Adam: Well thanks, Nikki. In my house, in addition to myself, I'm married, so my wife and I of almost fourteen years. And we have two girls, one ten, and one seven. Last summer we made two new additions. We got two little kittens. That's been an interesting change in and of itself. So, it's the six of us in the house.
NL: I wanted to see if we could reflect back. I guess this would be about ten years ago, about what your experience was like becoming a father for the first time. If you had any thoughts about what she might be like, temperament wise, personality wise. Any kind of hopes or fears you might have been in touch with before you met her.
A: I didn't have any specific…I didn't want my kid to do this, or be that way. And for our first one we did find out through the ultrasound that it was going to be a girl, so we did know ahead of time. You know I guess looking at our parents thinking okay well maybe there are certain things that our parents do that we don't really think are great. Here are some traits that we have that you know, we don't necessarily think are great either. One hopes they don't inherently have these traits, they take on all your positives, but that's not necessarily always the case. So, more it's about around how can you help to teach your kids when you see them do things that you know are good, encourage it. And when you see them do things that are bad, maybe not discourage it, but teach them how to adjust their behaviors. Because I find that it's definitely tricky when your kids are doing things that aren't necessarily appropriate. 2:35 Educating them on what it is they're doing, and how they're doing it.
NL: I'm wondering what other support you got as a new father, what you thought was helpful, or what wasn't so helpful, what you wished for and that sort of thing in terms of supporting you in your new role.
NL: I'm wondering, I guess, if you learned anything during the early part of the transition or even, I guess now, that you wish you had known or you'd like other dads to know.
NL: Yeah. I guess that's good advice, and I guess also a good segue because I'm going to ask you about becoming a father for the second time. I'm curious if there were any experience you had with the first child that kind of helped you. What you were able to glean, and maybe what you weren't able to since it's a different person that's being born.
A: It was definitely a bit of a challenge because now you're taking care of an infant and, at least for us, we were taking care of a toddler. She was two, they are two and half years apart. And one thing that was challenging, that we did, or I guess that I did that maybe wasn't so great, was that we looked at our older daughter as being much older and more mature than she actually was. You look at her next to a newborn, and oh she's two and half. She's this big girl. But she really is not a big kid at all. And I think perhaps we put a lot of undo pressure on her to be more mature than she should have been at two and half years old.
NL: Anything else you want to say about how your older daughter reacted to not being the only kid in the house anymore?
A: She initially, at least, didn't have much of a negative reaction at all. It was all really really positive. I think it was only after maybe several weeks of her little sister being home, and realizing that she got certain direct attention from her mom, especially around feeding times, that a lot of things were, in terms of her care, and getting food ready for her, and bedtime, and bathtime and all that stuff, was all left up to me. And so, eventually, after several weeks that kind of sunk in. Sometimes timing doesn't work out when the baby needs to be fed when somebody needs to get put to bed. So, I think that it certainly wasn't there initially, but eventually some of that, not quite, but almost resentment, that oh my God there's this other kid here in the house. We didn't really get a ton of that, but it was around certain activities that landed pretty much all on me in the very beginning that she's like wait, I want some mom-time too. 7:46 And how come I don't get mom-time? There was a little bit of that, but in general, she really, she was just really excited about having a baby sister around.
A: I think you're right. It applies. And I think that reading through this and that article that maybe the notion of ambivalence, in general, applies to life with respect to change. And I think that's what having a kid is. It's a significant change. And when anything changes there's going to be good and bad. And for sure, when having a kid there's good and bad. And bad in that there's certain things that maybe you didn't experience before that's challenging, and hard, and stressful at times. And maybe that's some of the bad. But it's good in that there's significantly different things that you experience. And looking at that transition in life from being a couple. And going from just having two of you and having kids, there's certain experiences that you won't have anymore because the dynamic of your family has changed. But then in doing similar things, similar activities, you're going to experience things differently. So, there's maybe some bad in that, okay, it's not like it was, but now it's good because we are experiencing it in a different way. And, things that you experience in life, now you get to experience with somebody else.
NL: In the article, one thing they noticed about women is that women tended to have some fantasies I guess about how motherhood would be, or about how they would be as a mom. And sometimes that would clash or just be significantly different than the realities. So I'm curious if you had any of that for fatherhood, if you had any fantasies about it. And if so, how you reconciled what you thought it would be like with what it has actually been like.
NL: This is kind of a general question, but anything that we haven't talked about yet that you would like to share that might support other men as they go through the transition of fatherhood?
NL: Thank you so much for sharing your story but also for sharing some of the wisdom that you learned along the way. I think this is going to really helpful for people to hear.
A: Excellent. Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.