Puerile sexist shite

Oliver's post was interesting, albeit laced with the kind of crude vernacular and grammar favoured by old timers like Platini.

Having a kid brought gender issues into stark relief for me. Having always espoused the suitability of men as much as women to be child raisers, I was suddenly floundering in the reality of finding the world of the infant an alien affair.

I really struggled with those first 12 months of my son's life. Sure, there was other stuff going on. I was doing a vocational degree that, due to the changing political landscape, was suddenly going to spit me out into a jobless landscape in a few years' time; various relatives started dying of cancer, or were in a position where I was the only relative around to support them through life-threatening illness and surgery; the council, after 10 years of procrastination, chose to gut/refit our kitchen & bathroom, so we were living out of one room with a shitting and crying machine; my parents moved abroad; and so on...

... so I got a bit depressed. I had some counselling. It's not the first time I've had suicidal thoughts (and probably won't be the last).

Anyway, your own upbringing comes back to haunt you. Mine was not good. My wife's was. Our backgrounds were polar opposites in a lot of respects, and yet we'd come together having reached a lot of the same conclusions about life. But suddenly you're a mummy and a daddy and everything is scary and new again. Gender stereotypes at every turn. Shock horror - it was utterly apparent that there was no way I'd handle being a house-husband i.e. primary care giver. There was loads of stuff like that where it just seemed more appropriate for the mother to do it. I haven't a clue what motivated this outlook, but I imagine it's a whole heap of stuff I haven't the inclination to go into right now.

And I left my degree. The urge to be a bread winner was overwhelming. 2 more years of form filling and begging for hand-outs didn't appeal.

We're not conventional, by anyone's standards. We both work part-time; we both cook; we both clean; we both spend hours as sole carers of our son; we both cringe in the face of the über-straights and their unimaginative lifestyles and lack of independent thought.

But I'm the fucking daddy, and she's the fucking mummy. I'm the bad cop and she's the good cop. I spend more time outdoors with Tynan, she spends more time indoors with him. It definitely feels like we're conforming to gender roles somewhere along the line.

Oh I dunno.

I admire your honesty.
You write well,Scarlett.