Fatherer's Question Time

How does a TA practitioner welcome and subsequently process the news that- all being well- he is soon to acquire his first experience of fatherhood? The answer, at least for this one, is with a curious blend of unreality, excitement and trepidation.

A vague quickening of inner warmth and existential triumph over death intertwines with the half-remembered cynicism of Philip Larkin's 'This Be The Verse'; all this observed by a menacing menagerie of twittering child development theorists. “Beware abandonment!” squawks one; 'Beware engulfment!” chirps another, like some sinister object relational fusion of the 'The Birds' with 'Eraserhead'. Somewhere on the periphery, a Council spokesman and Holyrood bureaucrat point and whisper something about 'Getting It Right For Every Child', while in the background a pair of insecurely attached adults are engaged in a tug of war; one tugging the left arm of a hapless child and screaming hysterically, “Look out! Look out, there be paedophiles about!”, while the other tugs at the right arm of the same, pleading, “Let him be, let him be free- just like me!”....

Such are just a few of the cacophonous Parent voices of cultural and transgenerational scripting around Daddy's responsibilities reverberating around my unconscious as the trimesters unfold.

Of course, by way of compensation, TA provides me with quite a few reasons to be cheerful- not least the fact that, as Erskine and Summers & Tudor assert, children are not the passive recipients of script programming we once postulated them to be. Nor are they prisoners of Mahler's autistic selflessness. My child will be fine-tuned for contact-in-relationship (Erskine & Trautmann, 1996) from the start- and will shape me as much as I shape them. I wonder what they will teach me about self, others and the world? Perhaps I will be born, too; the redefining and stroke-filtering scales falling from my eyes?

So, enough of these gloomy prognostications of hanging up my dancing shoes and handing on- and possibly fumbling- the baton. All I need to do is be “good enough”, as my new best pal Winnicott would say, and not lurch into acerbic guilt and self-criticism when I inevitably experience envy and resentment for the little critter from time to time.

David Harford www.harfordtherapy.com