Dexter Mayhew’s Father-Daughter Relationship with Jasmine Mayhew

Dexter Mayhew’s father-daughter relationship with Jasmine Mayhew begins in a moment of overwhelming devotion and is immediately tested by the gap between an ideal father and the exhausted, fallible man caring for a baby. Across the episodes shown here, he makes grand promises, fails at ordinary tasks, and then keeps trying: the relationship’s defining movement is from imagined responsibility toward an imperfect intimacy made through attention, repair, and play.

Identity and beginnings

Jasmine Mayhew is born in Richmond, Surrey, late in the evening of January 3, 2000, making her as old as the new century. She weighs six pounds and six ounces, described as neat but healthy. Dexter regards her as inexpressibly beautiful and feels certain he would give his life for her, while also recognizing that such a sacrifice is unlikely to be required. The combination establishes the intensity, and a measure of self-awareness, in his first response to fatherhood.

That night, seated in a low-slung vinyl hospital chair and holding his tiny, crimson-faced daughter, Dexter makes a solemn resolution to do the right thing. He imagines that his words and actions will be suitable for Jasmine’s eyes and ears, and that he will live as if under her constant scrutiny. He promises himself he will never cause her pain, anxiety, or embarrassment, and that nothing in his life will remain a source of shame. His first conception of being her father is therefore not a modest list of duties but a total moral renovation, with Jasmine imagined as both beloved child and measure of his conduct.

The promise meets ordinary life

The resolution lasts about ninety-five minutes. In a hospital toilet cubicle, Dexter tries to exhale cigarette smoke into an empty Evian bottle; smoke escapes, sets off the detector, and wakes his exhausted wife and daughter. He is escorted out still holding the bottle, while his wife’s tired, narrowed look registers the failure more plainly than any argument could. The abrupt turn from solemn vow to concealment makes the distance between his aspiration and his habits concrete.

By the beginning of the new century, the strain between Dexter and his wife is compounded by his unemployment. His television series Sport Xtreme has drifted into a slot so late that even BMX riders cannot be expected to watch it on a weeknight, and the programme ends. Paternity leave gives way to unemployment. This context matters to the relationship because Jasmine arrives alongside a diminished professional identity and mounting domestic pressure; the evidence does not make her responsible for those difficulties, but shows Dexter trying to inhabit fatherhood while other parts of his life are coming apart.

Solo care and the limits of competence

On a later night alone with Jasmine, Dexter encounters the work of care as a succession of immediate problems. She screams while he struggles to fasten her into a highchair, and he longs for her to be able to communicate basic needs. He interprets her silence as an absurd design flaw, not because he expects conversation but because he wants practical instructions about what is wrong. His impatience exposes how little control he has over the situation, while the comic fantasy of a baby explaining herself makes clear that he is trying, however clumsily, to understand her distress.

He feeds her purée a spoonful at a time, wiping her face with the spoon’s edge, and turns on a small portable television in hopes of calming her. Suki Meadows appears on a live lottery broadcast. Dexter feels a small spasm of envy at seeing his ex-girlfriend on television, but notices that Jasmine has become silent and still, entranced by the screen. His attention shifts from his own reaction to hers: the broadcast that stirs up his adult disappointments has, for the moment, captured his daughter’s interest.

Later, he tries to leave Jasmine to cry while he eats in front of the television. He turns up the volume, pours wine, and finds the bottle empty; the crying remains impossible to ignore. He prepares formula and carries it upstairs, but forgets to screw the lid onto the bottle. Warm milk floods the bedding and gets into Jasmine’s eyes and nose. Dexter recognizes the cause of her renewed screaming and his responsibility for it. Unable to find a muslin square, he uses her best cashmere cardigan to wipe her hair and eyes, apologizes to her, and changes her soaked bedding, clothes, and nappy. He then makes another bottle, feeds her in the darkened room, and stays until she is calm and sleeping. The scene does not make his mistake harmless; it shows care taking the form of recognizing harm, tending to its consequences, and trying again.

Distress, repair, and attention

When Jasmine’s crying rises again, Dexter first reacts in anger, shouting at her to stop, then claps a hand to his mouth in shame at the sight of her distressed, wide-open eyes. He scoops her up and sits with his back against the wall, absorbing her cries against his chest. He strokes her forehead and the back of her head, tries circling her clenched hand, and wonders whether she is ill or teething. The practical question of whether she needs a hospital becomes inseparable from his awareness that he is too drunk to drive. His sense of failure expands beyond the immediate task into a judgment on himself as father, husband, boyfriend, and son, but it does not make him withdraw from Jasmine.

Instead, Dexter gives her medicine and devotes the next twenty minutes to trying to settle her: funny voices, picture books, puppets, songs, the baby gym, and his mobile phone. He keeps changing approaches until she is no longer screaming, though she remains awake. The performance is frantic and makeshift rather than assured; its importance lies in the sustained effort to meet her where she is. When a Fisher-Price CD player shaped like a steam train offers another possibility, he puts on classical music, turns up the volume, and dances with her close to his chest. Jasmine stretches her fingers, looks at him without scowling, and laughs. Her response gives Dexter his first clear sign that the two of them have found a moment of ease together.

Music, memory, and a provisional bond

Dexter decides that the aim need not be to make Jasmine sleep: he can try to keep her awake and give them a party of their own. Sorting through boxes of CDs, he encounters the accumulated trace of his years as a DJ, from Acid Jazz and break-beats to house music and compilations labelled chill. The collection recalls sleepless, paranoid nights and acquaintances he no longer knows; dance music, once associated with his former social identity, now makes him anxious. With Jasmine over his shoulder, he nevertheless searches the boxes and turns his old musical world toward her.

A homemade birthday compilation from Emma Morley is tucked into one CD case. Its accompanying card congratulates Dexter on becoming a husband and father and expresses confidence that he will be good at both. He puts the disc on the toy train player and bounces Jasmine to Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy.” When The Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” follows, he dances with her in the small bedroom. He steps on a pull-along wooden dog and stumbles, then checks that she is all right. She is laughing. The awkward stumble and the check that follows keep the scene grounded in the physical vulnerability of caring for a baby, while the music gives their shared moment a feeling of elation.

“Walk On By,” a song his mother, Alison Mayhew, used to play, brings another generation into Dexter’s time with his daughter. He remembers Alison dancing with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, settles Jasmine on his shoulder, and slow-dances with her through the clutter of the room. The memory does not turn the scene into a declaration of perfected fatherhood: Dexter has been drinking, the house is strewn with toys and books, and his earlier failures remain part of the same night. But the sequence ends this portion of their relationship on an image of careful closeness, Jasmine’s breath against his neck and her hand in his, as he dances with her to music that links childhood, parenthood, and his own unsettled past.