I'm a father of five, with ages spanning from nine-year-old twin girls all the way up to three grown-up children. As you can imagine, the years have thrown plenty of challenges my way.
If I'm honest, I've met and beaten a good many of the challenges my kids have set me. I've also failed at plenty of others — spectacularly, I might add. But that's exactly what makes fatherhood so exciting and so rewarding. It's also what makes it a minefield. There are days I feel certain I'm about to tread on something explosive as I wander into the trickier corners of being a dad.
For me, the challenges began the very moment my first child arrived.
After nine months of waiting, the big moment came — and yes, it was everything I'd hoped for. Emotional, overwhelming, and a memory I'll treasure for the rest of my life, above almost anything else.
Once I'd floated back down to earth, reality set in: I was now responsible for this tiny human being.
In those first months, one challenge caught me off guard — bonding with my daughter. It was largely because I felt redundant. She was breastfed, so I told myself I had no real job to do beyond the odd cuddle to settle her or a nappy change. Looking back, I wish I'd known then what dads are encouraged to embrace now: that the bath times, the carrying, the skin-to-skin, the simply being present all count for far more than I gave them credit for.
Slowly, my role grew. As my daughter moved on to solid food, I found myself far more involved, and those early worries faded the day she took her first wobbly steps and started stringing together a few words — including "Dadda." I'll never forget that moment as long as I live.
One of the biggest challenges facing dads today is striking the right balance between work and family, and I've certainly wrestled with it. We all have to earn a living and pay the bills — and the bills climb sharply the moment you become a parent. It's all too easy to pile on extra hours chasing the money to cover them.
I worked far too many of those extra hours before the penny finally dropped: I was missing the formative years. I realised that if I didn't ease off, I'd miss things I could never get back. So I cut my hours to be there for my children, determined not to live with regret — and I made it to most, if not all, of those milestones. If there's one silver lining to how much working life has changed lately, it's that flexible and remote working has made that balance a little easier to strike than it was for me back then.
As I said, I'm a dad of five. Three of my children are from my first marriage, and one of the hardest things I've ever done was sit my three older children down and explain that their mum and I would no longer be living together — that I wasn't leaving them, but I was leaving their mother.
It was an agonising time. I had to come to terms with no longer living with my children around the clock, and they had to adjust to me not being there to tuck them in at night or sort their breakfast before school. It was genuinely traumatic, and it took me years to find my feet with that kind of parenting. If I'm truthful, I feel I missed a great deal, and I never fully made peace with being a part-time dad.
In time I moved on and remarried, and we were lucky enough to become parents to twin girls, now nine. But I never imagined that this would be when I'd face my greatest challenge of all.
The pregnancy went perfectly well until around 28 weeks.
At a routine scan, we were told one of the girls wasn't growing as she should for that stage. In that instant, it felt as though the floor had vanished beneath me. It was frightening and bewildering, and we were heading into completely unknown territory.
Our twin girls arrived prematurely, at roughly 34 weeks, by C-section. From that moment I was strapped into an emotional rollercoaster. They were rushed straight to neonatal care the second they were born, and to make matters harder, we were far from home — our local hospital had run out of neonatal beds.
The challenges came at me thick and fast. Above all, I was helpless and utterly out of control. I had to take a leap of faith and trust the doctors to keep our girls safe. At one point, one of the girls struggled to breathe and had to be placed on a ventilator.
The weeks that followed would test me more than I'd ever known. The image of that moment is burned into my memory forever. Holding myself together was hard enough — and then I had to go and break the news to my wife while somehow keeping it all in. To this day, I don't know how I managed it.
Thankfully, after 27 days, the girls were discharged and came home with us. Every single one of those difficult days in special care was worth it to bring our family home together.
The challenges I've faced as a dad have come in every shape and size. Having five children doesn't prepare you for the next hurdle, because every child is different. Just when I thought I could handle a familiar problem by drawing on past experience, I'd be proved wrong — each of them has their own personality, their own character, their own way of catching you off guard.
What fatherhood has taught me, through all the curveballs it keeps throwing, is to try to take them in your stride. I've found that when I trust my instincts, they're usually right. And — oh yes — I've learned exactly when to keep my mouth shut, especially during the teenage years!
