Give Him Back

My mum phoned me last night to ask if my ears were burning.

I didn't have a fucking clue what she was talking about, so naturally I said no.

I'd accidentally posted one of my Wildly Gentle pieces onto Facebook as a Reel. I'm still getting the hang of putting my writing out there and, although I wasn't particularly bothered, I've generally kept most of it away from Facebook and the people who actually know me. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe some of the things I write show a side of me that doesn't quite fit with the version of Andrew people have had in their heads for years.

The article had somehow made its way around most of my family and a fair few people attached to them. My sister's friend had read it and become upset because she could see parts of her own life in it. My cousin had phoned my sister to ask whether she'd read it. My brother had phoned my mum and opened with, “Well, are we going to talk about your son's blog then?”

Even my sister messaged me to say that if there was ever a time I wanted to start building bridges, she was there.

I'm not entirely sure where I am with building another bloody bridge, but she'd read it and taken the time to reach out. I'll take that.

Mum and I ended up talking for about an hour. She told me she loves reading the things I write because she gets to find out what is actually going on inside my head without having to talk to me about it.

She said this during an hour-long phone call.

Her argument wasn't particularly strong.

We spoke about the writing for a while and she told me she'd noticed a change in me since I started doing it. She thought I should keep going. I told her I wanted to, but I was worried I'd eventually run out of things worth saying. I have plenty of stories, but I don't want to manufacture articles for the sake of keeping a website busy. I don't want to write myself as a victim either, or tell somebody else's story in a way they wouldn't recognise.

Eventually she asked what I was going to write about next.

I said I didn't know.

Then the front door opened.

James came bouncing into the house as if he'd been away travelling for six months rather than spending an afternoon at the pictures. Within seconds YouTube was booming through the television downstairs and a voice was travelling through the house announcing that he needed a snack.

He had walked through the door carrying the remains of a Big Gulp Coke and an empty bucket of popcorn large enough to sustain a small village through winter.

Still hungry.

Somewhere between him shouting downstairs and my mum still talking in my other ear, it suddenly became obvious what I wanted to write about.

Him.

Or, more accurately, how I became his dad.

Not in the traditional we've decided the time is right, let's dim the lights because you're ovulating sort of way.

My route into fatherhood took a little longer.

I was about twenty-five when I decided I wanted to be a dad. There wasn't some profound moment behind it. I wasn't sitting on the edge of a mountain contemplating my purpose in the universe.

I had my own little roofing business, owned my house, was playing football and earning a few quid from it, and generally thought life was going pretty well. I was doing alright.

I just knew I wanted to be somebody's dad.

Not long afterwards my girlfriend became pregnant.

Result.

Except it wasn't.

She became ill quite quickly and started bleeding. One of the memories that has stayed with me is walking around Asda and watching her periodically open the freezer doors and stick her head inside because she kept getting these ridiculous hot flushes.

At the time neither of us really knew what any of it meant.

Then came the hospital.

There was no heartbeat and they were concerned about where the pregnancy was, so there were scans and tests and waiting around for people to tell us things we didn't completely understand.

Eventually we were told it was ectopic.

That was the first time I discovered how quickly something you'd been celebrating could become something you were frightened of. One minute you're imagining becoming a dad and the next you're listening to doctors explaining a situation serious enough that they need to make sure nothing ruptures.

That was the first one.

Unfortunately it wasn't the last.

Over the following eight years we went through different versions of that experience again and again. There were ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, hospital appointments, tests, operations and more waiting rooms than I could ever remember.

Eventually one of her fallopian tubes had to be removed after the damage caused by everything she'd been through.

In total there were twelve losses.

Even writing that number now looks ridiculous.

I don't want to describe everything she physically went through because that isn't my story to tell. I stood beside it. She lived it in a way I never could.

What I can write about is what those years slowly did to me.

They changed my relationship with hope.

At the beginning a positive pregnancy test meant excitement. You immediately started thinking ahead. You imagined a bedroom, a pram, Christmas mornings and this little person who would eventually shout Dad from somewhere in the house.

After enough bad news, you stop letting yourself travel quite so far.

A positive test becomes cautious optimism.

Then cautious optimism gradually becomes another phrase for waiting for something to go wrong.

You start protecting yourself without really noticing you're doing it. You still hope, because otherwise you wouldn't keep trying, but you learn not to trust hope completely.

There were lighter moments amongst all of it, although I doubt I appreciated them at the time.

Nobody properly prepares a man for fertility testing.

At one point I was handed a plastic cup and told that I needed to go home, make a deposit and get it back to hospital within about twenty minutes.

There is absolutely nothing dignified about that process.

You're sorting yourself out in the bathroom with military precision before running towards the car while still half standing to attention because apparently your future children are now operating against the clock.

The hospital was only a few miles away but I drove there like Knight rider head out of the window screaming at traffic to move.

Clear the fucking road.

Precious cargo coming through.

Then came the fast-paced walk through a packed hospital with the package hidden inside my coat like I was completing the first ever cocaine run from Colombia.

I was already conscious of how suspicious I must have looked, and then I reached the counter and was greeted by an attractive young woman.

Brilliant.

My ability to speak completely disappeared.

I pulled this warm plastic cup from inside my coat, somehow remembered my name and got out of there as quickly as humanly possible.

The good news was that my swimmers were apparently excellent.

Strong swimmers.

Looking back, that feels quite fitting considering James turned out to be one as well.

Clearly genetics.

Those bits make me laugh now, but there was another part of those eight years that was much harder to laugh at.

Other people's pregnancy announcements.

Most of my friends were people I'd known since I was about ten, and as we moved through our twenties everybody started doing the things people do. They got houses, got married and started having children.

Every announcement was good news.

And every announcement hurt.

That's quite a difficult thing to admit without sounding bitter, because I wasn't bitter towards them. I genuinely loved these people and was genuinely happy for them.

But human beings are capable of carrying two completely contradictory feelings at once.

You can hug your mate and tell him you're made up for him while another voice somewhere inside your head quietly says, I would give absolutely anything to have what you've just got.

Sometimes somebody would say they hadn't even been trying.

That one was always a belter.

You'd smile, congratulate them and mean every word of it, then go home with this horrible little demon pecking away somewhere in your head.

Why isn't it happening for us?

I don't write that because I think nobody understood how difficult those years were for me. I'm not interested in competing for suffering and I certainly wasn't the person carrying the physical burden.

It was simply a strange place to exist.

You were surrounded by evidence that the thing you wanted happened every day, apparently quite easily, while your own experience had taught you the exact opposite.

Eventually there was a point where I accepted that maybe I simply wasn't going to become a dad.

I told myself I could live with that.

I was still young. I had a decent life. Maybe this was just one of those cards you get dealt and you crack on with the rest of your hand.

That's what I told myself anyway.

Truthfully, it hurt like fuck.

Then she became pregnant again.

By that stage neither of us was rushing off to buy a cot.

We'd learned better than that.

But the weeks kept passing.

Then the months.

Scans came and went and, for once, nobody delivered the sentence we'd become accustomed to hearing.

Slowly, very cautiously, we started allowing ourselves to think that this one might actually happen.

At around three months we went to the Blue John Mines for the day. I love shit like that, so wandering around underground caves seemed like a perfectly sensible thing to do with a pregnant woman after years of pregnancy losses.

While we were in the caves she slipped.

She didn't fall far and she was fine, but my head completely fell off.

Had she not been pregnant I probably would have killed her myself.

I spent the rest of the day behaving like an absolute dickhead because I was panic-stricken. Looking back, it was completely over the top, but that's the strange thing about fear. It doesn't always disappear when the danger does.

The pregnancy continued.

And eventually we reached the day I'd spent eight years imagining.

I remember James being born as clearly as if it happened five minutes ago.

Things weren't progressing particularly quickly and everybody in the room had become increasingly interested in what was happening at the business end.

At one point I looked down and could see this tiny tuft of ginger hair.

Just hair.

For what felt like hours.

He was crowning and apparently needed some assistance cooling down, which led to one of the most serious medical responsibilities of my life.

Vagina water.

That was the official name in our delivery room anyway.

I had a sponge and cold water and took my responsibilities extremely seriously. Ten years later, the phrase still makes me laugh because at the time the vagina-water operation felt absolutely critical to the safe arrival of the future heir to my empire.

Things became more serious as the hours passed. People tried different things and there were conversations happening around me that I didn't fully understand.

Then, after what felt like forever, he came out.

Not gracefully.

He practically slid across the bed.

After eight years, there he was.

I cut the cord and watched them place him on the scales. This tiny ginger thing immediately started trying to lift himself up as if he'd been in the world thirty seconds and already had somewhere to be.

I remember staring at him and thinking one thing.

Finally.

All the hospitals, the losses, the pregnancy announcements, the plastic cups, the scans and the years of trying to convince myself I was fine with whatever happened had somehow ended with an actual human being lying in front of me.

My son.

James.

I was absolutely fucked afterwards and eventually went home to try to get some sleep.

I'd barely climbed into bed when my phone went.

Her mum and dad had arrived at the hospital to see the baby.

I shot upright.

Someone else was there.

With James.

They'd probably be touching him.

Holding him.

Possibly even prodding him.

This clearly required supervision.

I bounced off half the walls getting dressed and drove back to the hospital like a deranged lunatic because apparently nobody could be trusted around the baby unless I was personally overseeing proceedings.

That probably should have been my first clue that I was going to be a fucking nightmare.

People say having a child changes you and it sounds like one of those things people put underneath black-and-white photographs on Instagram.

Then it happens.

Something genuinely did change in me that day.

There was suddenly another human being in the world who mattered more to me than I did.

Which was beautiful.

It also created a small logistical problem.

He was mine and nobody else was allowed to touch him.

Obviously people were technically allowed to hold him. I wasn't completely deranged.

But there was an unofficial time limit of somewhere around two seconds.

My mum could hold him.

Lovely.

Give him back.

A family member wanted a cuddle.

Of course.

That's enough now.

Give him back.

Someone had patiently waited for their turn.

Excellent.

Your turn has finished.

Give him back.

There are loads of photographs from those early months showing James happily being held by family members. What the photographs don't show is the imaginary conveyor belt I'd created just outside the frame.

Smile for the picture.

Lovely.

Now politely fuck off and return the baby.

At the time this behaviour seemed entirely rational to me.

I'd spent eight years learning that pregnancy didn't necessarily produce a baby. I'd learned that good news could turn into bad news frighteningly quickly and that things you desperately wanted could disappear.

Then somebody finally handed me the thing I'd spent years being frightened I'd never have and apparently expected me to behave normally.

Of course I held on too tightly.

Fear doesn't always leave when you finally get what you wanted. Sometimes it just changes shape. I think it took me quite a long time to understand that.

And maybe that's been one of the biggest lessons fatherhood has taught me, because almost from the moment James arrived, life has been asking me to do the opposite.

To let go.

At first it was letting somebody else hold him, then letting go of his hand as he learned to walk, reluctantly leaving him at nursery, then school, and so on.

Each stage gives you another tiny reminder that this person you once considered your personal property actually belongs to himself.

His first year at school fell during Covid, which unfortunately coincided with the period where I convinced myself I'd become a barber (purely because you could not get your haircut anywhere so i bought clippers)

James has always had this brilliant mop of curly hair and on the night before one of his first days at school I gave him a haircut.

He looked like a tiny convicted criminal.

There was another haircut disaster years later when I made the catastrophic error of letting his mum take him to the barber. They cut it far too short and he came home devastated.

“I don't look like James John Murphy anymore.”

Full government name.

My sympathetic response was to ask why he was talking about himself in the third person like a tit.

Parenting excellence.

Then there was football.

I remember thinking at one stage that he was never going to make a goalkeeper. Now I've watched him pull off saves that genuinely make me wonder where the hell they came from.

We've developed a deal where clean sheets occasionally result in a trip to Smyths.

This sounded financially manageable when we agreed it.

It is no longer financially manageable.

I think we've completed Smyths.

He swims too. I remember watching him complete his first length of a twenty-five-metre pool, and now swimming is simply part of who he is.

We've swum together pretty much every week for ten years.

There are holidays and little adventures. There are ridiculous conversations where he asks questions I don't know the answer to. He has permanently claimed shotgun in the car and anybody else travelling with us is apparently required to sit in the back.

He also controls Spotify, which irritates the life out of me because he keeps contaminating my beautifully curated country and folk playlists with rap songs.

And then there is YouTube.

YouTube can still fuck off.

The second that goes on, I disappear and his mum can resume parenting duties.

But underneath all those ordinary little stories is something I've slowly had to learn.

Being his dad can't mean preventing everything bad from happening to him.

Sometimes loving him means standing slightly further away than I'd like while he works something out for himself.

It means watching him lose football matches and knowing I can't fix them. Watching him fall over. Watching somebody hurt his feelings. Watching him make decisions that wouldn't necessarily be mine.

I haven't always been brilliant at that.

When he was about seven, we played a football match where one of the opposition coaches was refereeing. He gave a goal that quite clearly hadn't crossed the line and James burst into tears.

That was apparently all the evidence I needed to launch Operation Protect The Child.

I marched onto the pitch to confront the coach and before I knew it I was toe-to-toe with three grown men, completely prepared to rip their heads off over an under-sevens football match.

Then I glanced sideways.

Seven little kids were staring at me with enormous eyes.

And somewhere inside my own head a voice finally arrived.

Give your head a wobble, dickhead.

So yes, I'm still learning.

For years I've been somebody who likes to believe everything happens for a reason.

I'm less convinced by that as I get older.

Sometimes things happen and they're simply shit. They hurt people and there isn't some grand lesson waiting at the end that makes them worthwhile.

I wouldn't wish those eight years on anybody and I would never tell someone going through repeated pregnancy loss that one day they'll understand why it happened.

They might not.

We were fortunate.

We got James.

Not everybody gets that ending.

I don't think twelve losses happened so that I could become a better father, and I don't need to believe they did.

What I do know is that those years became part of me.

They shaped how I experienced becoming his dad. They probably explain why I treated him like a priceless museum exhibit for the first few months of his life, and why even now part of me still wants to stand between him and anything that might hurt him.

Maybe they also taught me something about the ordinary things.

The football.

The swimming.

The holidays.

The stupid questions.

The rap songs destroying my playlists.

The requests for snacks thirty seconds after eating enough popcorn to feed Warrington.

The noise from another room.

They're nothing remarkable.

They're just life with a ten-year-old boy.

But every so often I remember the twenty-five-year-old version of me.

He had his little roofing business, his own house and a few quid coming in from playing football.

Life was going alright.

But there was one thing he wanted more than any of it.

He wanted to be somebody's dad.

It took eight years to get there.

James has now been here longer than the time I spent waiting for him, which is difficult to get my head around because those eight years felt endless and these ten seem to have disappeared in about five minutes.

The tiny ginger baby I wouldn't let anybody hold now walks home from school on his own, makes his own cheese on toast using approximately one loaf and an entire block of cheese, has his own friends, his own opinions and an increasingly large life that doesn't involve me every second of the day.

He's becoming his own person.

Exactly as he's supposed to.

And maybe that's the strange contradiction I've finally come to understand.

I spent eight years desperately trying to get him here.

Then the first few years desperately trying to hold on to him.

And the rest of being his dad will probably involve learning, bit by bit, how to let him go.

Not completely, obviously.

I'm not a fucking lunatic.

He's still sitting shotgun.