No Becomes a Pattern

I was tired. Not the dramatic kind of tired you put in a LinkedIn post with a black and white photo. The kind where you’ve mopped, done three loads of laundry, fixed a wonky cabinet hinge, and you’re standing in the kitchen wondering if you have the energy to open the fridge.

My youngest came up and asked if we could go roller-skating.

Every fibre in my body wanted to say no. I had a few excuses lined up. Getting late. Next week. Daddy’s tired. All true. All reasonable.

Then a thought arrived that I didn’t ask for and couldn’t shake. No becomes a pattern. A pattern becomes a reputation. And one day, someone is going to ask my kid what their father was like, and I do not want the answer to be “he was always tired.”

So we went roller-skating.

Small thing. I know. But small things are how this actually happens, in either direction.

I’ve watched a few friends slide into something I can only call weekend parenting, and none of them planned it. It starts innocently. A late meeting, so the grandparents feed the kids dinner. The late meeting becomes a late night, so the kids sleep over. One night becomes two. Two becomes most of the week. Nobody decides to become a weekend parent. They just keep saying yes to one more late night until a daily relationship quietly turns into a visiting one.

I think about this more than most fathers because I didn’t have one to copy from.

My own father was a trader and, somehow, also a Tai Chi teacher. I genuinely don’t know what he traded. Stocks, I think. He wasn’t around much. The clearest memory I have of him is an evening at Parkway Parade, just wandering around together for a few hours, no particular plan. That’s the whole memory. That’s the file I have to work with.

He died when I was thirteen. So whatever “being a father” means, I had to build it myself, mostly by watching other people’s dads and guessing at the rest.

A few years ago, I started writing something called Daddy’s Field Manual. Everything I want my kids to know, written down, in case I’m not around to say it in person. I never finished it. I have a nagging feeling I might not get the decades my father didn’t get either, which is exactly why the manual exists in the first place. It’s sitting in a folder somewhere, half done, the way most things you actually care about tend to stay half done.

And I have four kids. With four, you also cannot micromanage them the way you’d check an assistant’s email for typos. They’ve had to figure things out themselves. On a trip to Japan, I watched seven-year-olds commute home from school alone and thought, why not us too. Mine do the same now. I’d rather they learn to survive without me than discover later they never had to try.

Randy Pausch used to say you get to pick three: work, family, health, friends, the usual list. You don’t get all of them. I wrote a whole piece once about why I don’t really have friends anymore. Same maths, different column. Every father I know has quietly made this trade, whether he admits it or not.

I want my kids to be independent enough that they don’t fall apart without me. I also had four of them, partly so they’d never be without each other.

I’m not sure those two things point in the same direction. Independence and closeness aren’t the same skill, and I’m building both at once, hoping they don’t cancel each other out before I find out which one actually mattered.

Happy Father’s Day.