Sometime last year (or was it the year before?) Jon decided he didn’t want to visit anymore. He would rather hang out with his friends. “It’s boring,” he said. Fair enough.

Today Timothy let me know (via his mother) that he didn’t want to come over either. And I thought he wanted to be stuck in his room, playing X Box every waking minute. Whenever I went to his room to talk, he wasn’t interested in anything else. What do I know.

Indeed. What do I know. In 1990, when Jon was born, I realised how little I knew. Zip. About being a father, less than nothing. How come my Dad seemed to know so much?

And now, every year, I know less. More surprises, more melted expectations, more space, more drifting. Where is my life going? Do I have one? Did I trade Me in for Dad?

I’m so torn between being Distant Dad,  Money Lending Dad,  Stepdad and Resident Dad, I don’t know how to keep them altogether inside one head. Then there’s Husband, who seems to be more like My Son’s Stepdad at times.

I would just like to be able to maintain some consistency, to always know which hat I’m wearing, or to be able to trade them all in for one multipurpose cap. I wonder what that would look like. Perhaps it would have to be more like a bearskin, like the Buckingham Palace guards where. There would be lots of space in there. Lots of space.

One trait of mine that I don’t like is that when I get depressed I just want to sleep and sleep. Right now I could hibernate. Wake up in the spring.

I just don’t know which spring.