Dude of a dad

(I think I can hear stirrings from upstairs: an odd grunt, a door slam, a toilet flush. Reminds me: I must hang Isaac’s karate suit out to dry. He has his session this evening. And as usual he only brought it to me to wash late last night.)

It was my then-wife’s mother who taught me most about babies: vests going on over the back of the head, coming off over the front. How to do the double rock: jigging with your arms while swaying on your legs. How to feed a baby by locking one arm behind your back, holding the other arm with one hand, and diving in with the spoon, saying: ‘Here comes the horse, chock, chock, chock’ There must be other ways, but that one sure worked. And look at him now. Twenty four, fast asleep at the end of the garden.

And now, at 55, there’s another baby in the house. If you’d asked me at any time up to 18 months ago, was there any chance in the whole world that I might have another child, I would have said absolutely none. Zero. I was partnerless and felt destroyed by the death of Eddie. I had been alone in the house with him. He had gone to bed with what seemed to me like flu and he was dead in the morning. Quite usual for meningococcal septicaemia, the doctor told me.

But here we are with Elsie. It seems wrong to say that she is some kind of cure or remedy for all that loss, but merely by shouting and smiling and feeding and looking, she has the power to draw in all my attention. And, hey, I’m pretty good at some of it: vest on from behind, lift the legs for the bum-wipe, the double-motion swaying. Yes, I can lull her to sleep when she shouts…sometimes.