Over the past few months, I’ve been writing a memoir. It began as a deeply personal project – part reflection, part legacy – originally intended for my children. But as the words unfolded, I realised this story might resonate more broadly. It’s not just about me. It’s about the sober revolutions that shape who we are and the families we build along the way. In honour of Pride Month, I’ve decided to share one of its chapters. One about becoming a father. About choosing love. And building something lasting in a world that didn’t always make space for it.
Fatherhood begins long before the first words
The Father Before Fatherhood
There are some things in life you choose. And some that choose you.
Fatherhood, for me, was never a conscious decision the way the world imagines it. It wasn’t a longing that arrived one day with a clock ticking or a yearning fed by some Hallmark version of family. It was innate. Deeper. More primal. It lived in the architecture of my life long before it took human form.
Some instincts don’t need explaining
I Was a Father Before I Ever Had Children
Long before the court orders, the contracts, the midnight drives to hospitals, and the preschool nativity plays, I had been a father – to animals, to businesses, to people who wandered into my orbit and stayed.
I had built homes for hamsters and empires for ideas. I had poured energy and protection into things fragile and unformed coaxed life and loyalty out of chaos. I had been entrusted with small lives and big dreams. I had learned to build scaffolding around others long before anyone called me "Dad".
It’s easy, looking back, to see the pattern. I wasn’t only creating – I was nurturing. I wasn’t simply leading – I was protecting. Whether it was a parrot perched on my shoulder, a battered red-door desk propping up a fledgling business, or a young colleague trying to find their footing in a world too sharp for their tenderness – I held space. I made room. I made sure they could breathe.
I didn’t call it fatherhood then. I just called it living.
But it was there – in the way I fought for what couldn’t fight for itself. In how I built what needed patience more than power. And the way I stayed when staying was hard, and leaving would have been easier.
David, in the early days of starting Rhino Africa
Fatherhood Wasn’t an Idea I Chased But a Truth That Chased Me
Much like my journey into entrepreneurship, it wasn’t born out of strategy. It was born out of necessity. Some things in life are not choices. They are callings. You can resist them, defer them, rationalise them – but eventually, they find you. They rise in you and demand to be answered.
I didn’t become a father because it was convenient. I became one because something inside me would not let me walk away from it.
And when the time came – when the pieces of my life had been built strong enough to hold something more precious than ambition or success – I knew. Without hesitation. Without fear. The question was never if. Only when.
I wasn’t naïve. I knew the path would be harder. I knew that as a gay man, I was stepping into a journey few had walked before me. While straight couples could stumble drunk into parenthood, my road would require the precision of a surgeon, the patience of a saint, and the stubbornness of a mountain.
And yet, none of that frightened me.
Because when you’ve spent your life building foundations strong enough to hold others – when you’ve carried the weight of your own battles and still stood upright – the thought of carrying something more doesn’t break you.
Built to carry joy – and everything else
It Readies You
The truth is, I had been preparing for my children long before I knew their names. Before I knew their faces, I felt their tiny hands wrapped around my finger or the staggering, terrifying, breathtaking love that would expand my heart beyond anything I had ever known.
I was building a life that could hold them, even before I knew who they would be.
I didn’t know then that there would be four. I didn’t know that each would arrive with their own soul, song, and refusal to fit into any neat version of what I thought fatherhood would look like. But I knew this: when they came, I would be ready. Not perfect. Not finished. But ready – in the only way that matters.
Ready to love them without condition. To hold them without fear. To learn from them, as much as I hoped to teach them.
Because fatherhood isn’t something you earn the day a child is placed in your arms. Instead, it’s something you practise, quietly and imperfectly, every day before and after that moment. You carry it in your heart long before you carry it in your hands.
And it had been living inside me all along. Waiting. Building. Becoming.
This is who the story was always for
