Over the last few months a few people have mentioned how engaged I am as a dad.
And while, yes, I do enjoy doing things with the kids, this is actually driven by something more fundamental - that parenthood isn't something that falls on only Jane, and this is largely because we both have jobs.
Once we had a Sophia about the place we needed to work out how life with her* was going to work. Jane had taken a year off for parental leave, but after that point there came the question of what to do about the three/four years until school started. Nursery is expensive, and Jane wasn't a *big* fan of her job**. But she'd known multiple people who had left similar office jobs when they had a kid and then couldn't get back into anything of the same level and ended up doing very low-level jobs later on. And we knew that this would only be a temporary step - the kid(s) would go to school, and she didn't want to base all of her future options on a choice made to cover those three years. Also, being independent is very important to her. The thought of being entirely dependent on anyone*** filled her with horror. And we could afford to put the kid(s) in nursery, so that's what we did.****
And that made setting the tone for things much easier. Neither of us was the stay-at-home parent with the other being the wage-earner - we both had jobs, and parenting was divided between us. And, particularly once Gideon came along 18 months after Sophia went to nursery, Jane mostly parented Gideon and I mostly parented Sophia. Not that both of us didn't occasionally look after both, or do things the other way around. But Gideon was dependent on Jane in a way that Sophia wasn't, so it naturally fell that way. And so I got to spent a lot more time with her. Which suited me fine, because I find it much easier to build a relationship with someone who can talk to me and tell me what they want/need.
And so it's not that I ever said "I want to be a hand's-on dad", it's that we *both* wanted to have jobs, and so parenting was naturally going to be more evenly split than back in ye olden days.
*and eventually Gideon, although we didn't know if we'd be able to have another child at 43/48.
**She likes her current one a great deal more.
*** even someone as lovely as me, because let's face it, do you ever really know someone *that* well?
**** Theoretically *I* could have stopped working and been a stay-at-home parent. But the thought of doing that also fills me with horror. It is not something I would shine at, and I am delighted to hand off the work to people who are able to provide far more enrichment than I would manage. I have no idea how the ones who also have their own children manage to finish a long day with a bunch of small kids before going home to their own ones!
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