What does it mean to be a father? Michael Rosen examines his role today and what it was like when he first started out 24 years ago

I’m in the kitchen. Upstairs there are three people: my 13-year-old son, my partner and our new baby. I’ve tried waking Isaac, the 13 year old. I’ve switched on the light. I’ve rustled an old lampshade that’s sitting in his waste-paper basket. I’ve pressed an old teddy into his neck. I’ve dangled a belt onto his nose. My partner, Emma, is asleep and I haven’t tried to wake her up. And there’s Elsie, our baby, who has staggered and amazed me for many reasons but one utterly incredible reason above all others. She sleeps.

I’ve been involved in the upbringing of five children before Elsie appeared. It’s a complicated story of children that share my genes and others who don’t. And even the number five is complicated by the blunt and awful event that one of them died. Two years ago, my son Eddie, then nearly 19, died of meningitis. And as my mind tries to twist and turn around what being a parent and a father means, Eddie always stands there making the point that it’s not just a matter of being good or kind or doing the right thing.

(One moment, while I try to rouse my 13 year old. Incidentally, he’s 14 in a couple of days' time. Any suggestions for a birthday present? He’s booked me in to take him out to lunch at the local Vietnamese restaurant. And he says he wants a ticket for the hip-hop rave at Hackney Marshes later in the year.)

I forgot to say that there’s Joe, my 24 year old, still asleep in the converted stable at the end of the garden. When he was born I didn’t know babies. I didn’t know how they sleep, how they eat, what they do with their eyes, how they breathe – nothing at all. Well, for years I had known that I would never be a father. I had carefully analysed the fact that I was too irresponsible, too selfish, too obsessed with thinking about other things. I was absolutely not father material. Six children later, maybe I’ve learned something.

Oh, I’ll boast a bit…I’ve tried very hard to be as hands on, as ‘there’ as I could. No, I didn’t know about babies, but a few seconds into fatherhood and I was learning fast.

(I think I can hear stirrings from upstairs: an odd grunt, a door slam, a toilet flush. Reminds me: I must hang Isaac’s karate suit out to dry. He has his session this evening. And as usual he only brought it to me to wash late last night.)

It was my then-wife’s mother who taught me most about babies: vests going on over the back of the head, coming off over the front. How to do the double rock: jigging with your arms while swaying on your legs. How to feed a baby by locking one arm behind your back, holding the other arm with one hand, and diving in with the spoon, saying: ‘Here comes the horse, chock, chock, chock’ There must be other ways, but that one sure worked. And look at him now. Twenty four, fast asleep at the end of the garden.

And now, at 55, there’s another baby in the house. If you’d asked me at any time up to 18 months ago, was there any chance in the whole world that I might have another child, I would have said absolutely none. Zero. I was partnerless and felt destroyed by the death of Eddie. I had been alone in the house with him. He had gone to bed with what seemed to me like flu and he was dead in the morning. Quite usual for meningococcal septicaemia, the doctor told me.

But here we are with Elsie. It seems wrong to say that she is some kind of cure or remedy for all that loss, but merely by shouting and smiling and feeding and looking, she has the power to draw in all my attention. And, hey, I’m pretty good at some of it: vest on from behind, lift the legs for the bum-wipe, the double-motion swaying. Yes, I can lull her to sleep when she shouts…sometimes.

(Isaac’s up, filled his face with cereal and told me he wants money for the sleep-in at Clissold Park, this Friday.
‘You have to pay, to sleep in the park, now?’ I say.
‘Sure,’ he says. ‘And you’re driving me to school, now, aren’t you?’
‘But I’ve got an article to finish writing. It’s about Father’s Day. I’ve passed the deadline. I’m in trouble.’
‘Yeah yeah. Just take me, will you?’
‘But you haven’t hung your karate suit up to dry.’
‘That’s your job, Dad.’)

Elsie and Emma and Joe are still asleep. The two stepdaughters are elsewhere. One is living with her boyfriend and is pregnant. The other is kind of living downstairs. But she’s found love as well. So she lives out of a polythene bag between two places. I must ring her to remind her of her dental appointment and her meeting with a careers guidance person on Friday.

It feels like yet again in my life, a new family shape is emerging. I’m different things to different children. Oh, and it looks like I won’t be able to finish this article because the 24 year old wants to get on the computer and check his emails.