Sometimes our memories of fatherhood don’t match up with our reality as dads. And then we face a choice: try to become what we think our fathers were or reimagine the role.
“The pictures I had in my head of fatherhood were of me driving around in the car with my son in the back,” said Alex Trippier, our Lead Dad of the Week from northwest London in England. “That was my prevailing memory of my own dad. The problem was I didn’t have a car, I couldn’t drive, and I had a daughter.”
Alex’s daughter is now 16 and he has sons who ware 15 and 12. They laugh about this.
But there was something else that wasn’t adding up: how his career was affecting his family’s life. His father had been a member of parliament and later a businessman. His mother was initially the higher earner, but his career was the dominant one and kept him away a lot.
Alex was an actor by training but he soon realized that his career wasn’t lucrative and might also be getting in the way of what his family needed. “We’d be set to go on a family vacation and then this little thing I booked would pop up,” he said.
That prompted a pivot to a new career, as a franchiser with Monkey Music, where he worked with young kids. He liked it.
Still, the movie in his head wasn’t matching the script he thought he was performing. He was doing well with Monkey Music and had stepped into the Lead Dad role in support of his wife, who was a managing director at a television production company.
“All this stuff that I was doing, comparing myself to my own father, I was above and beyond him,” he said. “Where I started to feel the cracks was in my relationship with my wife. Why wasn’t she happy? Why was she resentful? Now I realize I really couldn’t see that she was the one who was planning everything, organizing everything.”
They righted things. He credits The Gottman Institute and Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play with helping him to start playing a different movie in his mind, one in which he wouldn’t be comparing his parenting skills to other men but working to understand how he could work more in partnership with his wife.
“I didn’t know any of this about mental load, maternal gatekeeping – none of this was coming up in my feed,” he said. “This is a conversation that’s only happening with half the population. We’re not talking to each other. We need to understand what the other half is thinking.”
His lesson for other dads: seek out your partner’s point of view and understand it. “I had to put aside that I was behaving perfectly and brilliantly,” he said. “I had to acknowledge that I wasn’t doing what I could have been doing.”
Wise insight, Alex. Welcome to The Company of Dads.
