Letter Home

Well, where to start on this one….

As I’m sure you’ve worked out, I’ve always been a hopelessly late developer. I’m still falling off pushbikes and motorcycles. Didn’t even learn to play guitar till I passed 30. Steady job – how long was it before I ever experienced that? And still no sense of what a proper “career” might be. What a walking disaster!!

As you know, many moons ago Georgie and I got together after many years of not being together when perhaps we should have been. Regret is a terribly self-indulgent extravagance and I don’t often immerse myself. Nor does Georgie, but occasionally we have lapses. If we’d got together sooner, could we have done this and that? Could we have avoided a lot of unnecessary non-happiness? But who knows? It’s rarely a productive road to go down and hardly entertaining. Nevertheless, history is there to inform us and it might be foolish not to look back from time to time – if only to adjust the rudders and fine tune the headings. One of Georgie’s regrets, may heaven forgive her, is that she never had a child with me. I’ve never considered I am much in the way of fatherhood material and nor have I felt bringing new borns into this world a particularly useful or constructive thing to do. Nor have I ever had much curiosity about where my particular genetic strand might lead. But perhaps, as they say, I just haven’t been in love enough. Despite our sometimes fraught living situations – what with custody strains and property dead ends and periodic job dis-satisfactions against a backdrop of global meltdowns – I regularly count my blessings and chief among them is this home (wherever it may be) that I can come back to with this lovely woman and her lovely child and all the trappings that seem to come with it. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier. I don’t think I’ve ever been as regularly side-tracked into laughter. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the sub-routines so much – from excursions to the allotment or the coffee shop to taking Julia to school on a Monday and a Friday.

With all of this in mind, Georgie and I found ourselves occasionally wandering down a minor regret road associated with missed opportunities for joint parentage. It goes without saying that we both love Julia big time and her happiness is always the chief consideration. But even she has wondered what it might be like to have a brother or sister. So, against all notions of common sense and plain old applied intelligence, Georgie and I took the decision to leave open a “window of opportunity” for a couple of months to see if the cosmos itself had any suggestions or inclinations.

Well, the cosmos has responded, and the answer seems to be – damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead. Within, it seemed to me, a very short period of time, I found myself drifting in the hammock at the allotment, gazing up at the blue sky through the green leaves of the little fruit trees, when Georgie’s gentle face hove into view and looked down at me with such generous smilings and outpourings of love that I felt transported. Her smiling face, those eyes, and, beyond, the leaves and the sky. I gradually realised she was speaking, and eventually clocked what she was softly saying. Can’t remember the exact words, but I’m afraid I didn’t have one of those Hollywood moments where the lead male is instantaneously ecstatic and leaping about and treating the whole thing as if it was the announcement of the second coming. To be honest, I think my first reaction was something like, hang on, we’ve only just opened this window. I think Georgie may have been a little disappointed by my initial reaction (hey, I was having a good time in that hammock), but over time I’ve found myself adjusting. We haven’t mentioned anything to anyone apart from a few medical people. The only other person who has been brought into the loop is Julia. We put it off as long as we could pending test results but she seemed to sense something. Georgie wasn’t really showing then but Julia seemed drawn to her stomach. Kept stroking and squeezing and putting her head against. So we rehearsed a couple of scenarios and eventually, when we were all loafing on the bed one morning we eased the news out. A little off-puttingly, she cried at first. We were both there caressing and consoling her until we mentioned that any names would have to be agreed unanimously by all three of us. She instantly began reeling off names and hasn’t stopped since. The other day she even asked if she could make the baby’s sandwiches when it’s ready for school (talk about long term planning; wonder how long that will last?).

One of Georgie’s concerns has been Down’s syndrome – the likelihood of which allegedly increases with the age of the parents. So scans and tests have been undertaken, all of which now seem to have given the all clear.

So there, in a nutshell, it is. I’m sure you’ll think I’m as mad as a hatter. I sure do. There is absolutely no sense to it, but it is gradually seeming so right in so many ways – some expected; some unexpected. Who knows? Time will perhaps tell (although in my experience time rarely tells you anything at all).