1 didn’t want to be just a week-end dad’

Press, 31 July 1986, Page 11

1 didn’t want to be just a week-end dad’

Emily was 15 months old when Ross Kinsman and his wife separated. Whatever else changed, he was determined that his relationship with his daughter would not suffer.

“I was very concerned to have a real relationship with Emily, to be a real dad, not just an intermittent, week-end one,” he says. At first he tried to dovetail childcare with his work at Kingsiea Girls’ Home. He enquired about job sharing and permanent, part-time work, but was told that there was no provision for either. “I was going to take it up with the union and try and get it changed, but my self-esteem was so low at the time, I didn’t follow it up,” he explains. “In the end, I felt that trying to work for anyone else would just be making a rod for my own back; I had to work towards an independent income.”

He had invested in some properties a few years previously, but they were not yet showing a profit, let alone providing enough to live on, so he approached the Department of Social Welfare to ask for support. “They were resistant at first, but I told them that it was very much in Emily’s interest for both parents to have that initial support and in the end they agreed. I’m really quite grateful to them, because I couldn’t have co-parented otherwise.” He thinks he will only need the benefit for another year. For the past 18 months he has been looking after Emily in rotation with her mother; at present, the arrangement is five days on, five days off. “Liz had been very accommodating about my

involvement in looking after Emily, but when it came to co-parenting, I think she felt quite threatened, perhaps because of the supposedly special relationship women are meant to have with their children,” he says.

"It’s to her credit that she quickly saw the fairness and rightnes of the situation. Co-parenting takes a lot of co-operation between a separated couple.” The arrangement is an informal one, and he feels the informality is an essential element. They checked the legal situation at the family law court and found it was more flexible than they had thought. "There is a popular myth that these things have to be enshrined in a legal arrangement, but that is intrinsically confrontative,” he believes. “You can get into an arrangement which is quite unreal because your needs change, and so do the other parent’s. The essential thing is Emily’s well-being, as well as fulfilling my need for the relationship.” , He agrees that stopping work has altered his perception of himself. “My self-esteem has increased incredibly, because I’m not trying to deal with all those conflicting demands. And the personal issues Emily faces me up with just by being her have really helped me to grow — such as learning to cope with anger better.

“Looking after her needed my total energy for the first year,” he admits. “I appreciated a lot of the issues that Liz raised, and the sort of feelings she had coping on her own. “I hesitate to say that I appreciate what it is like to be a mother — I

don’t want to be a mother, or a cardboard replica — but there are a lot of feelings and experiences in common.” When asked what he does, he describes himself as a solo parent.

He has been interested in the reaction of other men and friends. He joined a men’s group to try and work through some of the issues raised by the separation, and group work still takes up a lot of his time when he is not looking after Emily. “It’s just not an issue for them,” he was surprised to find. “It’s not necessarily that they’re out of sympathy, just out of touch. It’s a gap in their experience.” Emily goes to a weekly playgroup, and to a nearby creche three times a week, the same one she has been attending since she was 15 months old. She is now nearly four. “It’s important to give her that contact with other kids,” Ross points

out. “Emily has a life of her own separate from either of us, and we have to respect that. On the other side, I need time to myself. It’s a legitimate need, and it amazes me how people are so resistant to creches and so on.” Arranging babysitters to cope with his own need to socialise, especially at the week-end, he finds more difficult to organise. He tries having reciprocal arrangements with other parents, but finds women are a bit wary of having him as a babysitter.

He thinks that members of his men’s group may at last be switching on to the problems of his situation when he is unable to attend meetings, and is pleased to find some offers of babysitting beginning to come from there.

“I’m not doing it consciously, but I am finding that I’ve become a model for some other men,” he says. “But there’s got to

be a huge revolution in parental practices for fathers to get more involved.

“There need to be changes in our social structures to accommodate that — they’re just not flexible enough.” Even though he is aware that some people regard what he is doing as "nonsense," he says he wouldn’t change from being a co-parent even it he got into another relationship. “I look at the feedback from the creche: Emily is feeling good about herself; she is feeling selfassertive. That says a lot about how the situation is working for us and for her,” he maintains.

“How many other kids get to spend so much time with their father? The biggest gift I feel I can give her — that anyone can give to a child — is to feel good about themselves.”