Bevan Morgan

Intro music written, performed, and recorded by John Bright. You can find more of his original compositions on his YouTube channel here.

CN: ALCOHOLISM, ADDICTION, MENTAL HEALTH

I want to give you some background about me and the purpose of the show before we continue. So please bear with me for a moment if that's all right. My name is Bevan Morgan. I'm married to my amazing wife, Gemma. And we have a one-year-old daughter named Ava Kennedy Morgan.

I love my daughter more than anything. And after a year, I'm starting to get used to some of the trials and tribulations of being a dad and getting through problems without dissolving into a pile of immovable sand. But for most of my parenthood journey, it was an incredibly isolating experience. The guilt of finding it such a negative one was so overwhelming that I often struggled to envisage a future where I would even have a family.

Despite Gemma's insistent protestations when I spoke to her about these things, I couldn't believe her. I couldn't imagine her staying with me because of how poorly I was coping and how horrible I could sometimes be. It's been tough since we decided to have a child because that decision was tough for me. For most of my adult life, I didn't want to have kids, or perhaps more specifically, I didn't believe I should. We'll get to unpack some of the stuff later on and throughout the show. But for the moment, we'll park it. And I'll continue giving the Cliff's Notes version of how things changed.

It wasn't until I met Gemma that the question of kids started to arise because she wanted kids. And she made that clear early, so I knew it right from the start. And I knew I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life. So, having a kid would be a part of the cards in the future. After years of talking about it more and more, we finally bit the bullet. And I said I was ready, which wasn't true at all. But you're never really prepared, are you?

Even though I knew there was no moment where it would suddenly all click together, and the anxiety would disappear, I hoped that if we had at least made the decision and were committing to it, there would be more clarity, and I would start to change. It wasn't quite that simple, though.

The pregnancy was tough, as was the birth itself. I loved my daughter from the first moment. Of course, I did. That's as biological as anything else. But that doesn't necessarily help things. It's a disorienting experience to know that you love someone but often find yourself struggling in your life with them. I would hear people tell me it was rewarding, but there have been many times when it hasn't been. In those early days, for example, nothing is rewarding about sleeping in 90-minute cycles and living with the constant fear that your child isn't getting enough fluids or isn't safe and their best and near or isn't doing what they're meant to be doing developmentally.

As time progresses, your child can give you some signals and responses, and bonding can build. Some mothers have a fundamental instinct that comes from being an incubator for nine months—but standing in the kitchen at 3 am, after 60 to 90 minutes of shallow dozing with a baby screaming at you, while you desperately try to prepare a bottle in the dark. It's not rewarding. It's like punishment. And I constantly questioned how anyone could want to do this or enjoy it.

So, what exactly is the purpose of the show? I want to look at parenthood through the perspectives of emotions such as reluctance, anxiety, and vulnerability and through the lens of chronic and lifelong mental illness. I want to share the ups and downs of my journey in part so I can process them, but mainly in the hopes that others can relate. In the early days of the pregnancy, I tried to seek the voices of people who sounded like me, and I mostly came up with nothing. Most voices speaking about getting ready for parenthood from a father's perspective were obsessed with trivial crap, like losing the ability to go out with the fellas. But I didn't go out with the fellas before. I'm an anti-social grouch who doesn't drink. So I'm not a lot of fun at the best of times.

Other resources made me feel like a failure before I started. None of it felt relevant, and while I'm sure there's great stuff out there, I struggled to find it when I could have used it. So I'm just trying to create another resource, the one I hoped would be there when I was seeking help.

I just want honest and vulnerable discussions around parenthood for anyone in a similar situation. My experiences are not uncommon, and they are certainly not even remotely unique. I know that many people, fathers and mothers alike, will have similar experiences and similar questions that I had, and frankly, much worse experiences.

But I don't want to feel alone. And I don't want others to feel alone, either.

So, we know why I am a father. That's a pretty easy question to answer. I love my wife and want to be in a family with her. The unpleasant one to unpack is why I initially didn't want to be a father. And that one is much more difficult to answer because it brings many painful memories, tremendous vulnerability, and lots of honesty. It's what I want to focus on today. Because when I told people I didn't want kids, they always scoffed and thought I was lying or trying to be edgy. I always heard it would change and how 'you're so good with kids, you want them'. I'd have to explain that I didn't hate kids. I quite liked kids. I didn't want them because there was no way I had the mental capacity or resilience to ensure their lives were lived healthily and with love. I just began to embody the character of the aloof manchild. While part of me probably is that, there's no doubt that part of me was playing up to the role because it was too embarrassing to talk about the deeper emotions under the surface and the all-encompassing fears I felt.

It was a night about ten years ago when I lived in London alone. I was not in a positive headspace. And I plan to go over this period in a bit more detail in another episode in a few weeks. But it was late at night to set the scene, probably early morning. It was dark except for the light of my laptop and the occasional flicker of my lighter. And whatever ambient light was outside the window I had open. I was in a room about the size of a shoe box. It was disgusting. I was living my worst life. I was lonely, and I was wasted. The specifics don't matter. But I was pretty far gone. I was in the midst of a failed attempt to get sober. Because it was a relapse, everything was hitting me pretty hard. And this one night, I don't know what it was about the particular mix of substances, the brain chemistry I had at that time or exactly what the circumstances were. But I was having these horrifyingly vivid visions of what I looked like. And I don't mean hallucinations. It was more like the most empathy you could ever experience. I was looking at myself from the position of other people around me. I could see myself through the eyes of my parents, former bosses, friends, and girlfriends. I was replaying incidents in my mind from their perspectives.

You know, when you do bad stuff and bury it deep down, in that part of you that keeps smothering the memory for the rest of your life, in a vain hope that it will eventually die? Well, I went into that place, and I was digging. All of these memories came rushing back in the most suffocating way. And then I started thinking about my parents. They had sort of flashed him before. But now I began to really, really dig in. I was nearly 27. At the time, my prospects were bleak. I was broke; I was working entry-level office jobs designed for people coming out of school. I had torpedoed a relationship within a couple of months because of my drinking. I was rudderless, directionless, lost. And I didn't want to be alive all that much. That's not to say I was suicidal – it was more nihilism, I suppose. I'd been dealing with depression for most of the past 12 to 13 years at that point. And I didn't know that wasn't normal. There were things you could do about that other than occasionally taking fluoxetine and spending every waking hour intoxicated.

As I sat there alone, on the end of a single bed in a box room in the dark, overlooking an overgrown lawn that foxes were breeding in, it hit me. I was never going to get married and have kids. I could barely survive the day at that stage of my life. Everything I touched into crap. There is no way anyone like me should be let anywhere near the maternity ward.

I was constantly searching for a single solution to all my problems. That realisation wasn't as painful as expected; it was almost like relief. I didn't understand mental illness or even the most essential parts of living as an adult at that stage. And that's not to say I do now. But I have a better grasp of things. I'm not happy in New Zealand. I'll move overseas; everything will fall into place. I'm lonely; I'll hook up with the first girl who shows interest, and everything will fall into place. I'm worried I have got addiction issues. Well, I'll sober up, and everything will fall into place. Learning that you can't do that took me a long time. You need to keep moving and address all your little issues differently. And there is no finish line.

But at this time, I was looking for a single solution. So it was freeing to knock family life out of the way as a goal because it would be much easier to find single answers when I wouldn't have to involve marriage and a child. Then I thought about my parents again and all I had put them through and was putting them through. And then I imagined the conversation I would have with them one day to tell them that while I knew they wanted grandkids, they weren't getting any from me.

You can't explain these moments without sounding cliche because it all sounds cinematic. When you present these sorts of incidents outside context, they say they happened out of nowhere. In contrast, it's much more Hegelian than that. For years, there had been battling thoughts acting as thesis and antithesis, rumbling away, and this realisation was the synthesis. So, I'm not trying to convince you that I'd never thought about these questions of parenthood or even marriage. Of course, I had; whenever I got excited that I might have made a potential partner to solve all my issues, I would embrace the thoughts and picture the future in the most insanely unrealistic ways possible. I would imagine getting my photo taken at the top of Everest without thinking about all the crevasses, blizzards, and dead bodies that would need to be encountered to get to that point. Okay, dead bodies is a bit dramatic.

But as soon as I inevitably screwed up my circumstances, I would push those thoughts aside because to confront them ahead would be to face my failings as a person. And that's a tricky proposition to handle, mainly when you're already dealing with substantial emotional pain.

A recent breakup, years of anxiety and self-loathing, aided by an unexpectedly potent cocktail of narcotics, made all this come to the surface for whatever reason that night. To sound even more cliche, I suppose I imagine when things like this happen to us, we find ourselves at an intersection, a junction, around about, or whatever roading terminology you want to use. There seem to be many ways to go. Some will use it as fuel to make positive changes. Others will work their asses off, burying it and pretending nothing happened.

I chose a different route, but it is still popular for people in a similar situation. I decided to accept my fate, run up the white flag and use this realisation as an excuse to give up and to embrace a sense of nihilism and selfishness about my life. For me, sitting there in those moments, I wasn't going to have kids. But not because I hated them or wanted to be some wild bachelor for the rest of my life. Some people don't want to have kids because they don't like kids well. They want to live unburdened by the indifference and rigours that start to dictate their lives when a child manifests itself into their existence. And that's okay. Kids aren't for everyone.

But the reasons why people might say they don't want kids are complex, and you shouldn't just assume you know why. People deserve to have others be patient with them and not tell them what they think or what they will think. I didn't think I deserved kids. I didn't think I deserved the wife. And I felt that I would have neither and that I couldn't have either. I was poison to anyone I encountered in my life. So inevitably, I'd be poison on a family, too.

That narrative began to take over as one of the dominant narratives underpinning my existence. Even when we decided to start trying for a child, I didn't engage with the idea of what fatherhood would look like on a significant level. I do most of the life admin in our lives, which is horrifying for anyone who knows me. I'm not good at it. It just turns out that neither is Gemma. She's the breadwinner in our house and is focused on her career. So, I do most of it by default.

But I did almost zero admin for preparing to have a baby outside of trying to find books to reassure me and make me feel better. Everything else got put into the too-hard basket, and things were working out without me needing to do much, so I didn't try to change the situation. Gemma, meanwhile, apparently picked up a PhD in obstetrics and reproduction. She had everything planned to the nth degree, and I literally only just found out what that felt like for her. When I told her about the show and listed the episodes I was planning to do, she told me I should do one on the journey towards getting pregnant. In my seemingly never-ending quest to ensure that nobody ever nominated me for the husband of the year, I told her that I couldn't do an episode on that because there was not enough content. The show would be over in five minutes because it was also straightforward.

After the rage-induced shock of my bold statement wore off, she quickly provided me with a counter-narrative, lest I go through the rest of my life thinking that Ava just happened because getting pregnant is such a doddle. Looking back, I think I was just dismissive of the idea that it needed to be worked at. And I have no doubt that this was because working on it would mean tackling everything head-on. But also, I think it was just dismissive because of all the years as a teenager being told that teen pregnancy was a fate worse than death (which, by the way, can we stop that?), and it would happen if you even so much looked at a girl without using prophylactics.

My knowledge of the intricacies of how life comes to fruition has improved since then. But I do think that messaging has also distorted my perception somewhat of just what is involved in getting pregnant a lot of the time, particularly for the person hosting the baby. For Gemma, getting pregnant involved a lot of research planning, medical intervention and logistics, all of which I ignored and went along with. So yeah, I'm a late bloomer.

It's only since Ava came into our lives that I have had to confront my fears, anxieties, and insecurities meaningfully. It didn't help that, as I mentioned earlier when I tried to engage with these thoughts, I was discouraged by the information, particularly for men I found. COVID also got in the way of us doing things like hāpu wananga, and missing out on those warm-ups meant I belly-flopped into the pool's deep end while wearing cement board shorts.

So that's what this show is. It's me trying to unpack my emotions and fears surrounding this ludicrous journey that we call parenthood. I'm a father, but I do more than just want to speak to fathers. I want to reach anyone thinking of embarking on the journey, people who are on the journey, people who can't take the journey, and people who have finished the journey. Anyone remotely within the vicinity of the parenthood journey.

Over the next bunch of episodes, I'm going to cover a variety of different topics and relate different experiences in various ways. Some will be bleak, and others will sound selfish. And that's because sometimes parenthood is bleak or selfish or bleak and selfish. But if I do a halfway decent job, I'll also be able to express my profound love for my daughter. Despite all my mental misgivings, this isn't an advice show. I don't have any advice to give. I'm a father who barely holds it together, and by other people's standards, I'm not. But in my better moments, I understand that it is okay and that I'm not alone.

So if you're feeling reluctant or anxious and don't back yourself as a parent or you don't think you're good enough, I see you. I can't tell you you're good enough because I don't know you, but I see you, and you're absolutely 100% not alone.