I am fraying. My defences are rubbing away and I am on edge. I feel I am approaching critical mass in some way.
Big badda-boom.
Leeloo Dallas. Multipass.
So I have been contemplating my navel, and my relationship (such as it is) with my son. Or my not-son.
It is weird. I do not know how I feel. There are no guidelines. How am I supposed to feel? The oh-so-helpful counselor, before the adoption, told me it was important for me to be there for my girlfriend. That she would need me to be strong for her. The idea that I would have feelings of my own? Preposterous.
So I held my son, after he was born, when he still was my son. And I felt things.
People have the gall to tell me that there is no such thing as a birth father. Because I did not give birth.
Fuck you.
I was there, at his birth. I was his father, at the time of his birth. Mine were the first hands in this world to cradle his little body. Mine, the first tears to fall on his skin. Mine, the hands that passed him to his mother, and mine the heart that died as he left my arms and my life. Don’t you dare tell me I will feel nothing, just because he was not carried within my body. He was my son, he was of my body, and you will not take those moments from me.
So where do you go, in a relationship that starts that way? How do you maintain a relationship with a child who you see for a week out of every 12 months? How do you come to terms with the tiny baby being a boy of five, with his own ideas and opinions (oh my God, the opinions – what does he think of me? What if he hates me? Ohshitohshitohshitohshit!) How do you know what to say, how to act? How do you know when you are crossing boundaries? When you are answering questions in a way his parents do not approve of? How do you know what to get him for his birthday when you do not know what he likes, or what is cool to a kid of five in 2006? When you do not know who he is? Where is the fucking manual?
I am not navigating a maze here. It is a wilderness. There is nothing here, no paths to choose between – no this way or that way. Somehow, I am supposed to come up with my own ideas, I am supposed to pull them from the nothingness. But there is no feedback for right ideas – only wrong. I know when I am doing wrong. Doing right is just expected.
I said it was not a convenient excuse for returning to old ways. But maybe it is. Because at least I know where I stand now. And maybe I welcome Consequences as Feedback.
Ideas as Opiates.
