Waiting for him off the Dublin bus in Claremorris was his elderly father, who drove him home in silence, an awkward silence he finally broke with the simple question “Was there many on the bus?” 

The poor bastard clung to a tree for three days as the Indian Ocean emptied on top of him only to return to the West of Ireland and have his father ask him if the bus was busy. I still don’t know how true the story is, but it doesn’t matter. As the son of an Irish man born in the 1940s, it’s the most relatable story I’ve ever heard.

I often joke to my own kids that my dad only started speaking to me when I was about 12. He was ever present — we did a lot together — but it was only when I was old enough to pseudo-engage in adult conversation at the dinner table that we got to know each other conventionally. 

* My ‘joke’ about my own dad, while instructional rather than funny, is also disingenuous. My five siblings and I spent a lot of time with my dad growing up. Mostly going to and from and playing about a dozen sports. Or at the bog, turning, footing and bagging turf. Our relationship with him was built around silent ritual, not some transactional dynamic of get me this, find me that. I know this was true for many Irish kids growing up in the West of Ireland in the 1980s. Ironically, I probably saw more of my dad than my friends did of theirs because he was the principal of the secondary school we went to. So, luckily for us, presence was never an issue. Alas, if we workshopped the communication side, we would probably find some work-ons.

The point I’m trying to make to them is that, as my own two children constantly seek my attention, their expectations of me are simply far too high. That I’m an important man who has an important job. And social responsibilities. 

That I’m not automatically available to play football, build obstacle courses, turn on the TV (which they can now do for themselves) or search for a pair of leggings that haven’t been seen since last summer. That I am a person of authority. That I should be respected. 

They nod along. To me, I sound like Marcus Aurelius' in these moments, addressing Commodus and Lucillia. Erudite, compassionate but strong like an emperor. To them, I sound like Phil Dunphy from Modern Family.

Their friends sense my insecurity and pounce like seagulls on a chip. “Do you have a job?”, they’ve asked, more than once. “Yes, why?” I confusedly answer, checking what I’m wearing while looking around at all the other dads at the school gate, wondering do they get asked the same question during pick-up.

“Coz you’re always here,” they sneer back. The truth is, I’m not. The school-run is split equally, but why let the facts get in the way of a nine-year-old's world view that's ripped directly from Mad Men.

In the movie version of what happens next, I drop to one knee, eyeballing the upstarts to say the following: “You know where I was, kids, on my son's first birthday? I was in Afghanistan you little shits. That's where. At war. While you guys were peeing your pants and trying to pick up puddles in playgrounds, I was fighting the Taliban in Helmand.” 

In the real-life version of what happens next, one of them — and I know which one — would sarcastically answer “and how’d that work out for ya?”

There's the old joke about Freud saying the Irish were impervious to psychoanalysis. While there’s no evidence he ever said it, it rings true — to a point.

The reputation of Irish men especially, as stoic bastions of emotional dyslexia is both something we enjoy (in a typically self-deprecating way), even lean into when it suits us, but the ramifications of such a well-earned reputation for monosyllabic mumblings in the face of life's harder moments are many.

Silence can be a virtue, but, given man’s multimillennial seat at the top of the world order, silence can also be dangerous. In Ireland, we need not look too far into our recent history to find evidence of the patriarchy choosing a blind eye over equality and justice, all in the name of stoicism.

Thankfully, the modern fathering experience does not reflect that. A cursory glance of the school-gate pick-up line is evidence enough of a seismic shift in the dynamic of familial responsibility, even if many other aspects of society are much slower to respond. 

Before I had children, I saw in the example of my older brothers that the myth of men and multi-tasking was an erroneous one. That, from the practical viewpoint at least, there was little differentiation between the role of the mother and the father “in the home”. After thousands of years of hiding behind the model of hunter-gatherer supremacy, men are stepping out and stepping up.

Figures from the 2020 census show that 59.8% of married-couple households had both parents employed, with 71.2% of mothers and 92.3% of fathers in the labour force. This — one could argue — shows the progress that has been made in terms of gender equality in the workplace but tells us nothing of the attitude of my son's friend who’s wondering whether I actually have a job or not. He is not alone.

I realise as I write these words on the page how middle-class, white and heterosexual my observations on parenthood are, so I must point out at this juncture I do not see parenting as a competition, more of a coalition of the willing. 

But I can’t help wonder if society still expects a wartime dad. It proclaims otherwise, but I do believe that it does. Our wives and partners do not. The opposite. They are earning, leading and all the while continuing to out-parent us like they always did.

Yet, just as society has been slow to keep up with whatever overcorrection has occurred in terms of practical parenting, its obsession with the ideal of “what it means to be a mother” has never been so pronounced. 

As novelist and playwright Deborah Levy put it: “We did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicised by the Societal System, was a delusion. The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother.” For just as long as mothers have been suffocated by pop-cultural icons as role models, fathers have faced the opposite problem: of having no models at all.

Writer Michael Chabon tells an anecdote that about meeting a famous author at a literary party. This man, twice Chabon’s age, offered him some unsolicited advice. “Don’t have children,” he said. “That’s it. Do not. That is the whole of the law.” 

He went on to explain how, after one book, there would be a second that would inevitably be more difficult and unwieldy than the first, and would probably bomb. A third would nonetheless be expected, followed by a fourth, fifth and sixth, and so on for as long as his “stubbornness and luck held out”. 

All this would happen, he said, unless Chabon made the same fatal mistake as so many fledgling writers before him. “You can write great books,” he said. “Or you can have kids. It’s up to you.” Chabon, as it turns out, managed to do both, and in one of those books he astutely noted: “The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.” 

How telling it is that — in contrast to all the wonderful books about motherhood, for many years, the world's best-selling book on being a dad was Fatherhood, written by none other than Bill Cosby. Obviously Woody Allen had writer's block.

What was said to Chabon at the party has been said to the likes of me in the military, but just in a different way. Have kids, sure, but if you want a career just make sure you don’t ever have to look after them yourself.

In that context, it’s perhaps no surprise that today, in playgrounds and supermarket queues and airports, and, sometimes, in amongst our own parents, there still exists that element of over-congratulation for doing something we so obviously should be doing, a reaction that may be quaint and cute, but also very telling. 

The side-tilt of the head. The patronising 'awww'. The hair ruffling and the side-glance to see where the mother is. Is this, I wonder, what it still feels like to be a woman in some workplaces?

Regardless of the crippling consequences of society’s low expectations of men, the day of reckoning comes to all dads. If you’re Irish, that day will likely manifest itself at a bus stop, waiting for your son or daughter to alight after a great absence, and sit inside the car. 

Whether the subsequent journey is realised in awkward silence, or a cacophony of post-catholic catharsis is an unfair metric by which to judge progress. We will always want to know was there many on the bus. Success, I guess, will be measured by how excited our children will be to tell us.