The Idea of Co-parenting Emerges

 

The idea of co-parenting had not occurred to me suddenly. There was no alternative-approach-to-parenting lightbulb that flicked on over my head one afternoon. However, settling on it as a serious consideration for my own life did emerge somewhat out of the blue, but I'll come to that later. 

I was already familiar with the concept of co-parenting - two of my closest friends were co-parenting, one of whom I lived with, along with the child in question for half the week. I’d seen first hand how well it could work, how much more individual freedom the parents seemed to have than other parents I’d seen in more traditional set-ups. The difference was, those friends hadn’t planned on entering a co-parenting relationship in advance, it had happened in a far more unpredicted fashion. In my teens there hadn’t been a lot of consideration about parenting, I was still being parented myself at that age. By my twenties, in the noughties, I still didn’t feel like an adult to any great degree. Children felt like something I WOULD have eventually, partly because I assumed that at some point paternal instinct would kick in and I’d want offspring, but just as much because I thought having kids was simply something people do - like buying houses, forging a career and settling down in a monogamous relationship. 

In July 2015, a few days before my 30th birthday, my two closest friends introduced me to their 2-week old baby, Ralf, for the first time. This was the start of my first significant connection to a child. Having previously socialised almost exclusively within my own age bracket, befriending a pre-talking, pre-walking and pre-toilet trained baby was entirely new. I had always been somewhat awkward and self-conscious in my interactions with babies and young children, but despite this Ralf seemed to take an inexplicable shine to me over the following months. I was spending a lot of time with his parents, and consequently with him. I didn’t have nieces or nephews, or young cousins, so these were my first experiences of real bonding with a child.

As I entered my early thirties I was startled by how quickly time seemed to accelerate. My twenties, having begun when I was still at university, had felt like an extended saga, played out at a leisurely pace which allowed plenty of time to appreciate all the holidays, parties, lie-ins, pub-crawls and picnics, but when I hit my thirties it was like someone had down-shifted a gear and stamped on the accelerator. Suddenly the years started ticking off like one of those movie montages where pages of a calendar fall off one after the other, intercut with happy, dramatic and memorable moments.

The first of my friends had started having babies in their twenties, but they were mainly old friends from uni and school who didn’t live in the same town as me. As we entered our thirties friends from my immediate social group began having kids. Prompted by this development I began hearing the first, faint strains of a ticking biological clock, not to mention the unmistakable sensation of societal pressure. I also started to feel an innate desire to have children that I had never really experienced before. Meanwhile, I continued bonding with Ralf as he grew from the baby phase into a toddler, with more personality and awareness. Around the time he turned 2 his dad, John, moved into my shared house, with Ralf joining him for half the week. Up until this point Ralf, John and Ralf’s mum Sarah, had all lived together nearby. As Sarah and John weren’t in a relationship they were never planning on living together long term, hence John moving into the rental house to share with me, plus three other tenants.

These house-share years were a tricky proposition for John and Ralf, not to mention the three other housemates. I happily acquiesced to the additional noise and mess of a toddler in the house, but I had a connection with him that the other housemates didn’t have, so it was a more significant upheaval for them. Generally speaking they accepted it all with good grace, barring the occasional grumble about the banging, screaming and early starts that a toddler brings to a house. Late in 2021 me, John and Ralf moved out of the 5-bed shared house into another rented property with just the three of us. Ralf’s mum Sarah lived nearby and Ralf divided his time evenly between her house and ours. Unsurprisingly this set-up worked far better than sharing with 3 other, constantly rotating housemates.

The more of my friends I saw announcing their pregnancy, the more I started to feel a desire to become a parent myself. This peaked at a friend’s wedding in 2022, when I was handed the new baby of some mutual friends. I was caught off-guard by a wave of emotion that sprung up, seemingly out of nowhere. I clenched my throat and breathed deeply to stop myself from crying. I was unsure where the wedding prosecco ended and the broodiness began, but I was sure it was a message from my subconscious telling me precisely where it stood in terms of potential parenthood.

On an early autumn’s day the following year I was hanging out with my friend Helen at a local harvest festival, the sort of event you can find occurring on any given weekend in the inner suburbs of Bristol - it was all flower crowns, long-haired kids, gin cocktails and adults trying very hard to not look as upper-middle class as they definitely were. Whilst sitting with Helen, sipping said gin cocktail, the topic of conversation somehow landed on parenthood. Without any forethought, I told her that in the event I decided to co-parent, I’d always considered her to be my primary choice for co-parent. Going into the day I hadn’t had any plans to tell her about these thoughts, nor had I on any previous occasions, it just came out, like a sudden burp of intimate revelation. She replied that she had been thinking the same. And just like that, being a parent suddenly became the primary concern in my life.