Who's the Daddy?

It's been exactly 1,410 days since I became a father. This completely arbitrary milestone has given me cause to reflect upon the effect parenthood has had on me. I can think of no other occurrence in someone's life that has such an impact on the way they live it - either for practical or philosophical reasons - and I'm certainly no different.

The practical alterations to my lifestyle (e.g. forgetting what the inside of a pub looks like) tend to be borne of necessity, and may last only as long as the circumstances that require them. But there are other differences in me which, I think, are entrenched. I'm a new man. Here are some examples:

Crying

The list of films I can't watch without my eyes leaking is an awful lot longer than it used to be. It was basically just It's a Wonderful Life before. Now it would be easier to document things that don't make me cry. Recent examples of things that do include Shrek, Pacific Rim (seriously), and that thing on the internet about the schoolboy who overcomes his stutter. When they clear Iranian airspace at the end of Argo: that set me off good and proper. That is a very tense film, to be fair. I hope I haven't spoilt it for anyone.

Also: absolutely anything depicting a child in jeopardy.

Exclamation marks

I used to be a strict advocate of the theory that an exclamation mark is the written equivalent of laughing at your own joke. I would tut smugly at the merest sight of such garish punctuation, with a vehemence I now reserve only for those who confuse 'lose' with 'loose'. Or 'their' with 'they're'. Or 'its' with 'it's'. There are loads, actually. But the point is, I am now entirely unperturbed by exclamation marks. I even use them myself on occasion, although I often put them in brackets, so I can reserve the right to have been doing so ironically, should the need arise.

I struggle to find a direct link between fatherhood and the softening in my attitude towards this or any other form of punctuation. But I am in no doubt that it, like my increased propensity to weeping, is a symptom of a softer, more sympathetic outlook upon life. It could be that being the father of two girls has encouraged me to engage more readily with my empathetic side. Or it could be the lack of sleep.

Either way, I must still insist that the use of more than one exclamation mark in a single instance is unforgivable. Even if you are a PE teacher(!)

Functional insomnia

Until she was about nine months old, our eldest daughter was really rubbish at sleeping. Then we got tough. A week of us just pretending she wasn't screaming like an angry demon with a stubbed toe in the next room, and she finally accepted that she'd need to learn to settle herself down. Boom. Problem solved.

And not before time. I had started to go a bit mad, fulfilling various cliches to do with being a confused and forgetful zombie. And things were an awful lot worse for my wife, whose share of the nightly burden had been greater. But now we could return to a sensible, coherent life, having bravely helped our daughter to overcome her issues.

Then we had another daughter. After several months of similar nocturnal problems with her, we reluctantly concluded that we would be unable to pursue a similar solution. Allowing her to scream it out would serve primarily to awaken her sister's hard-won, peaceful slumber. So, in desperation to keep our youngest quiet - thus preserving the success we had achieved with our eldest - we began bringing her into the comforting security of our bed. Here, she would settle happily and sleep as well as her sister. Unfortunately, her favoured position in our bed was a perpendicular one which enabled her to kick me and headbutt my wife throughout the night. Still no sleep for the grown-ups. Cliche zombie lifestyles were resumed.

Two years on, this situation has changed in no way whatsoever. Our youngest daughter still spends half of most nights in our bed, where we sacrifice our own rest and comfort so that she can enjoy both. We have only ourselves to blame. And yet, on reflection, we seem to have been surviving; living ostensibly normal lives by day. I have always been a person who values my sleep. If you had told me four years ago that I would play a significant role in raising two children, be vaguely competent at a mentally and physically demanding job, and do other things like shopping, decorating and writing an entertaining blog - all on just a few hours' sleep a night - my incredulity at your preposterousness would have known no bounds.

But here we are. I guess this is simply a good example of people being more adaptable than they think they are. Or more deluded than they think they are about how adaptable they are. I'm too tired to tell which.

Whatever the opposite of vanity is

Much as it pains me to say it, I used to be a bit vain. I should clarify that, in my considered view, there are two distinct forms of vanity: there are people with an unpleasantly high opinion of their own appearance; then there are people whose preoccupation with their appearance stems from the opposite - an obsessively low self-image. I was very much in the latter category. I would spend a lot of time looking in mirrors. Squeezing spots, sucking in my belly, that sort of thing.

Now, I don't really care. It's not that my opinion of my physical appearance has improved particularly (although my new jumper does seem to suit me quite nicely). It just doesn't seem very important. Mirrors occupy my eyes much less frequently. My choice of clothes occupies my thoughts less frequently. I now have a curious, burgeoning pride in my stomach's slightly convex nature.

Of course, this could very well be just a consequence of ageing: I'm in my mid-thirties now, so perhaps I'm learning to accept the limitations to my beauty now that the decline is increasingly inevitable. But I know people my age who go for runs! Even when nothing is chasing them! Draw your own conclusions(!)

I think this change in my priorities has more to do with time. I spend less of it looking in mirrors because I have less of it to spare, what with all the parenting.

Seriously though: you should see me in that jumper.

Courage

I had an argument with a man in a car park the other week. He had deemed putting his car in an actual parking space to be excessively inconvenient. So he had positioned it horizontally, a few yards behind mine. Unfortunately for him, he finished doing so just as I wanted to depart. In my car. A task made quite difficult by this man's selfish actions.

Unfortunately for him, I'm a Dad now. I deal with stuff. I step up. I have grown used to expressing my reservations about the inadvisable actions of others. So I politely explained to this gentleman why I felt that the inconvenience caused to me was not justified by the convenience he had awarded himself. He disagreed. In years gone by, I would never have been sufficiently courageous even to reach this point in negotiations, but the new me pressed home my point with assertive and incontrovertible reasoning.

As I conducted the awkward eleven-point turn necessary to get my car out around his, I reflected proudly that he was probably feeling quite guilty indeed by that point. It had been obvious from the way he walked away from me.

Who's the Daddy?

The crying game

I've gone soft.

I remember observing some time after the birth of my first daughter that fatherhood had made me more sensitive: more prone to displays of emotion. As someone who had previously been troubled by my inability to fully engage with sentimental matters, I welcomed this development. To a certain extent. I was nevertheless hopeful that, by the time my second daughter came along, I would have found a way to rein in these weepy tendencies. I've got a reputation to uphold, after all.

It seems that I have failed to achieve this. Double the daughters; double the distress. I am struggling to convince myself that this is all simply a consequence of my burgeoning maturity; that I am no longer susceptible to the misguided social consensus that real men don't cry. On the contrary, I can proudly display my transcendence over this notion.

So why is it so embarrassing?

As the duty manager at work the other day, I was presented with a distraught young man of about three or four who had been separated from his parents. His anguish was quite understandable (most of us have a traumatic memory of a similar occurrence in our own youth) so I was unsurprised at the relief I felt when - before I had the chance to take any decisive action - his mum appeared on the far side of the shop, calling desperately to him as he sprinted at her, tears flowing and arms outstretched.

What I wasn't expecting was my reaction after this reunion had taken place. All too suddenly I knew I was about to cry. I was in the middle of a busy shop, of which I was supposed to be in charge, and I was welling up. I genuinely had to take myself away for a minute to compose myself. The more generous among you may find this endearing. Others will now be laughing at me, with some justification. Either way, it was unprofessional at best.

At least I was in a position of less responsibility today when an even more surprising source provoked my tear glands. It was my day off, and mid-afternoon before my wife and I were able to enjoy the sitting privileges granted to us only when both daughters are asleep. We chose to celebrate this by watching a recording made the night before of our favourite misanthropic, improvised sitcom, Curb your Enthusiasm. Larry David is capable of drawing various reactions from people: mirth, disgust, offence, guilty agreement, admiration... But he has never made me cry. Not even when Cheryl left him.

And yet today's scene, in which an entirely inconsequential character is urged to throw her baby from a burning building, to be caught by a former baseball player infamous for dropping catches, had me blubbing once more. The baby's jeopardy was nothing more than the setup for a joke about a baseball player. It was made abundantly clear that it was actually a plastic doll being filmed. But my new ability to collapse emotionally was immune to this fact.

Once I had completed the increasingly familiar task of composing myself, I was reminded of the aforementioned lost boy at work embarrassment. I turned to my wife to confess this tale to her. Only I couldn't get the words out, because guess what the memory of it made me do?

As I write this, there's a programme on TV about some soldiers' wives and girlfriends singing I'll Be There at a concert. I've got that tickle behind the eyeballs.

This has got to stop.