On Paternity Leave & Postpartum Depression

an interview with Daniel Tam-Claiborne

I first met Daniel Tam-Claiborne thanks to a stellar AWP panel facilitated by

Kaitlin Solimine

. A conversation about the tricky combination of the creative life and parenthood, Daniel was the sole father on the panel and his perspective was greatly appreciated. He mentioned a couple of things that caught my interest, namely that he had taken a long paternity leave where he was the primary parent that he felt was essential to his transition to parenthood AND that he struggled with postpartum depression.

Obviously I wanted to interview him.

I recognize that I do not often share the male perspective here.¹ But I’m grateful to Daniel for being game to engage with me around these questions.

I have been lauding the importance of paternity leave since I started writing this newsletter. In my love letter to expectant moms, I tell them to ask their partner to take as much leave as their company grants. This shouldn’t even be something women have to ask their partners to do. It should be expected. But as we know, even if men do receive leave, they often don’t take it.

From that post:

This recent article reports that “while almost half of men support the idea of paid paternity leave, fewer than 5% take more than two weeks. In 2004, California began a paid family leave program that provides a portion of a new parent’s salary for up to eight weeks…it increased the leave women took by almost five weeks and the leave that men took by two to three days.”

When I wrote about becoming a Part-Time Mom, I talked about how I was eager to become a part-time mom because I had been the default parent since birth. I think fathers taking paternity leave on their own could help fight this trend.

In another post I focused on just how lackluster the average length of leave a father takes is for what his partner needs:

10 Days Is Not Enough

So I wanted to hear from someone who bucked that trend. Who not only had paid leave offered to him, but took it.

Obviously given how few parents have access to paid leave, any kind of paid leave is a luxury. And yet it continues to be a luxury many fathers forgo. But as Daniel notes below, his leave allowed him to step fully into the role of a parent as well as understand how hard being home with an infant truly is.

Daniel is a multiracial writer, multimedia producer, and nonprofit director. He is the author of the short story collection What Never Leaves, and his writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, The Rumpus, HuffPost, and elsewhere. A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, his debut novel, Transplants, was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and just went on sale. He is on tour this month at select cities. See all his forthcoming events here.

Below are excerpts from our conversation conducted over email this month.

thecaregap

A post shared by @thecaregap

I first came in contact with you at an AWP panel on birthing books and babies, and you acknowledged the fact that you hadn't birthed a baby (although I think it is best not to assume how our children arrive in our families). You noted on that panel that you took a long paternity leave, six months, if I recall. Can you talk about how you were able to take such a leave and what that time looked like for you?

I feel fortunate to live in Washington State, which has one of the best parental leave policies in the country. Birthing parents get 16 weeks of paid parental leave and non-birthing parents get twelve. My partner, Meghan, and I each took the maximum amount available, as well as an additional month each using sick days and PTO. That first month we did together, knowing that it would be all-hands-on-deck in those early weeks. Then, Meghan did the next four months while I went back to work and we swapped when it was time for me to start my three.

Prior to deciding to have a kid, Meghan and I were committed to equal parenting, which looks different for different people, but part of that was always intending to each take as much leave as we could. I was fortunate that my employer was willing to grant me that time because it didn’t incur any financial loss on their end. But the gendered expectations for parents are still very present. I was still expected to work 10 hours a week—the assumption perhaps being that even as the full-time caretaker for part of Jun’s early life, I would have to do less.

We struggled early with lactation so made the decision to switch entirely to bottles within the first couple of weeks. In conjunction with that, we also moved our daughter to her own room, flouting conventional medical advice. The upside of this was that it allowed for a more even distribution of labor. Starting when Jun was three weeks old until we sleep trained her at six months, I took the first shift, doing wakings from 8pm to 3 am. Then Meghan took over from 3 am to 10 am. This meant we could each get a relatively full night of sleep—so long as we did so with almost no shared time in bed—because we each knew the routine and could execute it independently.

What do you wish more fathers knew about the experience of an extended family leave?

There’s a lot of research that suggests that parental leave is good for father-baby bonding as well as parents’ relationship with each other. But spending real time with infants actually has a direct correlation with better preparing the brain for fatherhood and being able to be more effective, instinctual caregivers.²

It was also hands-down the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Without having the experience of taking an extended parental leave, I would never have been able to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that caring for a child is more challenging than any day at the office. Full stop. Although having the overlap with Meghan was crucial for creating a family bond and getting the lay of the land together, the time alone with my daughter was the only way for me to learn how to approach and solve daily baby problems fully on my own. I think parents often default to whoever is “better” with the baby whenever difficult situations arise, which often just means the mother. Dads tend to have less hands-on experience troubleshooting independently due to more limited family leave, but an extended time off work could help to level the playing field.

It also gave me tremendous appreciation for my mom, who raised me and my sister as a single mother.

You mentioned that you struggled with postpartum depression. I’m not sure I’ve heard a father mention this before. What did this look like for you? How did you ultimately get it diagnosed? What do you wish more people understood about the toll parenthood can take on both parents?

I expected that caring for my daughter would be difficult, but I didn’t anticipate being faced with a depression so all-consuming I spent many nights in tears. I’m lucky not to have had significant bouts of depression in my life, but as a result, I was wholly unprepared for what happened after my daughter’s birth. I loathed the relentlessness. I dreaded the sudden fits. But I also found myself seized by a hopelessness I’d never before experienced. I saw my old self slipping away, and with it, the simple joys that made life worth living. I kept waiting for some signal that my life with Meghan would resemble its carefree past or that my indifference toward my daughter would suddenly turn to cherishing.

Instead of talking about it, I hid my negative feelings. I didn’t feel like I had any right to complain. Fathers have historically been ancillary to the project of parenthood, and I knew Meghan was struggling, too. While it was never officially diagnosed, I realized that I was very likely suffering from postpartum depression, a phenomenon I associated with new mothers but didn’t know could affect fathers, too. Putting a name to the intense shame I felt about my early relationship to both my daughter and parenthood helped reduce the stigma of sharing what I was feeling with others.

In the panel, you discussed the need for more honest writing about the experience of fatherhood as much of the fatherhood memoir space is more laced with humor or sarcasm rather than honest depictions. I know you interviewed Peter Ho Davies for the Rumpus and I loved his novel A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself which touched on the nuances of marriage and parenting. How can we help men see that the transition to fatherhood is just as monumental of an identity shift as motherhood? How might that help even the field in terms of what is expected of each parent?

I think that the first step is being willing to have frank and sometimes difficult conversations with the men in your life. The loneliness epidemic among men, especially, has been well documented, and I think it contributes to a culture of silence around issues of real material concern like the identity shift that occurs after becoming a parent. Unlike the ecosystem of books and resources and community available to moms in a similar position, I found almost nothing for dads.

I think a lot of men, myself included, are in denial. For birthing parents, the physical changes associated with pregnancy, birth, and the related hormone shifts, train the brain to keep a small human alive. For men, we don’t benefit from those bodily cues, so while we may understand, intellectually, that “things will change,” it’s often devoid of a lot of real-life application. It’s super important to put some of those transitions into tangible terms—actually plotting out schedules, responsibilities, division of labor—in order to make the experience of becoming a father feel more embodied. I highly recommend Fair Play as a way of approaching the many expectations and trade-offs associated with new parenthood as well as the book Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home.

Are there any books you recommend that help bring father’s experiences to light?

I’ve personally found a real gap in terms of memoir or nonfiction written by men that address the concerns and questions rooted at the heart of the radical transformation that is fatherhood. The New Father: A Dad's Guide to the First Year was helpful in getting the milestones down but the tone remained largely impersonal and detached. Most of the reading I did about parenthood that felt like it touched on the more personal challenges and triumphs came through the work of mothers—To Have and To Hold: Motherhood, Marriage, and the Modern Dilemma; The Blue Jay's Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood; Cherish the First 6 Weeks; and, of course, everything by Emily Oster.

That said, I’m very excited to pick up a copy of

Kevin Maguire

’s upcoming book, tentatively, titled The New Rules of Fatherhood, due out in June 2026. In the meantime, his Substack, The New Fatherhood, has been invaluable source of clarity and respite for me ever since becoming a dad.

Has your experience impacted whether you plan to have another child?

Yes. Although we haven't completely ruled it out yet, we were always planning to be "one and done" and my/our experience early-on with Juniper solidified that. Plus, it felt like having a second, for us, ran the risk of really negatively impacting our relationship, our creative passions, or both--a subject for another convo.

Thank you, Daniel, for opening up about your experiences. Check out his new novel Transplants, available here.

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1. I’ve interviewed gay dads here and divorce lawyer Aaron Thomas here.

2.

Darby Saxbe

is doing a lot of research in this area and has a book forthcoming called Dad Brain.