As my husband shows, there is great hope for the fathers of the future

I have great hope for the fathers of the future when I look at the young men of today, writes Nikki Gemmell.

Long ago I believed in the will of the father, omnipresent within the family; that his desires, beliefs and needs prevailed over all others. This was how family was done. Yet the father in my own little family has taught me a different, more effective and egalitarian way of existing: that it isn’t about the will of the father, but about his attention. And that is the glue that holds our family together.

Recently one of our children was going through a tough time. There have always been little spot-fires to put out; there’s always something. But this situation had an edge to it. It felt deeper, more serious, and as parents it has taken all our concentration and instinct to get through it.

We’re there now, I think, as much as you can ever relax with the parental vigilance. But through it all I observed my husband enveloping a cherished child with love. Cocooning them so that the child felt utterly safe. Home was their calm space.

It was father as rock. It felt miraculous: a quiet, solid thing anchoring our entire family. I was observing a man repairing a vulnerable child with his careful love. Vanquishing fears. Circuit-breaking with laughter. Making no demands, for this was not the time. There was a wild beauty to this love. I handed over to the father on this one, to this man drawing our child within his cloak of tenderness, shutting the blare of the world out.

Do we, onscreen, see these good fathers enough? Not at all. The father so often portrayed in popular culture is the bumbling, comically hopeless goofball, or conversely the man clotted by silence and bewildered by the demands of a patriarchy that won’t let him be who he really is.

“You are Kenough” is the mantra of the moment, and there’s so much truth in that gentle pop culture joke. The film Barbie made a feature of the many men among us who are Kenough, actually, when the universe is telling them to be something they don’t necessarily want to be.

Increasingly though we’re seeing men who recognise they’re enough in the space called Fatherhood. Tender Dad. Involved Dad. Comfortable-In-Himself Dad. I have great hope for the fathers of the future when I look at the young men of today, because this modern father feels like a new and improved version of the father of old; those men of past worlds haunted by wars and weighted by expectations and pole-axed by a failure to communicate their truths.

Those men didn’t change nappies, didn’t talk like they do now. And they didn’t realise that a more equal world leads to less of a desire to have power over another, to dominate and control.

The best fatherly love is energised by vigilance to family. Love as attention. Love as service. Love defined not so much during the big, declarative occasions but in the quotidian. “I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments,” Umberto Eco wrote, “when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.” We become what our parents label us, from an early age; and we carry those labels, good or bad, throughout life. It’s label as burden, or rocket fuel.

My father was my rocket fuel, as I can see my husband is to his own children. This coming week I’ll be visiting dad’s grave, watched over by ’roos in a place too far away. While there I’ll give thanks for the only two fathers I’ve closely known. Men from vastly different backgrounds, with a similar aim: to be the father who makes their children feel safe. I carry that gift like an underground seam strong through my own life.

And as I walk in the world dad loved I’ll remember the words of Italo Calvino: “So, with my thoughts following my father’s footsteps through the countryside, I fell asleep; and he never knew that he had had me so close to him.”