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.

I am her dad, and G- is her mother. This may sound obvious but sometimes obvious facts need repeating.

An article in a recent issue of Eve magazine explained how a mum by adoption did not and could not love her child for a year after bringing her home. It’s a decent, honest article – though it rather skips over the difficulties of the adoption process and the emotional problems that can occur soon after you adopt a child. I guess it was commissioned to tie in with the recent mini-controversy over claims that adoptive and biological parents love their children differently.

Reading between the lines of the article it seems to me that the woman in question did love her new child, but she couldn’t feel the bond. The trauma of IVF and the loss of fertility instill a certain numbness – at least, that’s my perspective. And there’s a natural tendency to protect yourself against being hurt.

It takes some time for an attachment to become secure. It took the best part of a year before S- was completely secure with G- and I, and therefore I guess G- and I with S-. During that time some things that social workers suggested might take some getting used to happened, and some didn’t. For a while I found myself worrying away at the feeling that S-’s smell was wierd, among other slightly incongruent .. not exactly events but ‘happenings’.

This doesn’t mean that we didn’t love S-. We loved her more than anything – we still love her more than anything. It’s just that the bond between us was formed slightly differently than the attachment that usually occurs between biological parents and their children.

Whatever that means. All I can say is we have never tried to protect ourselves from loving S-.

So anyway – getting back to the here and now – X- and Y- are on the scene again and seem to have a degree of willingness to engage with us. We’ve arranged to meet with them in early July. G- and I are both apprehensive about this – of course we are. But we’re not doing it for ourselves. (We’re certainly not doing it for X- and Y-.) We doing it for S-: in the long term so that we can tell her a little about the man and woman who conceived her, and in the short term so we can decide whether we think S- should meet them.

That’s the most important thing. Forget the fact that the social workers are telling us that we should meet with X- and Y-. Forget the fact that S-’s adoption order suggests that we should consider contact with X- and Y-. We need to look X- and Y- in the eye and think about it and then do what’s best for S-.

Because that’s what parents do.

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.