The highs, lows and silver linings of single-parenting a toddler.<\/p>\n
Summer read \u2013 originally published March 15 2025.<\/p>\n
He lay there prone, unmoving, his dark eyes glassy and fixed on the ceiling above.\u00a0<\/p>\n
My daughter looked at him, then at me. \u201cIs that\u2026 Daddy?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
I sighed. \u201cNo, darling, that\u2019s not Daddy.\u201d I grabbed the man to whom her question was directed and returned him to the kitchen where he belonged.<\/p>\n
No, he wasn\u2019t Daddy. This bloke did, however, fit the paternal stereotype of being handy around the home \u2013\u00a0I\u2019d just used him to open my beer, in fact. Yes, my toddler had asked if a bottle opener \u2013\u00a0a quirky bottle opener made from a table football player \u2013\u00a0was her father.<\/p>\n
You couldn\u2019t blame her for inquiring. She doesn\u2019t have one, you see \u2013\u00a0just me, her mum. To the Bob McCoskries of the world, the scene I\u2019ve just set is probably one of dysfunction. A single mother, her fatherless child so deprived of male influence that the poor thing clutches desperately at the only father figure she can find\u2026 a bottle opener. A tragic sign of societal decay.<\/p>\n
But to me, and to everyone with whom I\u2019ve shared this anecdote, it was pretty funny.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t take my child\u2019s non-traditional upbringing seriously. I don\u2019t want her to be confused, or feel like she\u2019s missing out. But what she was really asking was if the bottle opener guy was a daddy, not her daddy. As her language skills have developed, these queries have become more frequent, eventually morphing from questions into statements of fact. \u201cThat\u2019s the daddy,\u201d she\u2019ll inform me, pointing to a male figure in the background of a busy scene in a book. \u201cWell, it could be,\u201d I\u2019ll counter. \u201cOr an uncle, or a friend\u2026 or just a man.\u201d For the most part, she remains unconvinced. \u201cThat\u2019s Mummy,\u201d she recently declared, gesturing to Toby Morris\u2019s drawing of Alex Casey on our threadbare Spinoff tea towel hanging off the oven door. \u201cAnd that\u2019s Daddy,\u201d she added, pointing her grubby finger at Clarke Gayford brandishing a fishing rod. I could only agree.<\/p>\n
With apologies to Hayden Donnell<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until I became a single mum that I realised how pervasive the traditional nuclear family model is. In pretty much every form of media she consumes, from Peepo to Peppa Pig, Bluey to Baby-bloody-Shark, there\u2019s a mummy and a daddy and a kid or two. So she\u2019s begun to see them everywhere, these nuclear families. It\u2019s progressed to giving familial labels to inanimate objects based on size: a big stone found in the garden is Daddy, a medium one Mummy and a little one baby, a process that has escalated through all manner of items to such an extent that she\u2019s now labelling her own farts (\u201cDaddy one!\u201d she exclaimed proudly after letting rip a whopper the other day\u00a0\u2013 which, to be fair, does track with my experience of fathers.)<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not all a barrel of laughs, of course. The first time she said \u201cI want Daddy\u201d, I felt a bit sad. For a few seconds, anyway, until she followed up with: \u201cI want blue daddy! I want pink daddy! I want green daddy!\u201d Toddlers are cute, but they do talk a lot of nonsense. Without giving it too much weight\u00a0 \u2013\u00a0really, she could have been asking for a kitten or a unicorn \u2013\u00a0I explained to her that we don\u2019t have a daddy at our house, but she is very lucky to have her grandad and uncles and aunties and cousins close by. And Christ, child, you\u2019ve got a bloody good mother, I added (not in so many words, and in a more toddler-friendly cadence, I hasten to add).\u00a0<\/p>\n
She seemed to take it on board, and anyway, it shouldn\u2019t have been total news to her: we have picture books aimed at kids of single mothers who had them with the help of sperm donors. I always planned to be open with her about the whole situation from the get-go, so there won\u2019t be any \u201cbig reveal\u201d, but as her understanding of the world develops, her questions will no doubt become not so easy to laugh off \u2013\u00a0and trickier to answer. I guess I\u2019ll cross that bridge when we come to it.<\/p>\n