Finally, a father (2009)
I AM only just beginning to understand the pain my husband has carried with him on our path to parenthood. It’s a subterranean heartache but I can feel it beating beneath the surface of our lives, growing louder when times are hardest.
In his eyes I can see the cost of past experiences that have made him yearn for deeper bonds with people. Friendships are deeply important to him, as is that reciprocal give-and-take of a connection truly shared.
When it came time to start a family of our own, I know he (like myself) hoped to fulfil the dream of having a baby – son, daughter, it didn’t matter – who would hold him close in the deepest relationship yet possible. The one with his child.
As a family, we would achieve a grand closeness never before seen in the universe. In short, we would grasp hands and never let each other go.
But try as you might, it is futile to pretend that any of us can control life in this way. Nor is it right to expect that a child should act as some sort of gap-filler for relationships that spun away from us in our childhood.
Together, we have learned this lesson the hard way. Our daughter Amelia, who is now five, did not receive our exhaustive memos in utero about close companionship or ready compliance.
The lists we made detailing the places we would go, the activities we would share, the things we would teach her: all were lost in translation from imagination to stark reality.
Amelia arrived without knowing the great weight of expectation we had heaped on her shoulders. In turn, it took us time to learn that she is deaf and has autism too.
That second, more recently identified fact, struck my husband in the chest like an arrow shot. The wound has not yet healed.
For him, I think it must sometimes feel as though he has been thrust back into the more troubling spaces of his past. Of his longing for companionship and finding only barriers where open arms should have been.
But this is much, much worse, because here we are talking about his beautiful, cherished daughter. The person he most longed to meet and who, when he found out we were expecting, nearly collapsed from paroxysms of joy.
During the worst phases of Amelia’s rages, he has woken daily to chaos only to return at day’s end to find similar chaos readying itself to greet him once more. I am lucky, because I have been around to witness and enjoy the moments of calm that happen in between.
He has spent endless hours trying to get his daughter to listen to him, to calm down or just sit with him and play. If only for a few moments.
Often the greatest challenge is asking Amelia to leave him alone. She craves closeness too, but filtered through her autism it’s all rough physicality and she can’t moderate the need in an appropriate way.
So, she presses herself on him, lies on him, punches him and pulls at his face until he often has to abandon her and lock himself away.
But over five years of incredible ups and downs it is possible (read = mandatory) to adjust one’s expectations of family life. We have had to put on hold some of the things we hoped to do together. Little things that the majority of people take for granted every day.
We make do with living as a family unit that sometimes needs to split up and create more manageable compartments to survive. It’s crucial to recognise which combinations work best for Amelia depending on the situation.
A rare football victory in the early days.
Like going to the football. For as long as I can remember, my husband has dreamed of taking his little girl to see our beloved Bombers play. He would dress her in red and black and talk to her about the rules and the players. We can’t control much but Amelia has no say in which team she is required to barrack for. No matter what their recent transgressions, we’re an Essendon family through and through.
Sadly for my husband, taking her to games is too high-risk an activity right now. After about the age of two, Amelia has found it impossible to sit down for longer than a few minutes and the combination of crowds and noise makes it too stressful for her.
Very swiftly, Amelia starts to lose control and, as is the ritual, her Dad is forced to carry her screaming form out and away from the din, from those screaming just as angrily at the umpires. It’s not fair on either of them to pretend the result can be otherwise. At least in the short term.
So we achieve a domestic harmony of sorts by being ultra-sensitive to Amelia’s needs and abilities. And by looking out for each other as parents, and as individuals. So when her Dad goes to the football it is not with his family but with other Dads and their children.
Like a genial uncle, he sits with them and talks to them about the game he loves and wonders at how still they are. How easy it is to be with them. And he wishes he didn’t have to leave his daughter behind.
But just because he sometimes has to be apart from her, as I do, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t looked for other ways to connect with her. To make himself feel like her father, and she his daughter.
So what do they do? They walk. Most Sundays, Amelia and her Dad drive to sundry parks all over Melbourne and beyond and just walk. It’s more like ranging really, up hill and down dale, whether it’s raining or not.
Discovering happiness on the hills of Melbourne.
Amelia is a terrible walking companion. She has no sense of safety, she strays, and runs away and follows other people and animals like a hybrid canine-child catching the scent of something colourful, fun or more interesting over there. Always over there.
Last week she spotted a group of horse riders and careened headlong into a valley after them, with no fear of equine retaliation. The riders shouted at her to stop and thankfully she heeded their harsh tones. My husband recalled it to me later, the sense of helplessness as she broke away from him and sprinted towards potential danger.
Clearly rambling with Amelia is absolutely exhausting. But, for all that it is taxing, her Dad loves it too. Walking in the outdoors was a treasured part of his upbringing and now it is his gift to her.
Because regardless of the weather or the clouds that pass over her face from time to time they are together. They’re not at the football, or visiting friends, but on the hills of Melbourne they have found each other through walking.
And when they come home to me, their faces flushed from the elements and the joy of adventure I see only closeness. I see the beauty and the depth of their relationship as father and daughter.
For T, with love.
moderate-severe/profound... quirky 