Dads said

You can love them and miss your old life.

Stress doesn't always look like stress. Sometimes it looks like anger.

You and your partner may temporarily become colleagues.

Going back to work can feel like leaving two lives half-finished.

The first 72 hours are mostly admin and adrenaline.

You can hold your own child and think: I have no idea who this is.

At 4am most things look like an emergency. A lot of them are wind.

Three weeks can go by without you being outside in daylight.

Doing the money maths at 2am and saying 'all fine' in the morning is a very common arrangement.

Splitting the nights so one of you sleeps properly isn't a luxury. It's maintenance.

Frightening yourself with your own temper is a reason to get help, not a verdict on you.

A Friday drink becomes an every-night drink without anyone ever deciding it.

You can want your father's patience and none of his silence.

Month three is often the hardest and the least talked about. Everyone else has gone back to their lives.

Keeping one hour a week that is recognisably yours does more work than it looks like.

Cancel on everyone for two months and you can end up wondering where you went.

You can be in the room for hours and present for about nine minutes of it.

Crying about a bollard on day four is about the bollard in the way that it is never about the bollard.

Ten minutes of tea with no baby talk in it sounds daft. It tends not to be.

'I'm tired' is often the opening line for something with more in it.

Nobody tells you you've got good at this. You just stop panicking one day.

Losing it, coming back and saying sorry is a thing a lot of men never saw done.