Bottom line

Perhaps it’s the re-emergence of X- and Y- that’s making me question things a little more than usual. Out at a restaurant last night S- and two girls of around 4 and 5 years had a riot, running around a table, shrieking and laughing and hugging each other while we waited for our banoffee pie.

Was it my imagination or could I see the question in the girls’ parents’ eyes? Were they looking at S- and comparing her big blue eyes and light features with my own green eyes and G-’s brown hair?

To be different in some way is to feel exposed, at least sometimes. It’s how you deal with it that’s important. When S- evaded the excited 5-year-old’s grip and hightailed it for the open front door, I was up and out of my seat and legging it after her as quick as any biological dad.

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.