Mothering Sunday. What fathers understand about care.

I used to think care was something you did when something went wrong. Illness, sadness, a difficult day — those were the occasions for care. Between those occasions, I thought the job was presence: being there, providing, being reliable. I understood presence and provision as the father's contribution and care as something that happened in the gaps.

I was wrong about this in ways I have been slowly understanding for seven years.

Care is not what you do when something goes wrong. Care is the baseline practice of attending to another person's inner life — their specific tiredness, their specific worry, the specific thing they didn't say that has been in the room since Tuesday. Care is the practice of noticing those things, naming them when it's useful, and adjusting your behaviour in response to what you've noticed.

I am a slower learner of care than my partner. This is not because I am a man — I don't think it's structural. I think it's habitual. I spent the first thirty-three years of my life mostly not noticing other people's specific tiredness, because the environments I was in didn't require it of me. This is the specific capacity that care requires — the sustained noticing of another person's inner state — and it is one that I had to deliberately learn in my thirties.