By the time you’re reading this I will be enjoying my first ever Father’s Day from the other side of the bench. Already I know my son’s looking forward to it, the way he watches the calendar, or perks up when I say things like, ‘Wow, Father’s Day is really creeping on us, eh?’ or last night, when I opened my laptop and found a few tabs open for wacky gifts and nerdy books. ‘Not very discreet of him,’ I remarked to my wife, who stared at me with a puzzled expression when I showed her his searches from the night before. ‘But then Amazon’s interface makes private browsing quite hard – and he is only 11 months old’.

Looking forward to such chintzy celebrations is, I’m sure, facile and stupid. But I can’t help it, because I am also chintzy and stupid. I’m aware that simply fathering a child is, in and of itself, completely unimpressive, as evidenced by all the terrible men whose Twitter bios say things like: ‘dad to 2 beautiful angels’ rather than something more accurate like: ‘I tweet an awful lot at female newsreaders’ or ‘I am a racist.’

More than that, there’s the sense that, even after 11 months, my dad keys still haven’t arrived. I’m aware of the irony of me saying this here, in the weekly column I write for a national newspaper that is specifically about being a dad. But it’s true. I don’t mean that I don’t love being a father, that it doesn’t so often consume me that I can barely think of anything else. I certainly don’t mean that I sometimes get halfway home from the shops and realise I’ve been pushing an empty pram for half an hour. I simply mean I’ve spent so much more of my life putting ‘dads’ in an altogether more impressive category than that in which I place myself.

I still think of myself as ‘a person who happens to have a son’ while ‘dads’ are, by contrast, some other race of men, who have conversations about motorway renovations and lend each other drills. I don’t have a shed. I’ve never slapped the top of a friend’s car as they’ve driven away so they know how much I love them. In all these ways, I feel I have seen the true face of dad, and found myself not quite there.

I doubt a card and a little present will make any difference, but it will be nice, as maybe I don’t think about being a dad because it’s so much bloody effort actually being a dad, and only when at rest will I take stock. At the risk of breaking through my ego-protecting layer of self-deprecation, I don’t really care as I’m still chuffed to even be thought of as a dad at all, and my son’s dad particularly. If keeping at it means I eventually find some cardigan-clad corner of my own soul, a sacred spot to build model aeroplanes, a nested refuge where I can internalise my dadness, once and for all, then all the better. I just won’t be putting it in my Twitter bio when I do.

Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats