PARENTHOOD UNFILTERED: The First Good Dad I Ever Knew

By Part Time Working Mummy

In this column, mother of six Rachaele Hambleton shares the realities of modern family life from its chaos and courage to the everyday moments that shape us, raising children, navigating challenges, and finding meaning in the midst of it all. Insta: @parttimeworkingmummy

I’ve found myself reflecting on fathers or dads, not just the ones we’re given, but the ones who choose us and how, in the end, it’s presence that matters more than absence.

When I met my husband Josh twelve years ago, I realised something that had never really occurred to me before: I had grown up with almost no positive father role models.

In fact, I can count them on less than one hand.

As I write this, two men come to mind. My best friend Leila’s dad, Steve, who quietly helped raise me when I was little without even knowing that’s what he was doing, just by allowing me to be in his home, by making me laugh, asking about my day, cooking the best curries and showing me what a safe home looked like, and my Uncle John, my dad’s brother, who lived in Manchester and I often went years without seeing him. Those two men, in their own ways, when I was around them, showed me what kindness and consistency from a man could look like.

My parents separated when I began primary school. My mum left our family home in Devon and moved to Lincolnshire. Three weeks later, my dad moved our neighbour (who was his new girlfriend) and her two children into our home.

Overnight, life for my three siblings and me changed completely. My two eldest moved out, and my brother and I were left there. Before my mum left, my dad had been a workaholic; it was one of the reasons their marriage broke down, but after she left, he buried himself even deeper in work. He was rarely home, always away, always working.

What makes it stranger looking back is that we weren’t poor. In fact, I’d say we were pretty wealthy we had a huge detached home in the countryside, he ran a successful business, but despite that, we never did the kinds of things other families did together. We never went on family holidays, we never had days out. There were no spontaneous trips, no shared adventures, no family memories built around time spent together. Those moments just didn’t exist.

When I try to think of memories with my dad, there aren’t many. A few Saturdays stand out when I went to work with him, I’d spend time with whatever customer he was visiting to fix their toilet or tap or fit a new bathroom, whilst he would just be working. That was the thing, anything we did together revolved around his job. We’d listen to The Police albums in his work van, and he would always pick up a hitchhiker. I used to listen to him chat to them as he drove them on their way to their destination, and wonder why he wasn’t interested in things I did like he was a total stranger, looking back – he never really knew who I was.

In truth, he never really knew any of us.

I became a teenager and went into foster care. And I suppose looking back, when you grow up without examples of healthy relationships, you often walk straight into the opposite, which is exactly what I did at the age of nineteen. I met the man who would become my first husband and the father of my two eldest daughters. He was almost ten years older than me and already a father to three little girls.

The violence in that relationship started within weeks. Domestic abuse is often described as a dripping tap; by the time you see it, you can’t escape it but for me, and many others, the violence begins immediately, and once it starts like that, it’s also incredibly hard to escape.

There was shouting, intimidation and violence. It didn’t matter whether the children were there or not. My eldest daughter spent the first six years of her life in that house, terrified of him. Then, when I finally fled the relationship in 2010, the abuse for my girls didn’t stop, nor the post-separation abuse with me. They still saw him every other weekend, and the abuse continued in different ways. The reality of leaving an abusive relationship is that sometimes you don’t actually escape the person who hurt you.

By the time my second daughter was born in 2009, I finally confronted my own past. I told my dad about things that had happened during my childhood, things I had carried for years, things that went on when he was absent working away. That night, he stood up to leave my house and said something I will never forget. He told me that if the things I had said were true, he wouldn’t be able to see me again because he had allowed them to happen and that would make him just as guilty. And if they weren’t true, he wouldn’t see me again either.

In that moment, I realised I had lost him either way.

And that was the end of our relationship. I had grown up without a father figure, and today I’ve had no father at all for the last 17 years, and my children have not had a grandad.

After I left my girls’ dad, life was chaotic for a while. I had a short-lived relationship, and my third daughter was born. By that point, I had three little girls and a life that often felt like survival rather than stability.

And then, in 2014, I met Josh. Josh had two sons from his marriage, and at the time, they were in the middle of family court proceedings. Their mum was struggling with addiction, and the situation had become incredibly difficult for the boys, in 2016 they were placed into Josh’s care. What I loved about him was that there was never any question about what he would do; he sold his marital home and used every bit of the equity to pay for barristers and solicitors so he could fight for them, not because it was easy but because they were his children.

When Josh came into my life, my youngest daughter wasn’t even a year old and suddenly, for the first time, I was seeing what a partner and a father could really look like, should look like and it wasn’t just the big things, in fact, it was the ordinary, everyday ones that made my head blow up.

He made her a bottle in the middle of the night, seeing the kitchen bin was full and just taking it out, cooking dinner, and doing the school runs. Just the constant work of family life with five children under the age of ten shared between two people instead of being carried by one.

There was never a moment when it felt like it was “his boys” and “my girls”. From the very beginning, we were simply a family. One unit. He raised my daughters as his own, just as fiercely as he fought for his sons and then in 2019, we brought our son into the world together.

When I look at our children now, I realise how different their story is from mine. They are growing up seeing what love, respect, and partnership actually look like; they have a father figure in their lives who shows up for them every single day. And for me, my husband has helped me heal.

In my book, I wrote about how becoming a parent feels like a light switch moment. The minute you first lay eyes on your child, something shifts. A switch flicks somewhere deep inside you. Without warning, your whole world rearranges itself, and this tiny human suddenly becomes the centre of everything.

But I’ve also come to realise that for some people, that switch simply never flicks.

It didn’t for my dad. And he’s never pretended that it did, not to anyone that’s questioned him in the last (almost) two decades; it’s not something for him that’s ever been up for discussion.

But that switch flicked for Josh. It flicked for Leila’s dad, Steve. It flicked for my Uncle John.

And slowly, over the years, I’ve realised something else too….

Life becomes a lot lighter when you stop trying to win the love of the people who never felt that switch turn on, and start building your world around the ones who did.

The ones who show up.

The ones who stay.

The ones who love without hesitation.

Because when you find those men the genuinely good, kind men they don’t just change the lives of the children they raise. Sometimes, without even realising it, they help change the lives of the spectators who get to watch them parent.