This is a 'Dear John' letter to my five-month-old baby girl. By the time you throw up on the laptop again, I'll be gone.

At the time of writing, my baby daughter is in her nursery, stripping the paint from the walls with her screaming because she does not consider sleep to be particularly exciting.

Being permanently overtired and treating my chest hair like a set of monkey bars, now that's exciting.

For the past couple of hours, we have been desperately trying to get our little girl to take a nap. In the daytime, the only time she will nod off voluntarily is when she is attached to my exhausted wife's breast. And when we tried that while queuing at the supermarket, it was just plain awkward.

Sleep for my child is the essay for the student or the paper work for the executive; everything else is infinitely more interesting. Why take forty winks when you can perform a quick Brazilian on your father's chest instead?

Have you ever seen a grown man cry? Pull out the hairs around his nipples one by one. He'll blubber like a wooden actress in a bad period drama.

Whether she is leaving train track-like scratches on our cheeks or turning me into a soprano by kicking me in that delicate area from whence she came, our daughter is never short of distractions to occupy what should be her bedtime.

Sadly, her inability to remain still is a genetic characteristic inherited from her hyperactive, fidgety father.

On the rare occasions when she does doze off, she defines cherubic, a round-faced, peaceful gift from the angels, a definite contender for one of those TV commercials advertising cots and baby clothing.

In these moments, she is her mother's daughter.

When she has shattered every window in the house with her high-pitched wailing and her face has turned into an over-ripe tomato, she might be an advert for celibacy.

In these moments, she is her father's daughter.

'She's just like you,' my mother bellows down the phone as her grand-daughter works on her town crier routine. 'You would never sleep either, always on the move, always looking for a distraction. Do you know you were watching the Wimbledon tennis at six months old?'

'That can't be right, mum,' I reply incredulously.

'I'm telling you. Six months old in the high chair, you would follow that ball from left to right. I thought to myself, 'this boy's gonna be special'. And just look at you today. You're crap at tennis. You haven't made your parents any money like those Williams sisters.'

So we can look forward to sleep deprivation, an intense daughter constantly in need of stimulation and long hours spent on a tennis court retrieving lost balls.

Then, suddenly, everything changes.

The mini-Ozzy Osbourne gives up on the screeching, the crying peters out and the whimpering dissipates. Stubborn exhaustion finally gives in to sleep and our darling, cherubic daughter returns.

At the time of writing, she has just dropped off in the arms of her mother.

At the time of you reading this, I will be in Singapore on a working trip, having briefly left my baby behind and the sense of parental guilt is overwhelming.

For the first time, it is easy to empathise with the work-family conflicts that many parents are frequently forced to address.

With a sharpened parang, I have always chopped down the archaic stereotype, in our household at least, that daddy's place was in the office with a couple of cute pictures of those two strangers formerly known as his children beside his laptop.

That cliche has never sat well with this child of a broken home. This daddy is determined to be around to help with the tortuous screaming and the chest hair removal.

But the pressure to be both breadwinner and devoted parent - a father who is there for the first steps, first words and the first date with a hormonal boyfriend who plays in a death metal band - is relentless.

I want to be there for the baby's first spoonful of solid food, but someone must pay for her rice bowl.

So daddy must temporarily leave his little girl for a couple of weeks. She has been instructed not to learn to crawl, walk, talk or grasp the rudimentary aspects of tennis while her father is away.

At the time of writing, my little girl is still sleeping and I have just popped in to hold her tiny, fragile hand. I didn't stay long. My wife would've had me executed if I had disturbed either of them.

That's the funny reason. The real reason was the sudden, uncomfortable burning sensation in my throat.

For economic reasons, parents cannot always be with their children. But they should always want to be.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Nov 22, 2008.