The first time Gary Jenkins became a father, in 1995, his priorities changed in an instant. “I was a sales director, on the crest of a wave,” he says. “Becoming a father seemed to complement the full set: the car, the house, the job, the good life.” Holding his new daughter, however, he realised that he had never truly loved anything until that moment. “Suddenly, here I was, plunged into something beyond words, beyond my comprehension.”
When, 21 years later, his second child, a son, was born, everything about that first experience came back to him: the sleepless nights, the nappy technique, the feeling that he had a new vantage point on “the circle of life”. But this time around, fatherhood felt more “visceral”, as he puts it. “The poignancy is much more real. I’m aware that I’m at the end of that loop as another life is coming into it. My time with my son feels much more limited and hence much more precious.”
