Father’s Day: the media is full of images of happy, healthy children rushing to give their much-loved if slightly hopeless father a blokey gift, but when your little one is still in hospital the stereotypes are meaningless and all you really want is to have your child come home.

What is the role of a father of a premature baby? When my daughter was born unexpectedly early, my husband missed the birth completely – no magical memories of cutting the cord for him, he wasn’t even able to hold my hand. While I found myself on early maternity leave and able to spend all day in the NICU, he was still at work – sometimes far away. It made no sense for him to take his one week of paternity leave until we brought our baby home, at which point his employer initally refused to grant him the leave because it was more than 3 months after her birth!

My husband shared all my anxieties about Talia’s health, not to mention the broken sleep as I rose twice a night to express, without the joy and reassurance of being able to hold his daughter for days on end. He visited the nursery in the quiet of the evenings when the doctors were gone and the lights were dimmed, and sang her soft songs of love below the beeping of the monitors.

Now more than a year later, he still sings her songs. He holds her tight and reads her books, sits on the floor playing with her as soon as he gets home from work, pushes her on the swing in the park and rejoices in every little milestone. He knows how lucky we are to have her, and I know how lucky she is to have him too.