Text 1: Notes from the only dad at the gate, by Sam Okoro

An original contemporary blog.

Eighteen months ago, my wife was offered a job she could not turn down and I was made redundant from one I had never much liked. We did the sums on the back of a pizza box. A week later I was a stay-at-home dad to Amara, who is six, and Felix, who is three and a half and will tell you so.

Things nobody tells you. A three-year-old can take forty minutes to put on one sock. Plaits are a branch of engineering. There is no such thing as a quiet trip to the supermarket, only a negotiation conducted at volume in front of the biscuits.

For the first few months I was the only dad at the school gate, and I felt it. Conversations stopped when I arrived. People were kind, but in a careful way, as if I were a large dog that had wandered into a café. One woman asked whether I was ‘babysitting today’. I said that you cannot babysit your own children. She laughed. I meant it.

Then, slowly, it changed. Somebody invited Felix to a party. Somebody else asked me for my flapjack recipe (it is mostly golden syrup). Now I am on the class rota for reading volunteers and I have opinions about phonics.

I will not pretend it is easy. Some days the most adult conversation I have is with the woman at the post office. Some days I am so tired by bath time that I read the same page of a dinosaur book twice and Felix, who cannot read, corrects me.

But last week Amara drew a picture of our family for school. My wife was in a suit with a briefcase. I was in the kitchen, holding a wooden spoon, enormous and smiling. Underneath she had written: ‘My dad is at home. He is the boss of tea.’ I have stuck it on the fridge, and I am not taking it down.

Text 2: A letter from a father left in charge, by Thomas Wardle

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1863, a solicitor writes to his wife, who is staying with her sick mother, about looking after their three children.

My dearest Louisa, you will be glad to hear that the children are alive, and I think you will be surprised to hear that so am I.

On the morning after you left, Hannah announced that she had the toothache and must go to her sister’s, and so I have been, these four days, nurse, cook and schoolmaster together, with only the girl who comes in for the rough work to assist me. I had always supposed that the management of a nursery was a simple matter. I now believe that the Duke of Wellington had an easier time at Waterloo.

On Monday I burnt the porridge, so thoroughly that the pan is still soaking. On Tuesday Tom lost a tooth in an apple and wept, not from pain, but because he was sure that he should die of it. On Wednesday Edith went missing for an hour, and was found at last asleep in the linen cupboard, where she had gone, she said, to be a dormouse. I confess that I sat down upon the landing and laughed until I was nearly as foolish as she.

Little Kitty will not go to sleep unless I tell her a story, and she will only have the one about the bear, and she corrects me if I alter a single word. Last night I fell asleep before she did.

Mr Charnock, from the office, called yesterday to ask when I should return to business, and found me upon my knees on the nursery floor building a tower of bricks. He was so astonished that he forgot his hat.

I shall be very glad indeed to have you home, my dear, and I do not expect ever to complain again of the length of your day. But I will tell you something that I have told nobody else. I think I have learned more of my own children in this week than in the six years before it.

Your loving and exhausted husband, Thomas.

Both of these texts are about fathers looking after their children.

Compare:

• the writers’ experiences of caring for their children
• how the writers make these experiences clear to readers

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