Returning to work after paternity leave

I returned to work this week after four weeks of paternity leave. Four weeks is both nothing and everything. Long enough to fall fully into the rhythm of newborn life - the night feeds, the disorientation, the strange intimacy of being needed at all hours - and short enough that stepping back into paid work feels abrupt, almost artificial. The inbox reopens. Deadlines resume. Conversations pick up as if nothing has shifted. But everything has shifted.

Coming back to work with a four-week-old baby at home, and a toddler who still needs more than I sometimes feel capable of giving, has forced a sharper reflection than I might otherwise have allowed myself: what kind of parent, organiser, writer, and human being do I want to be in this political moment?

The broader context makes that question harder to avoid. We are living through deepening inequality, a resurgent and emboldened right, intensifying precarity, and the steady erosion of collective infrastructure. The stakes feel high and immediate. For twenty years I’ve tried to respond to that urgency through organising - building relationships, holding spaces, facilitating conversations, supporting estate-based projects, mentoring younger organisers, and contributing to a culture of class struggle that is durable rather than reactive.

For the last decade in particular, that work hasn’t been separate from my life. It has shaped my friendships, my commitments, and how I measure myself. Even when I told myself I would scale back after the birth of my first child in 2023, the reality was more complicated. Organising rarely disappears cleanly; it lingers in habits of availability, in the instinct to say yes, in the quiet sense that you should still be able to carry what you once carried.

With our second child arriving last month, the limits of that arrangement are no longer theoretical. Two children under three reorganise time at a structural level. Sleep is fragmented. Attention is constantly interrupted. Care cannot be postponed or delegated to a more convenient moment. Returning to work has underlined that reality: I cannot simply resume being who I was before.

At the same time, I am finishing my PhD. Four and a half years of funding created a buffer I probably didn’t fully appreciate while living inside it. Financial stability meant I didn’t have to fret constantly about money. Flexibility meant I could take on organising responsibilities without calculating every hour. That period allowed me to be consistent - to be someone people could rely on.

Now the funding has ended and the thesis is in its final stages. The buffer has gone just as family responsibilities have intensified. The overlap feels significant: one long project closing as another, far more unpredictable one, expands. Intellectual labour meeting the raw immediacy of nappies, nursery drop-offs, and trying to soothe a baby at 3am before getting up for work.

Over the past two years, trying to be the dad my eldest needs has also meant grappling with my own childhood in ways I couldn’t avoid. The psychological, emotional, and material struggles of growing up do not stay neatly contained in the past once you are responsible for someone else’s safety and sense of stability. They re-emerge as questions: what do I repeat, what do I interrupt, and how far away can I move my children’s experience from my own?

A great deal of energy has gone into that quiet work of unlearning and repair. In the process, I’ve had to admit something difficult: I have dropped the ball as an organiser more than I ever used to. Reliability and regularity were once among my strengths. I took pride in being steady, present, consistent. Over the last two years that steadiness has thinned. Not because my political commitments have disappeared, but because those same capacities have been redirected toward parenting.

With two children, that shift will deepen. This isn’t something that can be solved through better scheduling or renewed discipline. It requires adjusting my expectations of myself and being more honest about the promises I make to others. Letting go of an identity built around constant availability carries grief. But it also creates space to imagine a different form of commitment - one that does not depend on overextension.

I will continue working within ARC and aim to find ways of being useful that are compatible with this phase of life. I expect I will continue mentoring some of the younger organisers I’ve met over the last decade, relationships grounded more in accumulated trust than constant presence. But my time of regular facilitation, of holding extended political spaces and conversations, of being a consistently available sounding board for estate-based projects, is probably over for now - at least for a few years.

Organising may not be receding so much as relocating. Alongside a small group of other parents with young children, I’ve begun meeting to explore the possibility of creating a Sheffield Red School - something rooted in political education, childcare realities, and our shared material needs. In some ways this feels like a return to where I began: organising around my own lived conditions. Twenty years ago that meant bringing together prisoners (past and present) and LGBTQ groups because, as a queer ex-prisoner, that intersection was my life. Parenting may now become another site of that same strategic honesty.

Writing feels central to this transition. It allows me to remain politically engaged without pretending I can operate at the same pace as before. I have always preferred accessibility over academic distance, even while recognising that the two can inform each other.

And yet, if I’m honest, I carry an unease about leaning more heavily into writing. Part of me still believes that writing can be a fucking cop out - a move available primarily to those in a material position that allows them the time, literacy, and relative stability to sit and reflect rather than knock doors, facilitate meetings, or show up week after week in difficult rooms. I’ve spent years wary of the tendency to substitute commentary for commitment. The left has no shortage of analysis detached from practice.

I don’t want this turn toward writing to become that. If I continue here, it has to remain accountable to lived struggle, to the messy realities of organising, to the constraints that shape most people’s lives. Writing, at its best, can clarify, connect, and make experience legible. At its worst, it can become an alibi. Holding that tension openly feels important.

I also suspect I will write about parenting itself. Over the years I’ve written extensively about my own father, and some of that work has felt like the most honest writing I’ve managed. Turning toward the relationship from the other side - writing as a father rather than only as a son - feels uncertain, but potentially necessary. Not as confession, but as an exploration of what it means to try to do things differently.

For now, this feels less like a retreat than a reorientation. The kind of organiser, writer, parent, and human I want to be in this political context cannot be built on exhaustion and overpromising. It has to be rooted in care that is sustainable, in commitments that can survive interrupted sleep and shifting responsibilities.

I plan to keep this Substack going, with one post each Thursday. It will remain free and open to read. If you find value in it and are in a position to do so, I’d encourage you to consider taking out a paid subscription - that support genuinely makes the time to write possible. But whether or not you can afford to subscribe, if you think this space is worth owt, please share it across your networks as widely as you can. Eight years ago, when I was promoting Chav Solidarity, the hellscape that is Facebook was at least useful for shameless self-promotion. That usefulness has largely evaporated. If this writing is going to travel, it will do so because people pass it on deliberately - through email lists, group chats, conversations, and whatever platforms still have life in them. That kind of informal circulation matters more than ever.