It’s my life

These days, I find I’m getting rather used to the reversal of roles in our family. So I’m quite happy to do some of the creative thinking around how we bring up our daughter, about S-’s routines, welfare and happiness.

I’m still pretty rubbish at shopping, but I am getting used to the more spontaneous things about parenting: like snatching sleep where and when you can and having to think on your feet when you’ve nothing in the fridge for lunch.

One thing I found very difficult at first is the strange language of parenthood. And it has taken me a little while, but I’m now scarily fluent in Motherese, that strange tongue where you have conversations with people in your immediate vicinity – whom you may or may not know – though to all intents and purposes you’re actually talking to your child.

Search me out on a typical day and you’ll find me on the edge of groups of women speaking in a bizarre, descriptive language that requires a loud voice and an irritating over-reliance on the third person:

‘Yes, S-, the boy is climbing on the table. Yes, he’s very clever, but I hope he doesn’t fall off. Can his mummy see him? Oh no. Ouch… It’s ok. It’s ok, look, there’s the boy’s mummy, running over.’

In the evenings I relax by practicing grown up conversations with my wife. Luckily, she often tolerates my stumbling and sometimes rather juvenile efforts.

Blue moon

In the evening, after the housework is done, we put on our coats and go outside to look at the stars. S- is thrilled by the sound of the thrush singing from the top of the pine tree in our neighbour’s garden.

When I was a child my family emigrated to an African country where we lived for six years. My memories of life back then are fragmented, but very early one morning my dad woke me up and took me out for a walk and to see the dawn. I often think back now to the sandy grey of the track we walked along and the blood orange of the sun rising on the horizon. It’s an adventure I think I’ll remember until I die: a moment, if you like, of brilliance in my life.

‘Look, look. There’s the moon, and the twinkle twinkle stars,’ I say. ‘Can you hear the birds singing?’

‘Moo, moo.’

‘Yes, that is the moon, up in the sky. It’s a long long way away, thousands of miles, but we can see it shining on us.’

‘Up,’ she says, totally entranced, pointing and craning to see. ‘Up upp uppp!’

‘Yes, it’s very high,’ I say, hugging her tight, knowing that this is another of those moments in my life.

For tomorrow

Writing a blog can sometimes be a bit like having a fight with yourself. Often it seems easier to just skim over the surface of things, to take life as it is.

Last week I was listening to the featured ‘Book of the week’ on BBC Radio 4: Waiting for Daisy: the true story of one couple’s quest to have a baby, by Peggy Orenstein. The title’s pretty self-explanatory, I guess.

The book made me think about how fertility can become the central drama of a married couple’s life and how, by extension, infertility can turn that drama into tragedy. That’s pretty obvious too, I suppose.

When you go through the adoption education one thing they’re eager on is getting you to abandon what they call the imaginary [or ideal] child. The theory is that the child you always pictured yourself having can only get in the way of your attachment to the child you adopt. A ritual in which you say goodbye to your ideal formally, eg lighting a candle in church, is especially good, apparently.

I didn’t so much have an imaginary child in my mind, more a bundle of characteristics: a boy [only if pushed], good at sports, better at music, intelligent … the usual things. And I never really made a big deal about saying goodbye.

But I do remember standing late one afternoon in the autumn sunshine by the canal near where we live. I was looking at an old oak tree and, more particularly, at the long-tailed tits which were piping and flitting around its gnarled old branches. It really was the most beautiful scene and I smiled to myself to see it. But I felt incredibly sad for a moment, too.

Perhaps this was around the time G- and I- were being asked to discuss imaginary children, but now I always relate this in some complicated way to the child we didn’t have.

Why I’m writing this is not especially clear to me. Perhaps there’s a part of me that wants to save it and keep it for S-. Perhaps I hope that sometime in the future she’ll read it and understand a little bit.

One thing I do know, though, is that I wouldn’t change a single thing about her. If I had to create a child out of my imagination and put her there in front of me she would be exactly as she is now.

I guess that’s the kind of mushy stuff that us parents say, write and think all the time, but don’t expect me to apologise for it.

Shout!

Where it came from I wouldn’t like to say. I was tired and I’d been unwell for a few days, but my reaction was, in retrospect, a little over the top.

It didn’t seem to worry S- though. At least not too much. She looked at me wonderingly with those blue eyes as I stood over her and gave her all six barrels.

‘No,’ I said, the decibels rising with every syllable. ‘No, no, no, S-. Don’t do that. DON’T do that. NO!’

What was it that had set me off? Something major, obviously. Something earthshattering. Something that threated to tear the fabric of our family apart.

Well, actually it was that she’d just spilt her drink all over the kitchen table.

For the third time, admittedly. And deliberately, yes. Challengingly, for sure. But for the Lord’s sake it was just a few drops of juice. A miniscule amount of housework. And I’d absolutely blown a gasket.

When I look back I think she was trying to reassure me because when I picked her up from her high chair she clung to me and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Aaahh,’ she said. ‘Aaah’. [Her version of 'all better' or 'come on, old chap, it's not as bad as all that', I think.]

But I was still steaming. A few minutes later, changing her nappy [diaper] ready for her afternoon sleep, I almost boiled over.

Instead I stood up and walked out of the room [shutting the child safety gate behind me, obviously]. I went down the hall and into the kitchen, where I bellowed out my frustration for a good couple of minutes – luckily our neighbours all work during the day, so no one could hear my rather unbecoming vocalisations. Then I went back in and finished her nappy and put her down in the cot.

Later, when I was supposed to be washing the dishes, I stood and stared out of the window, feeling very ashamed of myself.

There’s a school of thought that says adoption gives you the chance to be better parents because you can put theory into practice. You can be more considered. You can apply what the social workers teach you to call a therapeutic approach to your parenting.

I knew that the next time she knocked over her drink [and there would be a next time, of course] I’d have to come up with something slightly less apoplectic. Something that an impartial observer might consider more suited to the occasion. Something – actually almost anything would be better, come to think of it.

One of the hardest things seems to be learning, as the cliche puts it, how to lose a battle so as to win the war.

So macho

No, this isn’t some crazed love letter or invitation to an Internet forum, but sometimes the titles of these blog posts just jump out at you.

When I got to the playgroup the other day the organiser greeted me with some excitement. ‘You’re not the only dad today!’

I looked around while I was taking S-’s coat off and nodded to a large bloke in jeans and a sweatshirt, talking into a mobile phone. Pulling the drawers out of a toy kitchen just by his feet was a girl of about 3 or 4 years, obviously his daughter.

I thought we might have a manly catch up during the morning’s activities. This is a playgroup specifically for adoptive parents, so we could grab the opportunity to natter about being in the same boat [you don't see many of us stay-at home adoptive dads about, you know!].

But there was little opportunity for any sort of conversation, nevermind the mutually supportive, caring-sharing discussion I had envisaged. He wandered around the room following his daughter, playing desultorily with some of the toys and resolutely refusing to talk with anybody. I tried to catch his eye a couple of times but soon gave up. His face grew longer and darker with each passing minute. For a while he sat at the activities table poking glitter onto a cardboard star with magnificently bemused contempt.

It must have been a depressing morning both for him and for his daughter, and it wasn’t long before her slightly manic attempts to play with everything in the room flagged. As soon as it was clear that she was running out of ideas, he asked whether she was ready to leave.

Perhaps she was ready to go, and perhaps I’m being unfair, but he wasn’t really giving her a choice. Of course she agreed with him! She wanted to keep him happy.

It can be bloody difficult standing in a playgroup for the first time, especially if you’re not used to kids. So I had a small amount of sympathy for him on that score.

But come on man, you’ve got to make an effort and at least look as if you wouldn’t rather be thousands of miles away, for your child’s sake if nothing else.

So anyway I guess we’ll have that chat next time. Or perhaps not!

Last Christmas

One of the strange things about writing a blog is watching it develop a life of its own. That might not always be so comfortable for you, the writer, and there often seems to come a time where you end up re-evaluating the worth of what you’re doing.

I sometimes wonder what S- will make of this blog in the future when she’s old enough to read it. Or when she’s old enough to understand it – which is a different thing altogether.

This train of thought always makes me re-question my motives. I’ve previously discussed my unease at the mining of other people’s lives for the purposes of bloggery [see About this site].

Would S- actually like what’s here? What would she expect to see? A diary of all her doings, all our adventures? Would she want pictures of herself, like you can find in other parenting blogs?

Somehow neither of these alternatives seem right. I can’t be sure whether I think this because S- is adopted and her confidentiality is therefore more important than most kids, or because of my own reserve. Perhaps a mixture of both.

When I started this blog I intended it to be the diary of a new stay-at-home dad. There was, I knew, this extra twist in that our child came to us through adoption.

Now I think it’s all a bit more complicated than that. You can’t separate out all the  important facets that seem to appear when I write things down here: the adoption, S- herself, and my/our experiences. All these things are mixed in together and can only be expressed in that mixed-up way.

It’ll be the same for S- in the future: she’ll have to make sense not only of herself but also about her feelings about G- and I, and in the light of her complex history. We can only do our best and only be as honest as possible.

The above is simply a long-winded way of trying to explain why I feel that a blow-by-blow acount of our first Christmas together would be both unnecessary and wrong – not to mention dull. Instead I want to remember three things.

The initial look of bewilderment on S-’s face when she was surrounded by an absolute mountain of presents from all her new relatives. Other parents, both adoptive and non-adoptive, have since told me that their kids reacted in a similar way. But, yes, I did worry at the time that it was too much for her, that everybody was overdoing it.

The second memory comes from New Year’s Eve. We spent the evening at a friend’s place, and S- slept in a travel cot in a spare bedroom. G- and I crept upstairs at 1.30 in the morning, picked S- up gently and quickly threw all our things together. But it was no use: S- was awake. G- rolled her eyes in mock despair.

‘Mama?’ came a little voice.

‘Yes darling,’ said G-.

‘Da-da?’

‘Yes darling,’ I said.

Knowing that we were there obviously satisfied her, because she gave a funny, contented little chuckle from behind her dummy [soother], waved ‘hello’ at us and settled into G- as we went downstairs, where our friends were waiting to say goodbye. S- peered at L- and R- over G-s shoulder, smiled a shy smile and then waved at them, too. At which point we all broke out into hushed giggles.

The third thing I want to record is not so much a memory as an impression. While we’re together S- and I have a good time, I like to think. But watching G- and S- really made me appreciate my limitations. The talking, the games, the laughter and the natural bonding that go on between my wife and daughter make my efforts pale. The activities I set out on always seem a bit regimented, a bit static, in comparison with the fun and joy that G- and S- share.

I think I understand ‘in my bones’ now why children need a mother [it's easy to say we understand, to think it in our heads]. Kids need a dad, too, of course they do. But the mother is the primary, the centre. How can it be otherwise?

Sweet child in time

People often ask: ‘Is she your first child?’ or ‘Have you got any others?’ or something similar. It’s one way that adoption is a different experience, I think, because – aware as you are of the curiosity that lies behind the question [after all, S doesn't look much like me] – there’s always this urge to explain, to put things into context.

I usually just say ‘yes, yes, she is,’ and I do my best not to rush into filling the inevitable gap in the conversation.