. Add on that to a baby, every object is either a toy, or a future toy, or something unimaginably malign that’s about to be toyed with. Tidiness is a distant concept. I had an out-of-body experience watching myself applaud my kid for putting a block inside a box. The floor was a minefield of unexploded Fisher-Price, but one block went inside one box and the world felt lighter.

A birthday party for a one-year-old is a daytime get-together for adults who once enjoyed The Libertines unironically. It’s people once described as “legends” at Glastonbury sipping IPAs in button-ups. That first birthday party is thrown by two exhausted parents for someone who would have preferred some percussion downtime with a wooden spoon and a saucepan. I must say, nothing exposes your true friendships faster than asking people to attend a first birthday party in South London.

My daughter has attended more fashionable parties than I did in my 20s and 30s combined. She’s become accustomed to a Belmond-hotel, Claridge’s-for-one-night level of luxury. She is a drain on my money—“Daddy has spent more cash on tiny elasticated Vinted trousers than he has on shirts from The Row, and knows there is no proportional relationship between the size of a child’s foot and the price of a child’s shoe”—and yet I have never felt richer than when somebody else entertains my child for seven minutes.

Parents speak about sleep the way death row prisoners speak about freedom. I used to worry about my screen time, but now I’m glued to the baby monitor, checking she’s properly down for the evening. As a former party monster, I have never been so proud of someone for… going to sleep? “Naps are as serious to Daddy as interest rates,” and being a good sleeper has become my only measure of human worth. A baby can be a possessed Chucky doll by day—slapping the nanny and shitting down the curtains—but if she sleeps at night, we’re all agreed we’re very lucky.

Some babies need the structure of a nighttime routine, and not every baby likes going out. My baby has never shown any displeasure in going out. Sometimes you find yourself singing Christmas carols between Louis Theroux and your pram, and you dine out on that story for weeks because the rest of the month you’d been watching the Kylie doc one notch above mute. I spent years cultivating being interesting at dinner parties—just the right blend of talking, of peacocking, of occasional listening—and my daughter has achieved the same captivating effect by almost holding a spoon correctly.

The happiest person I know spends large portions of her day shouting at pigeons (there has to be a life lesson in that). Love is apparently spending 40 minutes watching another human point at a cat. Or point at the space where a cat was. Or point at a space where a cat never was, as if a cat has just been there. (Actually saying the word “cat” requires teeth, and teeth coming in can be agony, which seems unfair when they just fall out in a few years anyway.) Speaking of cats, you can legitimately forget to stroke your cat for six months. I felt terrible when I realized, and we’ve now petted him six ways to Sunday. His life is a pendulum.

Some other very scattergun, baby-brain musings before I wrap this up: The first year of parenthood is mostly googling whether something is normal. Every parent is a minor historian, charting the ingestion, digestion, and excretion of their baby (I can identify a filled nappy from 30 paces). Nothing ages you faster than your back seizing up while playing cars on a floor mat. I have never clapped this much in my life (and I once took an amateur dramatics course). Nothing, and I repeat nothing, feels as good as a sleepy head on your shoulder.

“Daddy is going to sound melancholy,” but the first year of parenthood is a long lesson in saying goodbye to versions of someone you’ve only just met. Babies change so rapidly, you’re always saying small goodbyes to a baby you’ve just gotten used to. You quickly come to understand that life is not a narrative; it is a sequence of fleeting fascinations. Adults—especially, erm, Vogue columnists—are obsessed with stories, but babies are obsessed with texture. Babies don’t care if any of this gets wrapped up in a satisfying way; babies are often only thinking, What does that taste like?

For me—for every parent—there’s a before the baby and there’s an after the baby. Before the baby, I thought my job would be teaching my daughter about life in all its glory: shining, shimmering, splendid. After the baby, I am the student, naively traipsing behind her, lapping up facts about a world I’d stopped noticing. Tibbs is schooling me on how much of this doesn’t really matter.