Adrian Barich didn’t want to wake up to a shiny new watch this morning.
He’s got enough socks and jocks, and a fancy lunch isn’t necessary.
What he wants most for Father’s Day is a card from his kids filled with a few kind words about him. He’d take a paragraph.
Over his 22 years of fatherhood, it’s always been the little things that mean the most.
The chats with his daughter Madi on their drive to school, something about this unassuming time encouraging her to open up, sometimes a little too much for a naive dad. Calling his kids’ sports carnivals, spotting Tom’s mane of hair in the crowd or the back of Madi’s page-boy haircut at the end of a race. The kids waiting impatiently by the door at 7pm for a cuddle after Dad’s long day behind the mic.
Should the cards get lost in the mail, STM has our beloved columnist’s back, and has some comments that we prepared earlier.
For Tom, his charismatic dad is the most reliable fella he knows. He could ask him for anything and he’s straight on to it.
Madi echoes his sentiment, adding no matter what age they are, their dad will drop them off anywhere, even if it means juggling his own schedule. He’s a selfless person, one that still drives her to work some mornings, that she still waits for at 7pm — mostly to see what’s for dinner, but she’s excited to see him all the same.
Perhaps you know Barich as a leading sports commentator for the past 30 years, on your screens and in your ears. Maybe it’s from the pages of STM, his heartfelt columns prompting tears one week then a chuckle the next. West Coast Eagles fans will of course know him as a midfielder in its inaugural team, its first game played in 1987.
To his kids though, he’s just dad.
Ask him what gives him purpose and what he’s most proud of and Barich isn’t pulling out an old blue and yellow guernsey or reeling off his resume.
“It’s the people they are,” he says of Tom, 20, and Madi, 22. “They’re kind, and you can tell they’re going to be good people — they have good moral fibre.
“It’s not about being a great footy star or being great at your job, it’s the person you become. I think that’s what we get judged on, it’s the most important criteria.”
Barich always knew he wanted to be a father, and reflects now that he and wife Jodie could have welcomed a few more. He’d consider fostering in the future.
The first time around — he was 31 when Madi burst into their world — he had the same doubts as most to-be dads.
“Do I even know what I’m doing?,” he remembers stressing. “Am I going to be able to do this? But then you think, I’m not exactly inventing the wheel. It has been done a few times before.”
What he hadn’t counted on was the birth itself — a caesarean, before he was handed tiny Madi before Jodie went into surgery. There was a neonatal stay too, which is part of the reason he goes as hard as he does for Telethon each year.
“You realise why everyone’s so passionate about it,” he says. “How small the humans are and how they end up becoming big, great giants — like Tom.”
When it came to forming his parenting style it was borrowed from his own parents and learnt on the job, then tweaked slightly for his individual kids.
“You tend to be super protective of your daughters,” Barich says. “It does sound crazy that you think they’re more fragile, but sometimes they are. And coming from a football background, it can be a bit misogynistic. You just hope the boys she chooses are good people — and she’s got a really good boyfriend.”
With Tom, on the other hand, who now towers over him, the worry was elsewhere.
“You need to keep on top of the mental health side of it, and make sure that young boys are opening up,” Barich says. “You can’t just ask them ‘how was school today?’, you’ve really got to be clever in your questioning to pick up if there’s anything there. I’ve seen so many young men struggle.”
The other parenting rule he set for himself was as much for him as it was for his kids: don’t live your life through them. For example, Barich the ex-footballer was never going to attempt to transform Tom into the player he had the potential to be.
The hardest part of parenting turned out to be the part he knows matters most: letting the kids go and encouraging them to forge their own path.
“You know it’s the right thing to do, but you don’t really want to do it,” he says.
It arrives in instalments, he says — the first time they took the car on the freeway on their own, the first overseas trip without him. He says he spent the latter more or less praying the entire time.
“You think you’re never going to see them again,” he says. “You’re not ready for that letting go.”
He often reflects on the Italian side of his heritage and thinks they definitely have it right about keeping their family close, often taking over the whole street.
“If it was up to me, I’d live with them (the kids) for the rest of my life,” he laughs. “But I know deep down my role is to release them, to build them up and give them all the tools they need and then at some stage you have to let them go.”
So Barich pays attention to all of the last times, the ones you don’t notice until it’s gone. The last time he carried the kids. The last time he was allowed to kiss them in public. The last time he held a hand into the school gate before the request came to be dropped at the corner instead.
He remembers doing it to his own parents, so he can hardly complain.
“I’m zooming in on those moments so I don’t miss any of them,” Barich says.
His own parents, John and Dawn, are on his mind a lot now that his kids are older. His father came out after the war speaking no English, moving from Northam to Bentley and raising four kids across Perth, Canberra and Bangkok.
“I’ve only got admiration, because I’ve got to the stage of my life where I’m wise enough to realise how much they did,” he says. “When you’re younger you might be judgemental: ‘why didn’t they do this for me?’. But now I’ve realised my parents would have done a thousand little things that they never got credit for, because I’m doing that now.
“I reckon when the kids are about 35, they’ll come back and go ‘Dad, geez, you did a lot for me’.”
He says there is no need for perfection in parenting, all you can do is be there, care and try your best.
For regular readers of Barich’s column, you’ll know he’s had some experience in letting go, in that of his three beloved pugs Bean, Hattie and Lily. There is a bookshelf in the family’s living room with photos and mementos of them.
As his Energiser bunny of a cavalier-French bulldog cross Frank zooms around him during the at-home shoot with STM, he’s already working out that he might be his last dog.
For now, though, Frank is fit and healthy, a pint-sized guard dog who ensures they always know when the postman is en route. His kids are also still living at home.
However today pans out for Barich, it likely won’t be as memorable as a previous Father’s Day, being woken up in the early hours of the morning by Madi to tell him she had a flat tyre.
“That Fathers Day I was out charging a flat tyre at 5am, as any early rising locals had a bit of a chuckle as they walked past,” he says. “Nothing says Happy Father’s Day quite like being roadside assistance at sunrise.”
That one probably won’t make the card, but he’ll settle for the paragraph regardless.
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