Dwelling

It’s only at this time of night, as everybody sleeps and the house is silent, that I ever ‘dwell.’ There’s so much activity during the day, so much to listen to, to see… children to enjoy, activity, work, entertainment… so much going on that I don’t dwell anymore on things that are better not dwelled upon.

But tonight I’m dwelling. And it’s unusual for me these days. I don’t like it.

I’m dwelling on Chloe’s recent miscarriage. I’m letting my mind wander to the ‘if onlys’ of that situation. I’m praying to a God I’m still not completely sure I believe in that my baby boy or girl made it to Heaven and is with Gran and Grandad.

I’m dwelling on shitty things I’ve said to people, shitty things I’ve done to people. I’m dwelling on the way I hurt my family and friends pushing everyone away all those years ago. And I don’t know why… I don’t dwell anymore.

I’m a firm believer that sometimes you just have to move on from mistakes. Clear up the debris as best you possibly can, take the lessons you can learn and move on. Sometimes those affected by your mistakes won’t let you clear up the mess… sometimes with good reason. And it feels unfinished to walk away from those situations. Yes, you have your lessons. But leaving carnage feels awful. Fortunately, in most cases, I have been able to clear up after my mistakes. Most of them.

In the grand scheme of things, the mistakes I have made have been relatively minor. But we are all our own worst critics and with a more mature outlook on life, I now dwell on things I said that I should never have said… things I did I shouldn’t have done.

Dwelling. A painfully unfamiliar state of being for me lately.

So it’s time for bed. Time to sleep. Tomorrow, the wonderful chaos of my beautiful family will wake me in the early hours and this dwelling will all seem a distant memory.

Sleep well, folks.

Making the World a Better Place

Son,

You want to make the world a better place. That’s what you want to do when you grow up. You see injustices on the news and you immediately want to go out and personally fix them. You want to feed the starving, you want to personally disarm the armies of the countries at war and tell them all to stop – to be friends. You want to house the homeless, bring home all the stray, unwanted or cruelly treated dogs.

You want to make the world a better place.

What you don’t realise is that you already do. I tell you how wonderful you make my world and sometimes I think you just think I’m being an incredibly uncool Dad.

But you do. You make the world amazing. And not just my world… Every single time you pick up toys dropped from pushchairs in the street and chase the parents to return them to the babies, you make them smile. Every single time you hold doors in shops open for old people (or pretty girls) you make them smile. Every time you tell the pretty girls in the shops that you like the smell of their perfume or that you think their hair is pretty, you make them smile.

I have no doubt you will change the world when you’re older, one way or another. But just because you can’t go out disarming those at war and rehoming every single dog on the planet right now doesn’t mean that you don’t make the world better already. Sometimes making the world better is just a series of small contributions… if everybody on the planet made 5 other people a day smile, that would be a whole lot of happiness in distribution.

You make every single person you come into contact with smile, son.

The world is better because you’re in it. And my heart is fuller, my smile is wider, my life is a happier one because of you.

As I’ve said so many time before, you’re the greatest gift I’ve ever received.

I’ll always love you even more than humous.

Your incredibly uncool, occasionally soppy and eternally doting Dad xx

Explaining Love

You can’t draw a picture of love. You can draw things and people that you do love. You can draw moments of love. You can take photographs of people in love. But you can’t ever illustrate love. It’s too many small things to make one simple picture.

It’s the way she smiles at me first thing in the morning and the way she sends me messages when I’m at work just so I know she’s thinking of me. It’s the way she’ll make sure dinner’s ready when I get home from work no matter how tired she is… It’s the way she knows what I’m thinking before I’ve even finished thinking it, knows what I’m going to say before I’ve even said it and knows how I’m feeling without me having to put it into a series of meaningless adjectives. It’s the way she accepts me without a list of changes and compromises I have to make. It’s the way she kisses me, lays her head on my chest.

It’s the silent ecstasy that lingers in the air as we sit in the quiet just looking at one another. It’s the smiles that happen, without words or instigation, between us for seemingly no reason other than the world reminding us how lucky we are. It’s the way she tiptoes quietly around my mind during the day, no matter how busy I am or what I am doing. It’s the quiet nights in, it’s the books we read together and the poems we recite when the children are asleep.

It’s the way we work together as parents, the way we bounce off one another as friends and the way we’re there for our families – together. It’s the way she can make the worst day slightly better with a kiss or a passing comment.

It’s the way that she doesn’t expect perfection, nor do I. We simply expect honesty and one another. It’s the way she sees my imperfections not as flaws but as ‘character.’ It’s in the way she’ll write messages on napkins and leave them in my coat pocket or laptop bag. It’s in the way we function better together, in the way our imperfections complement one another just as well as our positive character traits do.

It’s in the way that we’re just better for one another. It’s in the way I want so badly to become a better husband every single day and better still again the next day just to even have a half chance at deserving her.

It’s in the way that everything is just better when we’re together.

You can’t draw that, take pictures of it or even fully explain it. It’s a bizarre thing, love… I'm not arrogant enough to think I’m the only person who’s ever experienced it. So, so many of us do experience it… yet it remains so difficult to explain.

So I won’t try anymore… I’ll simply enjoy it, embrace it and be grateful for it, for her… for my stunning wife, soul mate, best friend and the only person who’s ever really completely known me and loved me…

It Simply Wasn't Meant to Be...

Life sometimes delivers blows that you didn’t expect. And sometimes it they’re so painful that you wish you were made of steel, not of flesh and not of materials to susceptible to hurt.

Three days ago, Chloe and I lost our unborn child. A cruel twist of fate so soon after we’d had the pleasure of sharing our amazing news with everybody. It was a cruel, cruel, cruel blow.

She knew. She knew the moment she told me we needed to go to the hospital. And I knew. I could tell by the panic in her eyes.

I’ve learnt to accept life’s blows with a dignified acceptance. Yes, it hurts. Yes, my family aches for this loss. Yes, my wife is in pain. But I can only conclude there must have been a reason that this child, this tiny little baby, wasn’t meant for this world.

I take solace in the fact that he or she will be spared the incomprehensible cruelties of this world, of humanity… Perhaps he or she is with Grandma and Grandad somewhere much more beautiful than here, somewhere much purer. I hope…

I also take stock once again of what I do have (rather than focussing on what I don’t have).

My beautiful baby girl

My incredible son

My stunning wife

My inspirational sister

My cheeky little nephew

I am fortunate in so many ways.

To my tiny, precious unborn child… to the one never meant for this world. Mummy and Daddy love you. Eternally in our hearts and thoughts x

Number 3!

I’ve been waiting for today like an impatient child waiting for Santa. I’ve been waiting so I could tell my son, my sister, my friends… I’ve been dying to say something to just about ANYONE but promised I would keep schtum until today.

We let my son have the morning off school so he could come with us and find out for himself. Then we went for lunch with my sister and, before either Chloe or me could get a word in, our son told my sister.

Then we went to see Chloe’s parents and our son told them the good news. Then it was to the phone to ring around my nearest and dearest who aren’t close enough to just pop in on.

And now that’s done, I can put it here.

We’re having another baby!!!!!

Number 3 will be with us in early August – probably just before Sophie’s first birthday.

We didn’t plan to have another baby within a year of Sophie’s birth. But by the same token we didn’t do anything to prevent it. And we’ve discussed how wonderful it will be to have two so close together in age. Our son is enjoying his older brother role and will feel like King of the Kids with 2 younger siblings to protect.

He’s excited!

Needless to say, our little girl is far too young to understand (she’s only just 5 months old)!

But I understand and today I’m so happy to be able to share it. I promised I’d wait until the 12 week scan, which was this morning. Our son just loved it – as much as Chloe and I did.

What a wonderful feeling. I’m ALL KINDS of excited all over again.

When Things Work Out

I’ve been really fortunate over the last year to see so many of my friends and family enjoying life… getting good things, achieving awesomeness and generally getting all the greatness I know they deserve.

And when things just ‘work out’ it makes absolutely everything bad they had to go through seem like a distant memory. Allow me to give my favourite example:

My Sister

Fell pregnant (unplanned) to an asshole boyfriend. That was not great. On the flip side, it led to my beautiful nephew and he has made her the happiest woman on the planet.

She split with the Father of her son and he decided he wanted nothing to do with his son. On the flip side, my sister met an awesome guy who treats her son as his own.

Awesome guy was homesick and moved back to Brazil. Hideous for her. But then he came back and (very romantically) just turned up on her doorstep telling her he misses her and her son too much to be away. They will marry in March.

It’s always shit to have to experience break ups, deaths, loss, stress, financial hardship or pain of any kind. But without it, could we really ever fully appreciate what we have? It took my sister enduring a relationship with a waste of space to fully appreciate a nice guy. It took them losing one another to fully appreciate how much they want one another.

I look at my situation – my wife, my beautiful children, business and home… and I look at where I was a few years back and how dark it all seemed. I feel as though I appreciate what I have so much more than I think I otherwise would have.

My friends (online and offline) who I see thriving in their lives and genuinely experiencing happiness are benefitting from what I like to consider good karma. These are good people who deserve good things.

I love it when things work out.

From Russia with Love...

From Russia with Love…

“From Russia with Love. Lol.”

That’s how she signed off the email in which she confirmed she would be moving to the UK so I could be close to my son. Only a couple of weeks later I was picking them both up at the airport, eternally grateful to a woman who was turning her world upside down to allow me to have a real relationship with that little boy. That little boy had taught me more about love in the first 24 hours I had known him than I had learnt in the 20-something years prior.

Not even two years later, that little boy and I would be back in Russia attending the funeral of his Mother – of the woman who made my relationship with my son possible.

And just 2 years later again, that little boy would be a little man with an inspiring outlook on the world. For someone so young, he’s been through a great deal and handles it better than many adults I know handle their own challenges.

My son has a homework assignment to talk about the greatest gift he’s ever had. As we sat down to talk about it yesterday, he asked me;

“What’s the greatest gift you ever had?”

“That’s easy,” I told him. “You and your sister – the best gifts ever.”

“I wasn’t a gift!” he laughed. “I didn’t get wrapped up!”

“You were a gift,” I assured him. “You were brought to me all the way from Russia. And no, you weren’t wrapped up. But not all gifts get wrapped up, do they?”

“My Playstation was wrapped up?” he told me. “And so was my guitar and those new notebooks you got me for my birthday. And everything Santa brought was wrapped up!”

“Not all your gifts have been wrapped though… your new bedroom wasn’t wrapped. Your new sister wasn’t wrapped either, was she?”

He has an answer for everything so I was a little surprised when he didn’t say anything for a moment.

“Hmm.. I know what my best gift ever was. And it wasn’t wrapped,” he finally said.

“What was it?” I enquired.

“I’ll tell you later.”

And off he went to get started on the assignment.

Two hours or so later he brought his book to me and asked me to look over the work. The title was, as per instruction from his teacher, “The Best Gift I’ve Ever Received.”

I read it, corrected one or two little errors and explained to him why they were errors and then I suggested he took it to Chloe.

She cried – tears of happiness of course. And he had the biggest smile on his face ever. Sometimes it just feels that good making someone’s day.

I’ll leave you with the opening paragraph:

“The best gift I’ve ever received is my new Mum. Her name is Chloe. She isn’t my only Mum. My first Mum died from cancer and then I thought I would never have a Mum. But Chloe married my Dad and they asked me if I would like it if Chloe was my Mum. I said I’d like it a lot because I love Chloe and she loves me even though she didn’t know me when I was a baby.”