The small child yelps and jumps. He has the face and gait of an adult man despite being about six years old. The place is silent otherwise. I quickly begin to down my drink as an unfamiliar couple with a small dog enter. Rolling a cigarette, I go outside and am greeted by a regular with his own dog, which is adorned with LEDs. I finish my drink and touch the bereaved man on the arm as I put my empty glass on the bar. After negotiating the terrors of the bland super-market I make my way to the exit.
I am stopped by a man a full foot shorter than me. I am not a tall man. Going home. Read the paper [gesturing the morning newspaper] and that. It is the strangest thing I have ever seen. My twelve-year old Favourite Son and fourteen-year old Favourite Daughter are staying with me for a rare week away from their home with Their Mother four hundred miles away. Also present are my sister, her beginning-to-crawl twins, one of my brothers with his toddler son and daughter and two cats, three dogs and three other adults.
I retire to the kitchen to escape the chaos and help my mother with dinner preparations. After a minute or two I return to the the living room. For an instant Their Mother is there as she glances at me over her bare shoulder, raven-haired and her face — as it always is in repose — absurdly beautiful and looking as though she were plotting murder. My tongue fills my mouth and tastes of metal and my brain feels too big for my head. My finger-tips and toes feel a bit odd.
Me: No. They just adopted the image. My father was a working-class man living in the North-East of England in the s. As a child I would be stood on the windowsill of my bedroom with my hands at the top of the window hoping for a glimpse of my father as he came home at midnight. Double-glazing did not exist at that time. Leaning on a window could cause it to break. But I remember the hammering and that it was a weekend before twelve in the afternoon when the public houses opened.
And I remember my bedroom having bars on the windows. I Solve A Mystery. The envelope is good quality, stamped and has been beautifully written in a hand I half-recognise. I'm not familiar with the post-mark.
The street-name is similar to mine and the postcode is incomplete. This feels familiar. Inside is the flimsiest of of those 'self-published' greetings cards, with feasibly the worst Warhol-wannabe bullshit print upon it.
I study this for a while. Good quality Christmas cards illustrated by my seven-year old son featuring a young, beardless Santa brandishing a burning golden sword toward a supplicant bearded older Santa discarding his gloves in defeat into a pile of Christmas debris. Another illustrated by my ten-year old daughter involving anime-style reindeer and dolphins because why not. Obviously they were actually really good.
This is something different. I look at this card. Or any other direct family member. So anyway I start seeing this girl You know? Ghost Of Christmas Past Part 2. By definition, you don't really see a crisis coming. They tend to wear the most nondescript clothing. After which her husband and I discuss the world in general over too many drinks in the conservatory whilst my mother makes dinner.
We all have a chat and a drink first. The subject skirts around upcoming yuletide festivities. We had a pleasant chat with the result that I felt rather content for the bulk of this year. His own son!
He notices THAT, looks at her and then at my face. It started fairly innocuously. After a mere six weeks at my new job I am promoted and become the manager of my new colleagues. This causes some consternation amongst some, many of whom have worked at the company for years. Stuff them. My counterpart in another department is also bumped-up. For the first hour or so things are fine. We discuss work like normal people. My wife is moving away you see. For her work. Taking our daughter with her.
For her job. Me: Ok. Me: Totally. There I am, the dad, walking into the playgroup room with a child in my arm and a diaper bag over my shoulder. There she is, some random mom, sitting at the snack table, reading a magazine or looking at her phone, glancing at her kid every once in a while.
I nod and say hello as I enter. She gives a polite smile and, without a word, goes back to what she was doing. OK, I think. Not everyone has to jump out of their seats at the sight of another parent. So we sit in silence for a few minutes. Then, in walks another mom with her kid. And another with her kids. And another.
They greet each other, they settle in, their kids play. The buzz of conversation slowly begins, and soon the room is humming with children frolicking and moms chatting and laughing about bedtimes, feeding routines and discipline strategies.
Some of them clearly know each other, but others are definitely strangers, as I overhear several introductions. And there I sit, in a chair designed for a 3-year-old, looking like the new kid in school. Or just the kid everyone avoids because he always smells like cat pee. I realize it takes time to be accepted into any new group. For instance, some moms were sitting around one week talking about laundry detergent.
When moms get together—the moms I witness anyway—they talk about laundry detergent and baby shampoo. This particular week, as I said, it was laundry detergent.
Do you pay the extra money for name brand, or is the store brand just as good? Liquid or powder? Scented or unscented? I sat in my seat apart from the group, listening for a few minutes before weighing in. It works just as well, and his skin has really improved. Probably a second or two, but it seemed like much longer. Then, slowly, they all turned back to one another, shook off whatever it was that had just happened, and picked up their discussion where they had left off.
And that was that. My attempt to join the party had failed. They carried on conversing, and I went back to keeping my mouth shut. About a half hour later, I discovered that my contribution to the laundry detergent forum did break the ice a bit.
As I was preparing to leave, a mom who was packing up her stuff alongside me started making some chit-chat. Silence followed as we zipped shut our diaper bags and grabbed our kids. And we parted ways. Another playgroup, another hour of awkward silence, I thought on my way home.
See, I assume all stay-at-home parents do the bulk of the housework. Still, it happens to both sexes all the time. No boys allowed. Everyone knows sexism almost always hurts women, not men.
Women are the ones who get talked down to by mechanics. One thing women have on men, however, is parenting. Moms, not dads, are still seen as the family nurturers. So I can imagine their confusion and possible resentment when I strut in, trying to talk about unscented laundry detergent.
Ah, the hell with it. Maybe I really do just give them the creeps. I suppose the next time I go to a playgroup, I should wear pants. I almost feel bad writing about this one, because the lady who said it really did mean it as a compliment. But she kind of did. It happened a few weeks ago, when I was at a restaurant with my kids.
It was just the three of us: me, my 5-year-old, and my 9-month-old. We were sitting at the outside patio—my son enjoying his buttered noodles and fruit salad and me skillfully eating a black bean burger with my daughter squiggling on my lap—when a lady sat down at the table next to ours.
I was taken aback, because she was a dead ringer for Margot Kidder. Older Posts Home. Subscribe to: Posts Atom. Each brings a risk. I am not saying any of this to scare anyone. I am saying it because this is the reality you face when choosing donor conception. My kids are good kids. They are my kids no matter what. I am not their biological father. But I am their Dad. We have lived through too much together to question that.
Are they ok? So far. My responsibility is to be truthful with them, listen to them, respect their questions and decisions, and to put their needs in this area ahead of mine. Did I mess up their lives? Only they can answer that. When we ask will they be ok, are we asking to answer our fears or are we asking to propel us to give them the tools and info to ensure they are.
Choosing donor conception is a choice that requires an acknowledgment of responsibility to not hide from the issues our children may face and the responsibility that we made that decision. Make what you will of my words. Friday, April 30, Sides of the Circle.
Understanding Donor Conception. I am still here. I am just mostly over there. On Instagram. My focus is still on my children. Working to be a good Dad. To recognize it's not about me. That realization came long ago. Trying to help others with questions they may have. I understand the feelings on all sides of this circle. It is sides of a circle as for so many it still is a raw reaction that makes people want to see things as black and white.
It either is a bad thing or it's a wonderful thing. In truth it's a thing that has many sides of a circle in that we need to recognize each other's feelings and you can't really expect someone to make a 90 degree turn and get it.
It takes time and gradual course corrections and points of understanding. The slow curve of a circle. I am today as I found myself in working from the middle. I got knocked here quickly at that Toronto Conference hosted by Diane Allen where I met so many wonderful people.
Diane of course. Wendy and Ryan Kramer. Olivia Montuschi. And several others including Jo and Rebecca that allowed me to see differing experiences. Jarringly so for a youngish dad of So today I am here in the middle or rather continuing around the sides of this circle. Still learning.
Still listening. Trying to help or explain nuances where I can. Tuesday, September 29, Follow me on Instagram. I have not abandoned this blog. But it does seem that Instagram has become the faster avenue for me to post images, links, comments etc. Please join me on Instagram at Instagram. Wednesday, July 22, My Take on Telling. Maybe that is when we all started associating telling with a secret or ratting someone out and disclosing something that should be left unsaid.
Telling in the donor conception world is no less fraught with fear, apprehension, relief and honesty depending on who is doing the telling, who is hearing the telling and of course what is being told.
My own views of telling after all these years is that it represents openness and truth and information that does not belong to me. The question that comes next for me today is that as a dad to two donor conceived children, now teenagers, who am I allowed as their guardian to tell and if so when.
To when this journey began for my family and how my views on telling came to be. First off I have never liked sweeping things under rugs or hiding things.
Second, I hate the concept of stigmas. When I was a kid I knew a couple of kids that were adopted and they were normal kids but somehow the issue of their adoption was a thing.
Back then I did not understand why but I also knew that something was a thing. Telling for me is the overall understanding that children created via donor conception methods have a full right to know their story and that they be given the opportunity to claim their story and narrative.
That as parents we support their wishes and their questions. We decided early on that our children would know their conception story. Pretty much from birth each child would be told that a donor helped create them. At age two, or thereabouts, we started reading donor conception themed books to my son and as his sister came along soon after she heard the same stories from day one.
He had accompanied us to visits to the hospital infertility clinic and knew mommy and daddy were trying to have a brother or sister for him. We did get some evil stares from people bringing a child along sometimes but we had no one to watch him and he being the generally well behaved kid he was at that young age usually won over the room.
Parents, Siblings, and Extended Family Parents knew early on that our plan was to try to use my stuff via a testicular biopsy in conjunction with IVF. When my Ex was pregnant with our son both sets of parents certainly knew that a donor had been used.
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