John Lennon Was Terrified of Letting Anyone Touch His Newborn Son Sean
John Lennon took a hands-off approach to raising his son Julian, but he threw himself into his second son Sean’s upbringing. Yoko Ono told Lennon he would bear primary responsibility for raising their son, and he wholeheartedly agreed. He took his role as father seriously and was highly concerned about Sean’s health. Lennon didn’t even want people touching his son for the first months of his life.
John Lennon didn’t want anybody touching his son, Sean
Shortly after Sean’s birth in 1975, Lennon called his lawyer, Leon Wildes.
“‘It’s John. I’m a father,'” Wildes recalled him saying, per the book Lennon: The Definitive Biography by Ray Coleman. “He was ecstatic, bouncing around his room as he spoke.”
Lennon was highly protective of his young son.
“In the months following the birth John allowed very few visitors to the Dakota,” Coleman wrote. “He was afraid they might spread germs. Nobody except John or Yoko was allowed to touch Sean. It was the single most important thing in his life.”
This was because Lennon viewed Sean not just as his son but as a miraculous gift to himself and Ono.
“The baby decides the time and place and which family to have,” he said. “Yoko did not give birth to Sean; Sean came through Yoko as a miracle and a gift to us.”
Yoko Ono told John Lennon he was responsible for raising Sean
After giving birth to Sean, Ono wanted to get back to work. She believed she had put in the effort of carrying Sean through her pregnancy. Now, it was time for Lennon to look after their son.
“Well, I’ve carried the baby for nine months and brought him into the world,” Ono told him. “Now it’s your turn to look after him.”
Lennon agreed with his wife and threw himself into raising Sean. He stepped back from his career and began referring to himself as a “househusband.”
“He didn’t come out of my belly but, by God, I made his bones, because I’ve attended to every meal, and to how he sleeps, and to the fact that he swims like a fish,” Lennon said in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono by David Sheff. “That’s because I took him to the ‘Y.’ I took him to the ocean. I’m so proud of those things. He is my biggest pride, you see.”
What is the relationship between Sean and Julian Lennon?
Lennon called Sean his “biggest pride” but publicly admitted that his first child, Julian, was “born out of a bottle of whiskey on a Saturday night, and there was no intent to have children” (via Playboy). As an adult, Julian Lennon has called his father a hypocrite for abandoning his family and spoken about the chilly distance between himself and Lennon.
“It was still very distant. I probably knew him as much as I know you,” he told The Telegraph in 1998. “That’s about how warm it was. There were cuddles now and then but there was always an uneasy tension.”
Despite the vastly different dynamics between Lennon and his two sons, Julian and Sean view each other as brothers. Sean has said that Julian is the reason he started playing music. Julian has also said that despite his problems with his father and Ono, he never wants to say something that could hurt Sean.
