Write about what happens to you.
About everything that happens around them, whether at home, on the street or in the world.
This is what motivates the journalist and writer Sergio C. Fanjul (Oviedo, 43 years old) to start creating stories, to tell his own story.
In his latest book,
The Father of Fire
(Aguilar, 2024), he recounts the first two years of his daughter Candela and does so from love, from amazement and also from the pain that caused the coincidence of the arrival of his first daughter to the world and the death of his mother almost at the same time.
A frequent user of social networks, where he has been sharing his daily life for years, he admits that he has rivers of ink about the Carrefour in front of his house or his walks through his Madrid neighborhood.
“So when I found out that he was going to be a father, such a relevant and important life event, how could I not write about it too.”
In the end, his readers, from whom he gets a lot of
feedback
on his publications, convinced him and he gave in to comments like: “Write a book that your daughter will love in the future.”
"And I did it.
Although I'm not entirely sure that he will like it when he grows up.
We will see,” he acknowledges.
In the last stages of writing, Fanjul was also offering different columns in
Mamas & Papas
that took the reader little by little into the adventure that raising Candela was being for him: “I started to write about the arrival and birth of my daughter. on social networks.
Then, when I was hired to write it, I started sending things to the section.
And many parts were being built in parallel.
There were columns that I put in the book and there were parts of the book that I turned into columns.”
More information
Grief: when babies arrive and grandparents leave
ASK.
After Candela was born, two months later her mother became ill: how did she experience it?
ANSWER.
That's the
crux
of the story.
On the one hand, I had a very great feeling of injustice, because at the same time that we were experiencing Candela's birth, which was a beautiful thing and full of joy, suddenly the disappointment appeared that my mother was sick.
Living through that whole horrible process of doing tests and more tests and not knowing if it is cancer or not, and maintaining hope, until in the end you discover that yes, it is cancer and that it is one of the worst.
And that injustice also lived in my mother: the joy of knowing her granddaughter and at the same time knowing that she was going to die.
Q.
What was the process of accepting your mother's death like?
A.
My mother's cancer allowed her to be well almost until the end.
Until one day she went into a tailspin and I had to tell her.
I told her she was going to die.
She told me: “But I want to be with you, I want to be with the girl.”
And this was, is, super sad.
Therefore, I don't know if Candela's arrival before her death was a blessing or not.
On the one hand, it's nice that she knew it, but on the other, she's a bitch that when the girl is born and you're a grandmother, then you're sick and you die.
Q.
How did Candela help you in the process of your mother's illness and subsequent death?
A.
It's funny because at first many people told me: “You have to take refuge in Candela, because it is the light and it will take you out of this darkness.”
But, in reality, the first few days I was kind of angry and his presence bothered me.
The girl was simply doing girlish things and I was starting to grieve and I didn't understand her joy, I was experiencing a cognitive dissonance, one in which she was so happy and didn't let me grieve.
At that moment, her presence reminded me of the injustice of her grandmother not going to see her grow up and I feared that I would stay in that thought forever.
Thank goodness it wasn't like that.
Q.
How did your partner experience all this pain?
A.
This is important because they never ask me.
Liliana, during those days, although we tried to distribute the tasks, obviously, and especially the last month and a half of my mother's life, she practically took care of the girl alone.
Well, I was there, but I had to take care of grandma.
I had to deal with death, because dying is a monumental mess.
I had to do public relations, give information to friends and family, manage the visiting schedule because my mother was very well known... It was like when folklores die, there was a lot of commotion.
Furthermore, my mother's house has two rooms, one where she lived during the last two weeks of her life and another where Liliana and my daughter were, one was full of pain and the other full of love and games.
“Let's not expose the girl to disaster!” I thought.
Two years ago my daughter was born.
Time filled up, full of beauty and fear.
Our life became decentralized.
There was laughter and sorrow, an earthquake.
Life was serious.
At 10 months mom died.
In 'The Father of Fire' (@aguilarlibros, @penguinlibros) I narrate the adventures of being a father.
pic.twitter.com/s0NbDuy38L
— Sergio C. Fanjul (@txepeligro) February 6, 2024
Q.
Did Candela's presence help you in any way when facing grief?
A.
Actually I don't think that having Candela helped me in grieving, because she prevented me from being able to dedicate myself to getting through it 100%.
Grief, my grief, could not have much prominence because we were immersed in parenting and Liliana, in addition, was also enduring something as hard as breastfeeding, and I could not ignore the subject and say: “Since I am grieving and sad, I lose heart.”
I couldn't stop to lick my wounds, to worry about my depression.
It seemed wrong to do it because there was Liliana, she is dusty from breastfeeding the baby at night, and I couldn't be saying: "I don't feel like being here with you because I'm sad."
Q.
You commented in the column
With the arrival of children, married life is no longer what it was
,
published in this section
:
“No matter how much you as a father participate in raising a child, the mother continues to bear the main burden. of caring for a child.”
Can she develop this idea?
A.
Yes, parents, from the moment a woman becomes pregnant, then gives birth, then breastfeeds, play a very secondary role.
And then we gentlemen who feel like the protagonists of history and social life are faced with a moment in which we are mere witnesses.
I have the fictional anthropological theory that we come from a matriarchal society, but at one point in history the lords felt so secondary at birth that they said: “This cannot be.
We have to regain the lead.
Because we don't paint anything in life."
And they created the patriarchy.
I don't know, it's an idea, maybe yes, it all came about like that.
Q.
Even so, you try to make an effort every day, how?
A.
I wanted to be a present father, not perfect, but present, available and in favor of working and learning with all the conflicts that exist, but above all present.
I had an absent father and I wanted to be there.
I also don't want the book to seem like I'm giving fatherhood lessons because all I'm saying is one basic thing: that you have to want to be a father and you have to be present.
Q.
How do they distribute tasks?
Do you think real co-responsibility can be achieved?
A.
We make a rational distribution of tasks and all that, but, in the end, biology already helps the mother to take care of herself more, because she is the one who gives birth, among many other things.
Then there are the roles acquired since childhood, the cultural ones, which make us tend to replicate them.
And also society itself is made so that there is an unequal distribution.
What I want to say is that society, culture, biology, everything conspires so that the distribution falls more on women and I sincerely believe that it is inevitable and we have to walk towards the utopia of 50% co-responsibility.
But, deep down, I don't think it's possible, no matter how hard you try.
Q.
How did the arrival of your daughter affect your life as a couple?
A.
The couple goes from being a thing of fun, of a couple's love, to being a thing of family love, and there are people who don't like this.
There are parents who feel displaced and many conflicts and tensions are generated that must be learned to resolve.
It is true that when we choose a partner we are not thinking about managing a child, we are thinking about going on a trip, having dinner, living together... And when you have a child everything revolves around them.
For example, you go out to dinner as a couple, to a super cool place and you always end up talking about her or the errands that need to be done, but always related to the little one.
I also think that we have lost our sense of humor, we have become more serious.
Now there is less room for jokes.
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