This year, I reached the age my dad was when he died. I’ve been thinking about him and all the years that have passed, but it also made me reconsider what I’ve missed out on.
Back in 2019, and I’m sitting in a busy cafe in central London waiting to talk with someone about their dad. We only know each other online, but I’m about to ask questions we rarely ask even our closest friends.
What’s it like growing up with a dad?
What is yours like?
What do you know about him, now you’re an adult too?
How does he show his emotions?
This is the first in a set of conversations in pub gardens, over the phone, in busy train stations and noisy cafes. Some were with people I barely knew, others with friends. They told me about their dads and all the different ways they see them. Some told me about being a dad themselves and how that has turned what they know on its head.
It is the most moving, rewarding, and unique set of conversations I’ve ever had.
Father-children relationships mould us like plasticine, leaving thumb marks and indents as we shape ourselves around them.
And now years have passed, and I revisit those life-changing conversations. I listen to the recordings and feel the warmth of them once more. I pick up the thread of why I did them in the first place: to find out if I can understand a bit about dads from other people where, for me, it is a gap.
What I find in these conversations is complex.
The dad who battled with alcoholism, so I’m talking with an adult who lived in its wake. Someone who has an indelible mark left in their life by that relationship, but who has shaped themselves so compassionately around it to understand themselves and their father.
I hear some common themes: the dads who were brought up not to share emotions, so they are a mystery to their children.
“I will tell your father when he gets home” – the ones to be feared, who get to have the final say.
But I also hear about the dad who subverted the gender norms of the time, staying at home more so that his wife could work, a quiet champion for his daughter’s right to have the same chances as her brother, a mountain-lover and explorer.
Some heroes wear hiking boots.
I learn from the son who suspects, now he is an adult, that his dad may be living a lie.
I receive an old cine film where I see him moving again. It has been over 30 years since I saw the way he moves, his face in motion.
The dad dealing with illness whose family life – and his place in it – was forced to change. Someone who has been able to come to terms with a shift in what it means to be the man of the house. A man deeply loved and able to show it back.
Dads who broke the trust of their children. And only by becoming adults themselves, finding out that grown ups are confusing and imperfect, could they start to repair. They describe a shift in power in this father-child dynamic.
I learn that father-children relationships mould us like plasticine, leaving thumb marks and indents as we shape ourselves around them. There’s a realness to how each person describes the bit I don’t know at all – how their lives are shaped by their relationship to their fathers as they themselves have grown and become adults.
My dad, on the other hand, is contained in a handful of photographs and some memories which get less and less certain each year.
I don’t have a lot. It’s a disproportionately small cache of things compared with the underlying seam that his existence, then illness, then death has left.
I receive an old cine film where I see him moving again. It has been over 30 years since I saw the way he moves, his face in motion. I see his long strides as he walks into a church for a wedding, and his slightly shy smile to the camera. The video doesn’t have any sound, but those few seconds are like when Charlie Bucket finds the 50p piece in the snow to get that final golden ticket. I watch them every day until I eventually have to ration it so I can be normal again.
I can’t even imagine what things might have been like had he died in the age of smartphones – the endless treasure trove of photos and videos. But he might have been harder to let go if I could keep replaying him alive.
So I don’t have a lot. It’s a disproportionately small cache of things compared with the underlying seam that his existence, then illness, then death has left.
And I know, and have always known, that I won’t get all my answers. I won’t know how he might have reacted to his grandchildren; what he’d have made of me playing the drums after he had to suffer through all that violin practice; what might have made him angry or sad, and whether he’d stay up late talking with me in the kitchen.
But what I do know is that it has been worth really asking people about the significant humans in their lives. And in 2026, I’ll be doing more of that.