TV’s Kate Garraway thinks I’ve been emasculated. She said it to my face, live on ITV’s Lorraine, in front of everyone. This troubles me. Despite leaving an extremely butch career in software (I wasn’t Vin Diesel enough to do any coding, but I did write leaflets and order promotional USB sticks) to look after my children, I certainly don’t feel emasculated.

In fact, I feel rather, um, masculated. Taking the lead in parenting doesn’t just make financial sense, it also gives me the chance to pursue personal ambitions like taking a really hands-on role in my children’s upbringing and getting myself elected as a local councillor. But Garraway implied that I was less of a man. On TV. With my mum watching.

Sure, I lead a surreal double life of carrying out council casework in the only part of the leisure centre where phone calls aren’t drowned out by Let it Go or fending off plastic watermelon and bacon proffered by a two-year-old Blumenthal while presenting an image of reliable professionalism to clients and constituents.

And yes, politicians are supposed to kiss babies, but having one on me at all times was becoming gratuitous. But emasculated?

Stay-at-home dad is a derisive term. It has connotations of being a loser. It’s a completely redundant phrase

Then it struck me. I despise the idea of being a stay-at-home dad. “I am not a stay-at-home dad,” I find myself exclaiming increasingly often, before tersely citing the example of a female friend who went freelance when her son was born and yet she’s never referred to as a stay-at-home mum.

I realised I thought of myself as a councillor first, writer second and dad third. I was giving my children third billing. Why?

Was Garraway right? Deep down, do I feel less of a man? Am I secretly ashamed of being thought of a failure, or a freak, or effeminate? And am I selling my kids short as a result?

There’s only one time in my life I’ve felt emasculated and it was in a garage in rural Italy. We had blown a tyre, and having successfully navigated the Italian word gommo meaning both “tyre” and “condom” (unhelpful when explaining how you’ve burst one, especially while travelling with a pregnant woman), we sat waiting for the replacement to be fitted.

Not speaking Italian, we used our phrasebook to painstakingly translate what the mechanic said to us: “What does your man do if he can’t change a tyre? Does he work in an office?”

Like it or not, how we provide for our dependents remains a central part of our concept of masculinity. Perhaps that’s key to explaining our perception of men who care for children, even when it doesn’t make much sense.

My grandparents had a “traditional” marriage – my granddad went out to work, my nanna raised the children. But when he got home, he handed all his wages over to her, receiving only pocket money in return. She was the CEO of the household. He was a beast of burden. Am I the emasculated one?

My own father was often the parent at home, during periods of unemployment. He was not a stay-at-home dad. Could it be that the stay-at-home dad label is new, but the stay-at-home dad isn’t? It doesn’t help that even self-confessed stay-at-home dads don’t know what that label means.

Warwick Mansell is one of the UK’s foremost education journalists. I noticed his Twitter biography described him as a “sometime stay-at-home dad”. I asked him what he meant.

“I’ve never really thought about what it means. I just put it in there to flag up that I might be tweeting about my own childcare rather than the nation’s now and again. I’ve never given any thought to what one actually is,” he said.

“I did it full time for the first six months of my daughter’s life, now I do one day a week. It just means, from my point of view, one day a week I’m not working, I’m being a dad. Sometimes I’m a stay-at-home dad, sometimes I’m something else.”

Warwick’s answer is telling. We’re happy to give people labels, including ourselves, but we rarely stop to think about what those labels mean, especially when they can have negative connotations.

During my experience on Lorraine’s show – they cut to a feature about omelettes before I got to mention my children, but I did get to meet Cher Lloyd and writer Grant Feller.

If I was the saintly face of male parenting, Feller was meant to be the pantomime villain, someone who actively resented the experience. But what puzzled me was that his children were of school age. Why did he think of himself as a stay-at-home dad if his children weren’t at home?

Feller, too, feels the burden of the label. “If you’d asked me what I am, I’d say I’m a writer first, then I work in newspapers, then I’m a dad. Maybe that’s a hang-up,” he said. “Initially I felt emasculated, maybe even feminised. I thought of myself as a certain person and suddenly I wasn’t”.

Why? “Stay-at-home dad is a derisive term. It has connotations of being a loser. It’s a redundant phrase. It’s like calling a 60-year-old a pensioner. It might be true but it misses out all the subtleties.”

The subtleties Feller talks about are of course the simple fact that stay-at-home dads don’t just stay at home – and they aren’t just dads. And the same is true for women.

As a councillor, I’ve see how reliant we are on an invisible army of non-working women. They run activities at community centres. They volunteer in schools. They organise litter picks. We couldn’t manage without them. Yet we reduce them to one thing they do, some of the time – looking after children. It’s like someone introducing you as a “motorist”.

John Polkey, on the other hand, embraces the stay-at-home dad label. “It just made sense for my wife to go back to work because she made more money than me,” he said, laughing.

A hair stylist, Polkey shut his salon when his son was born and became a mobile hairdresser, working when his wife came home, or taking his son with him.

“For me, a stay-at-home dad is someone who is primarily a homemaker and child-carer, and that was me. I did all the cleaning, I did all the shopping, I made the meals, I saw to my family’s every need so my wife could focus on work.”

How did he feel about being thought of as a stay-at-home dad? “I loved it. Absolutely loved it. I didn’t feel any stigma. Did I feel less of a man? No, I felt awesome. I felt more of a man, I did what was necessary for my family.”

So, Polkey is a stay-at-home dad who loves it. Feller is a stay-at-home dad whose children aren’t there, and Mansell is a stay-at-home dad once a week.

What on earth am I, then?

It hit me. I’m a parent. Like any other parent, I’m just doing the best thing to meet the individual needs of my own family. I don’t need a special label because I’m not special. Everyone does this. And that’s what rankles. The idea that doing things my own particular way makes me somehow different from other people. I’m not afraid of the label, I just find it superfluous.

And, Signore Fratelli, I can replace a tyre. I just can’t find one for a 2005 Ford Zetec in rural Italy on a Sunday.