bitful

This morning on the way to work I started daydreaming about having a child.

Just a quick reminder for new or absent-minded readers: I am a man and I am in a relationship with another man. Chances of conceiving: a big fat zero, unless God decides to manifest herself a second time with another Immaculate Conception, this time man-on-man, thereby proving once and for all that Gay is Good and Church is Wrong.

So anyway. It is the future, and our child's name is Angela (after a very much loved aunt of mine who died of cancer in her late sixties, the only relative outside my immediate family that I ever felt close to). Our baby is adopted in 2008 when she is already four years old. I have no details about her history, but she was probably into care.

Angela is only one year older than S., my best friend's daughter. They get along like a house on fire. Angela lives in the UK and S. in Italy, but they always spend their summer holidays together since they were 7 and 8 years old and S. came to stay with us us during the London Olympics. They are inseparable, BFF and all that, and although they live hundreds of miles apart, they manage to share their lives on a daily basis with the aid of technology that starts baffling their ageing parents.

Angela is also two years younger than C. (the daughter of another couple of friends of mine), to whom she very much looks up to but sometimes gets her into trouble. C. is very bright and cheekily mischievous, quite smart for her age and overall a very stimulating influence for Angela whenever they meet.

At a very early age Angela takes up Ju-Jitsu to become a black belt like Daddy Doctor, while Daddy Bitful gives her piano lessons and makes a point to always speak Italian to her. Oddly enough, she shows absolutely no interest whatsoever in Daddy Bitful's Barbie dolls, but comes home from school every other week with some form of animal life she has decided to rescue from the street. She love spending time at her grandparents' in the countryside, playing in the garden and listening to stories about the three cats they had for nearly twenty years.

Both daddies have only wish one thing for her, that she grows up to become a strong and opinionated person, whatever path she decides to follow in her life. They encourage her to be inquisitive and curious, and she does turn into a confident and balanced young woman, with the thick skin and added maturity of having to deal very early with a little outside resistance to her not entirely orthodox family setup.

After her A levels Angela takes a year off and spends some time at her grandmother in Italy, where the unexpected happens. She falls in love, suddenly and very passionately, with one of her friend S.'s university mates and within a year she moves to Italy, has a baby, gets married, and becomes the happiest stay-at-home mum. Not even in her wildest dreams could my own mother imagine that she would become a great-grandma at the age of 98. Dr B. and I, once we reach retirement age, decide to spend a few months every year in Italy to see the grandchildren grow…

…and then my train jolts and breaks and stops, and it's my stop and I get off and I get into work with puffy eyes - and that's not just because these days I've got a bad cold.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 10:37 pm and last modified on February 18th, 2007 at 5:27 pm, and is filed under uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.