Keeping The Stars Apart - 1. Story

She's finally fallen asleep. We were up all night, sponging her down and singing to her as we waited for the three hour relays between paracetamol and ibuprofen to take effect. We were about to bundle her in the car and hightail it to the emergency unit when I found my old otoscope and looked in her ear. If a pharmacologist could see the inflammation, I managed to quip, then it's definitely otitis media. We called a paediatrician friend of mine who emailed a script because I lose all sense of medicine when its my child. The temperature has settled and my husband has passed out next to Susie after driving across the city to find an all-night pharmacy to dispense the antibiotics.

As the dawn light splashes over my sleeping family, I remember my own bout with middle-ear infection when I was five, just a year older than my daughter is now. My mom stayed with me the whole time, soothing me with same lullabies as the rigors shook my body and the throbbing felt as if it were going to cleave my brain in half.

Chris stirs, and then sits bolt upright, confused, with a wild look in his face.

'Hey, hey, it's okay love,' I say, grabbing his shoulder. Even after two decades, I still shiver whenever I touch him, amazed at how his muscles remain simultaneously titanic and sylph-like. At 37, he still looks like a blond Superboy even as silver wicks into his temples and his beard.

He looks around, and then reality settles in. His eyes dart to our daughter.

'Bru. Is she better?'

I nod. 'Both of you have been out of it for a few hours now.'

The sky is lightening quickly, and I'm so thankful it's the weekend.

'You've been sitting here awake the whole time?'

'Yes,' I say. 'Why wouldn't I be?'

Chris leans in to kiss me. 'I know,' he says. 'Our hero.'

'Is Mikey okay?' he asks.

'Ja. I checked in on him just now, he's snoring with both dogs.'

Chris shakes his head and smiles. 'So much for trying to keep the bed out of bounds.'

Our son is an animal whisperer, like most eight-year-old boys. He'll go to bed and end up with two cats around his head, the Jack Russell in one armpit and the Labrador draped over his legs - yes, all 30 kg of her.

'Get in,' says Chris, patting the one side of our bed.

Our parenting style is best described as "scientific crunchy". I believe dirt is good but would sterilise the feeding bottles twice over (first in the microwave and then soak them it in dilute sodium hypochlorite). I continued sterilising all their utensils and cups after they were fully weaned. We vaccinated the fuck out of them but Chris made almost all the baby food for a whole year.

We flirted with surrogacy and the whole IVF thing but I kind of cracked halfway through the first set of paperwork. And then we decided to adopt and the paperwork was several orders of byzantine magnitude worse.

And now we're feeling the need to have a kid again. Chris and I have a good joint income, we bought a house way too big for even the four of us, and if we could give one more child a loving home and a good future (I think?? I think too much) it's something.

It hasn’t been easy. Never mind the ever-present looks of disapproval or surprise, there is my own guilt about stupid things. When with our first arrived I would buy formula at the pharmacy and keep my eyes peeled for someone telling me I'm feeding my child powdered McDonalds (someone actually said that to me and then doubled down when I said neither myself nor her other father are capable of lactation, suggesting we source from donors... fuck off please, that resource should be ring fenced for the premature waifs in NICU.)

I can't answer these questions, and I don't know what psychological trauma we've inadvertently transmitted to our children even epigentically. They may not share our DNA but go far back enough and we actually do.

The point is, we love them more than anything in the universe.

Messing it up is inevitable. There's that poem... They f*** you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do...

All I can say is... and Chris too... is that while fatherhood came natural to the two of us, it came natural in the way forest fires and monsoons do, upsetting everything painfully and reorganising entire ecosystems. The Bible says: Wretched as you are, you know how to love your children. Not that I think we're wretched.

It's especially when the kids are asleep that I miss my mother. How she would have loved them; how they would have loved her. It's hard for Dad sometimes... wanting to share his grandkids with Mom, and he can't. It's also amazing how Brian and Fiona have more or less a united front there are family get-togethers. I'm still flabbergasted how we were able to have an absolutely peaceful Christmas at Southbroom with both of them there, we witnessed no old enmities, to the point that Michael had to ask:

'How come Grandpa and Grandma don't live together if they're Daddy's parents? It's not like Papa, because his mommy died, and that's why Gramps is alone.'

Brian handled it with surprising aplomb.

'It doesn't matter, Mikey. We both love you and Daddy... and your Papa.'

This was enough for him, who simply nodded and then asked for some more Coke, which I will allow on holiday from grandparents because it's their job to break all your parenting rules.

Chris had to suddenly get up "to check on the gammon"; I found him in the bathroom, desperately trying not to cry. All these years later, Brian's rejection (and reacceptance) of him hasn't completely healed. Not even when he jogged out in front of forty thousand screaming fans as a last-minute replacement Springbok to help bring the World Cup home to South Africa. He still does a double take when his father tells him he loves him; it's only recently that he can even stand to hug him.

I understand, and think how lucky I am to have my father.

I never thought that would be the most awkward moment (so far, at least: we're freaking out when puberty comes.)

We were stealing ourselves for the inevitable questions: “why do I have two fathers? What does being gay mean? Why don't I have a mother?”

And so, we were called to school because Mikey got into textbook scuffle.

Our son sat with his arms folded, red-faced but calm. The principal had a sage expression on her face.

'You realise, Michael,’ she said, ‘that what you said and did was not very nice, but I understand that he had no right to make that comment about your fathers.'

Chris and I raised our eyebrows and looked at our son, and I tried hard to hide my pride at the way he had dealt with the situation:

It was Mikey who told Richard to back down and stop bullying the little Grade Two boy, to which the little oaf said to him “butt out fag-ass" followed by "besides, he can run to his mommy. You can’t. You don't have a mom."

Mikey shrugged his shoulders and replied calmly: 'Well, at least my dads wanted me. I heard you weren't planned, and then your dad ran away with his secretary."

Mikey expected the punch; he took it on the chin and then, very calmly, broke Richard's nose.

My husband's eyes twinkled, as the tried hard to stifle laughter.

We took our boy for ice-cream and decided not to ground him.

'Mikey,' I said with a deep breath, 'we know it must be strange for you sometimes, that we're not like many families.'

'What do you mean, Papa?'

'Well, you see, there's me and Daddy, and we're both men.'

'That's okay,' he said, a small sagacious Gandalf. 'But Granny died when you were young, so you only had your daddy. So me and Susie are lucky that we have both of you.'

My heart went supernova with love for my son.

'But you know you grew inside the tummy of a woman,' said Chris, 'and from a... nature point of view you and Susie do have a mom...'

'Yes I know, but parents raise kids.'

'How are you so wise?' I said, kissing his forehead.

'I think it's Granny. Gramps said I talk the way she does.

My Dad was right.

'So do you know if I came out of the vagina or did they cut her open when I was born? Because Granny was born with that thing on her face and that's why she could see things.'

'Oh my God,' said Chris, and covered his face, and I started giggling.

'Um,' I said, 'I was told you came out the... the usual way. I had to be cut out, because the cord was around my neck and Grandma was very tired... but, that’s only some cases.'

'I thought so,' says Mikey, and sighs deeply, as if he had solved a major philosophical problem. 'Can I have a waffle?'

*

I hear a little series of footfalls, and next thing I know I'm sandwiched between Mikey and Chris, who in turn is coiled protectively around our daughter. She's still deep in slumber. Her little tresses are spread out, fusing with her father's amber locks.

Within moments, Fred has jumped on the bed with a bone that his almost as big as his little terrier body, then, and after half a minute of unrequited whining Tessa has slumped in her basket. The cats arrive en masse as I'm drifting off, and even as the sun is rising, I can see Venus glowing on the horizon. Our bed is a spacecraft, and soon we will dream about flying high above the earth, seeing the clouds swirl over Africa; there's lightning playing over the Rift Valley and a little red glow over Réunion as the volcanoes twitch in their slumber.

We are, perhaps, little planets orbiting around each other, and I think that is what love is: not just gravity, but anti-gravity too; like cummings’s poem says:

This is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart.