Voyage around my fatherhood

Human Life Review, Winter 2003 by Close, Alan

There is a line in Helen Garner's novel Cosmo Cosmolino in which a character attempts to cope with the breakdown of her marriage. "To see a couple of any age lean towards each other across a restaurant table caused Janet's heart to fracture like an egg."

Random glimpses of parenting-my young nephew, naked and finally tired as he lies on his mother's belly after his bath, my friend Mick dancing with his four-year-old at the pub, a father walking slowly down the street with his child-the small arm reaching up so high, the little hand lost in the big mitt, all the trust and responsibility this image evokes for me-such moments, similarly, can crack my heart like an egg.

Easy on the eye, admittedly, compared with much of the hard reality of parenting, they remind me, painfully, what is absent from my life. They lead me to question what might have gone wrong that I have missed out on children-and to wonder with occasional panic what direction my future can possibly take without the rudder of family life to steer it.

"Children suck the love right out of your bones," Garner writes elsewhere. How can we who are childless find any reason for living that even comes close to this?

I didn't choose not to have a child-how many of us do?-it is, rather, how my life has panned out. I'm 47, which means of course that I'm not too old. But if anything I feel readier now to be a grandparent than a new father. Watching men my age with small children, I have no doubt we were meant to do this business 10 or 20 years earlier, and I wonder whether emotionally and energetically my fathering days have passed.

I have been the father of several terminations, all but one of which were clear mutual decisions-as much as any can be. That one exception, however, was my girlfriend's last-minute choice. She had been my partner for several years but our relationship was in turmoil after we had become involved with other people.

I doubt we would have stayed together even if we'd had the child-a boy, we were certain, and already named Jack. But I also have no doubt that I would have parented Jack with every gram of dormant love that lies hardening in my bones now. He would have been 13 this month. I can imagine, too easily, his gangly cockiness, the sullen, aggrieved tone in his voice and, also too easily, the frustration and fierce protectiveness this arouses in me as his father.

I look back at my life and understand that every other twist and turn and choice I've made were all but inevitable, as if I were blindly following a script my past had left in my hands. But who might fatherhood have made me? What life might I have now? My girlfriend's decision that day in June 1989 remains the one moment when my future could have swerved in a radically different direction.

For a long time I thought I did have children-the result of sperm donations made when I was 24. I'm sure this assumption dampened whatever drive I had to father children of my own. Only in my early 40s did something make me inquire after the fate of those donations. (I was single again and taking stock of what seemed to be the ruins of my life as I entered middle age.) To be told that my sperm never survived thawing and had been destroyed only months after I donated it sent me reeling. I was utterly unprepared for the shock and disappointment I'd feel-a distant shadow, I imagine, of what it must be like to lose a child.

These were two distinct turning points in my life-the moment I was told I was not a father after all and the moment the child waiting to be born as my son was sent off into another life instead.

I daydream about a knock on the door, a letter in the mail from a son or a daughter I never knew I had. I fantasize about the richness this would give me, the meaning I would instantly have in what otherwise too often feels like a life still waiting for direction.

Many women must learn to live with the knowledge they'll never have a child. No doubt because men don't have the same fertility deadline, we don't talk much of this.

For me the acid truth that I have probably squandered my children in terminations and contraception is etched deeper by that small, weak beacon of hope, the itch of desire, the sharp stab of pain that this is not the case.

[Alan Close edited the anthology Men Love Sex, which in his native Australia remains a benchmark of male writing on the emotions. His poetry, stories and non-fiction have been widely published in Australia and overseas. He asked that we make it clear that he "supports the right to choose," but also that he thinks "young women and men need to be cautioned against repeating the mistake so many of us made-to see abortion as yet another contraceptive option without considering the long-term emotional repercussions which often follow a termination." The following appeared in The Weekend Australian, Dec. 28-29, 2002, and is reprinted with Mr. Close's permission.]