No award, no medal, no mountain peak, no victory could compare with the moment you become a parent. I remember exactly where I was when I learnt I was going to be a father for the first time and exactly what I felt — a stupefied disbelief, a numb terror.
I was 38. And there was in the seven years of my sober life a handful of things that I knew to be home truths: I would never play golf, I would never be a soldier, I would never own property, I would never join a political party, I would never wear a T-shirt with whimsical writing on it, I would never eat pizza with pineapple and I would never be a father. I was plainly, genetically unequipped to parent anyone; I had made such a patently bad job of looking after myself, I couldn’t be trusted with children.
When I learnt I was going to be a father I was lying on a mattress in my mother’s flat with Lily the dog, who couldn’t get upstairs any more and was inclemently incontinent. I spent the next eight months in a state of underground terror.
I lay awake thinking of all the things I could do for a child and all the things that could go wrong. I didn’t say any of this out loud because obviously Amber, my wife, had to worry about all this stuff that I worried about, while also being pregnant . . . and with the added worry that she had me as a partner. The one thing I never doubted was that she would be a good mother, and 24 years later there’s not a single day when she hasn’t been.
I didn’t go to the hospital when Flora was born. I think it was because Amber said I wouldn’t be a help. She says it was because I said I wouldn’t be a help. I got a call early in the morning from a midwife to tell me that I should get on a bus.
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“I stared at the small pink face and felt a golden blessing
By the time I got there everything would be finished. I was told to wait in a corridor with another pacing man and then a door opened a few inches and an Irish accent said, “Give it a couple of minutes while we make Mum presentable, and here’s your daughter”, and this swaddled child, eyes closed, with a look of deep thought, was put into my arms. I’d never held a new baby before. She fitted naturally and comfortably into the crook of my arm like the missing piece of a puzzle.
I stared at the small pink face and my head filled with a grace, a golden blessing. I knew absolutely with perfect clarity that I would love this little girl all my life without hesitation or question. I also knew that it would all be all right — the worries, the projected calamities — they would all be all right. We would manage. Better than that, we would flourish.
I have said that the hinge of my life was before and after drink and drugs. The second chance. But there is another fold. Deeper and more profound, before and after my children. The birth of Flora changed everything. Two years later there was Alasdair. I wasn’t there for his birth either, I was looking after Flora, desperately worried that she’d be upset by the arrival of another child demanding her mother’s attention.
We went to the hospital together to pick her baby. She said she wanted a brother. So I took her to the maternity unit with its rows of cribs and new babies and she pointed to a pleasant-looking little chap who was my Alasdair and again I felt the grace of love and the sense of rightness.
And then later, with Nicola, the twins came. And I was there for them. I hadn’t meant to be, but the doctor said just pop in for a couple of moments and then presto, with the dramatic efficiency of a birthday magician, the gore-striped child was lifted over the curtain that had been drawn over Nicola’s lower half like a Punch and Judy set — a little girl. And immediately afterwards, a little boy. Edith and Isaac, and the now unsurprising but still ecstatic feeling of not falling but filling with love.