Sorry

I know I haven’t posted much here recently. Really, it’s for your own good. I have become exactly the sort of boring parent I feared I would. I am fascinated by everything the kids do and cannot believe you won’t be too. You love my kids. You do. YOU DO. Just let me get this one blog entry off my chest and, I promise, we can move on.

One year ago today, P and I were drifting, weightless with fear, towards their foster parents’ front door. My amygdala was coughing loudly and urgently gesturing for my attention:

“Turn around sunshine and start running. Empty your bladder and void your bowels and you’ll be 0.5% faster (and much less appetising to a raptor).”

“Listen” it kept saying “You cannot make yourself love them. This will be a disaster.” The amygdala, it turns out, is well-meaning but not to be trusted when it comes to adoption and to matters of the heart. I love my girls. This is a miracle: Prosaic, quotidian but miraculous. I was the boy who didn’t believe in Love.

When Prince Charles writhed awkwardly behind the then Lady Diana Spencer at their engagement announcement and, prompted to confirm they were in love responded with, “Yes … whatever love is”, his words mirrored my thoughts. “So”, I speculated, “it seems the future monarch and I have more in common than our shared passion for punishingly uncomfortable hunting tweed underpants.” I could not conceive of Love existing in the form that everyone else on Earth appeared to credit. It all seemed believing in Father Christmas. We were conspiring, as a culture, to fool ourselves into believing in something supposedly wonderful that 5 minutes careful thought would indicate was ridiculously impossible. Love was, at best, the side effect of some hormonal surge.

When I had my first crush, I was bemused. I couldn’t work out why my head had stopped working. I was compelled to approach her and speak whatever nonsense fell from my mouth; to write letter after letter after letter. It was a measure of her great humanity that she did not simply pay to have me rolled off the side of a Scandanavian ferry and dropped into the North Sea. I cannot ever thank her enough. For an aspiring cynic, the crush was an important but terrifying realisation that a devotion to sarcasm alone was not a sufficient bulwark of identity. I could feel Love overcoming me; over-powering me. It was as if I was losing an arm-wrestling bout with an beneficent but implacable nun. I felt like HAL, losing system after system and knowing that I was one logic board away from singing “I’m half crazy, all for the love of you”.

When I fell in Love with P things were different. I felt Love seeping in to the salt marsh of my mind – an evening tide raising boats from beds and bringing life back to the pools and shallows of my brackish self. I welcomed it. “Prince Charles” I thought “you’re an idiot”. I threw away my last pair of tweed undies.

Falling in love with the girls has been different again. It feels like I’ve been tased. All higher critical faculties have gone. All is impulse now. The impulse is extravagant. I understand with a perfect clarity that the world is simply not good enough. It has to be changed. I have to change it. Now. When I get home and Little S runs to hug me I just want to stand in the doorway and cry. When Big S hands me a picture of our new family, I want to stand in the doorway and cry. Pretty much any interaction with them makes me want to head to a doorway and start weeping. My house needs more doorways.

My amygdala is back in favour. Two days ago I had taken Little S to a “mini-active class” which involves her ignoring the instructors whilst running around grinning and waving at me. I sat rapt, heart soaring. A shadow in my peripheral vision resolved to a small boy. An evil little bastard who, without provocation, threw a basketball at Little S’s head. It caught her from behind and dropped her. In comfortably under a nano-second my amygdala had a fully documented plan of action which involved my taking the small male child and drop-kicking him the length of the gym before going in search of his father with an iron bar and a gutful of homicidal rage. My frontal cortex begged me to sit still. It assured me that whilst I very plainly felt justified in taking another child’s life, others might look less charitably on my actions. I instead concentrated my anger into a look so malevolent that when I caught the offender’s eye he wept instantly. I am probably the image he sees now when he closes his eyes. I fear what I will have become by the time they reach their teens. Any boy who messes with their feelings will hear me cackle gutturally and never be seen or heard from again. My entire garden will be covered by patio.

What does all this come to? It comes to this: I know sometimes men who are considering adoption read my blog. I know they will at some point ask themselves whether they could “Love somebody else’s baby”. I just want to put my arm, metaphorically around those people, and say “of course you can you unbelievable fucking imbecile. You won’t have any choice in the matter and it is utterly wonderful”