This is my second Father's Day.
Being a stay-at-home dad has obviously not been what I'd imagined — this is also my second Father's Day locked down while my partner works from home. At the start of this I thought lockdowns were the remit of prisons.
Even so, it has still been everything I had hoped — the giggles, the life lessons, the cuddles, even the crying and sleepless nights.
Before COVID hit, I managed to attend just one parent's group session at my local maternal health clinic before they were shut down.
In the room were 16 new mums with their new bubs. I was the solitary dad.
This situation is no outlier — only one in 20 Australian parents who are given the "primary carer" moniker are men.
Barriers include the issue of leave
My time as a dad has made me realise just how many barriers there are to allowing dads to take more time away from paid work — like the bureaucratic hurdles to taking leave as a non-birth parent.
From day one, the administrative tasks involved in raising a child assume that there is one female parent and one male parent.
There is then a further assumption that the woman is going to be doing most of the legwork — and paperwork — in raising this new person, while the man will be the breadwinner.
This is out of touch with the diversity of parenthood in modern-day Australia.
Take the federal government's paid parental leave scheme. This notionally provides the primary carer with 18 weeks of leave paid at minimum wage, plus two weeks of paid leave for the secondary carer. The latter carries the unhelpful name 'Dad and Partner Pay'.
It is an arduous road for a dad to take the primary carer payment. Services Australia has nearly 1,500 words of instructions of how to transfer a payment on its website. And it's complicated.
I know dads who have applied unsuccessfully two or three times before working their way through this maze. I only failed once.
Deep cultural barriers
Other frustrations like not being recognised as the primary contact when booking medical appointments or not being listed on vital forms quickly become part and parcel of being a stay-at-home dad.
These bureaucratic eye rolls underlie a deep cultural aversion our society has to allowing dads to take more responsibility for the care of young children.
This culture is a barrier that I perhaps naively did not anticipate.
It is a culture that allows regular comments down the street — "It must be dad's day, then."
It is a culture that leads to slips of the tongue, like that parent's group being called "mother's group" by its moderator.
Importantly, it a culture that has deeply entrenched views in the workplace about the role of dads in the early days of parenting.
The stories other dads tell me make me feel lucky to have a supportive employer.
A private school teacher told me he could only take two weeks' leave, blaming it on "old-school institutional sexism".
"That's the way it's always been done," he was told.
Another dad told me he only felt comfortable taking annual leave instead of their two weeks' leave entitlement: "Work was super hectic throughout my kid's first year and I thought the extra two weeks would just have put additional pressure on me on the other side."
They are not alone. Only three in 20 Australian dads take more than four weeks' leave on the birth of their child.
And it's not just dads.
A woman in a same-sex relationship told me: "I just found out I'm eligible for 13 weeks as primary carer but I don't feel like I can take it. I think my managers will be pissed. So I'm only taking five weeks over Christmas when it's quiet."
Australia has a problem when it comes to allowing dads and non-birth parents the space to take more time off work.
On the whole, dads want to take more leave but are being stopped by unnecessary bureaucracy and a culture that says our job is to keep working.
Yes, we can and should look at more generous parental leave policies, such as the "use it or lose it" models found in Nordic countries, echoed by the Grattan Institute's recommendation to give each parent six weeks of leave plus another 12 weeks to share.
But my own journey, and the stories of people I have met along the way, have taught me that even if we did introduce such schemes, it wouldn't necessarily change our societal expectations of a dad's role.
The pandemic is making us all reassess our society, the way we work and ultimately what is important in our lives.
This Father's Day, I hope we can all reflect on our roles as parents and what we can do to embrace hands-on fatherhood rather than leaving us dads on the outer.
Sam Drummond is a lawyer and dad to Gwendoline.
ABC Everyday in your inbox
Get our newsletter for the best of ABC Everyday each week