‘Daddy’ was the first word that really stuck around for my son. He was slow to speak and then words would materialise, but fail to catch on. When listening for little words here and there, I realised certain sounds would appear and then retract suddenly, never to be seen again, like a groundhog disappearing into its burrow. ‘All gone’ was there for a while, so too a pleasingly Dublin-esque ‘howiya?’ but neither was reliably present for more than a week or two.
Until Daddy. Daddy, it was clear, was here to stay. Speaking as the daddy in question, it was endlessly validating to be addressed by my proper title, and 8,000 times a day no less. The effect was only slightly cheapened by his habit of addressing every other object, person, concept and place in the exact same fashion.
‘Daddeeee,’ he’d say to the postman or a passing dog. ‘Dadddee,’ to his favourite toy, or the steaming remains of a recently fertilised nappy. ‘Dadddee,’ he’d declare in the WhatsApp videos my wife would send me of him greeting not me, but his new father; a crushed disc of Babybel cheese.
‘Mama’ was slower to emerge, but it is, crucially, always specific. When he says mama, he means his mother, which lends the word a little more significance.
‘Nana’ came next, once we arrived in Dublin to my in-laws, and decided he needed a handy word for his doting grandmother. All of a sudden his slowness to speak was forgotten and within days his repertoire had swollen to include ‘cheese’ (when saying cheers with his bottle) ‘cheese’ (when having his photo taken) and ‘cheese’ (when handed a Babybel that he no longer mistakes for his own father).
My father-in-law is currently luxuriating in the name of ‘Gaggy’, which we’ll admit is a fair compromise given that grandad doesn’t have a repeated two syllable form like dada, mama or nana. I’ll be happy with this, so long as it doesn’t stick around for too long. We don’t want to become like one of those posh families who adopt each other’s childish nicknames, the type that often led to Irish farmers being solemnly evicted by landlords with names like Poopsie Fotheringham and Binky Carmichael.
Only with my own father was there a setback to all this progress. I still address him as Daddy because I’m Northern Irish and saying ‘Dad’ in that accent makes you sound like Brad Pitt in The Devil’s Own. Perhaps inevitably, the time I spent calling another, more beloved, adult ‘Daddy’ proved confusing and my son shifted ‘Daddy’ on to the elder Mr O’Reilly, stripping me of the title entirely. It turns out that my boy regards Daddies like Popes, and is unwilling to recognise any more than one at a time. Like a bent copper in Line of Duty, he demanded a Daddy at least one rank senior, and I spent Christmas 2019 as my son’s half brother. Sure, what’s in a name anyway?
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