Tales of a slutty dad...

 

When my sister found out I was about to become a dad, she exclaimed: “I’ve always known you’d be a dad. You are cut for it. You’ll be great”. God knows where she got that from. I for one certainly never thought it would happen. In fact, from an outsider’s perspective, I’d be the last person you’d expect to have offspring. You see, I’m gay, and despite some dabbling with the female of the species during my university years, I never really warmed up to the idea of sleeping with them. Give me a woman to talk to, go travelling with, work with and drink with into the wee hours of the night any time. But sexual intercourse? Yuk. No thanks. Really not my cup of tea.

Men, on the other hand... personally I find most of them a bit of a waste of space. They tend to be either violent, aggressive, bullish, egotistical and thick, or scheming, vicious, hyper-ambitious, greedy and dangerously smart. Sometimes a mix of both. Either way, they are best kept under constant surveillance, and occasionally locked up. But when it comes to sex, men is what I like. I mean, REALLY like. I've slept with loads, chasing them in many unsavoury locations: public toilets, backrooms, saunas, darkrooms, libraries, bedrooms, gyms, cars, parks and cinemas. I have no idea how many men I’ve had sex with in my life, but trust me, you need many, many hands with many, many fingers to count them all.

I am, basically, a feminist and a slut, without the seething anger of the former or the bad reputation of the latter.

So what’s this baby stuff that has suddenly cropped up in my life? Despite what my sister might think, the idea of becoming a dad never really crossed my mind. Being gay meant for most of my life that the whole reproduction thing was pretty much off the radar. And to be frank, I am actually still against the idea of gay couples raising children altogether. Yeah, yeah, I know the arguments and I have read the statistics: children of gay parents are more likely to be happier, more accomplished human beings and if the parents are lesbian women they even perform better at school. Whatever. It’s just wrong. You need a mum and a dad to grow up well. Full stop. This is what I’ve always thought and argued vehemently, putting up a vaguely Daily Mail-reader, Tory-voter attitude, which clashes with pretty much all my lefty principles and beliefs.

Maybe it’s because I am Italian, and I was brought up in a conservative Catholic family (although, was it REALLY conservative and Catholic? Bollocks. More on that later...). Maybe it’s because I spent my entire life trying to dismantle and get rid of all the principles that were hammered in my tiny infant brain by those vicious priests that ran my religious school, although some things are just too ingrained to get rid of, and I simply have to live with them. Or maybe it’s because my dad died when I was 8 years old, and I was left without a father figure to relate to all my life (yes, I know, Freud and all that crap, even if I am textbook case this does not mean he is right). Bottom line: I think growing up with both a mum and a dad is GOOD.

Well then, how do I explain the fact that there’s a small baby boy about to burst out of Lady V’s vagina, and that he’s got my DNA firmly carved onto each and every one of his tiny baby cells? No, we weren’t drunk. In fact, the conception process was so long and excruciating, that anyone without the determination we had to make this happen would have given up trying long ago. The truth is: I asked Lady V if she would bear my offspring. I asked her to move in with me and raise them with me. It was, from a certain point of view, a declaration of love and a marriage proposal all wrapped into one. And minutes before I declared my idea I had no idea I was going to do it. It just came rushing out of my sober mouth (it was late morning, we hadn’t plunged into the local Morellino wine yet) like water out of a burst dyke (!).

I’ve gone back with my mind to that moment many times in the last few years. Why did I say that? Did I really believe it? Yes. Maybe. Or maybe not. Does ANY man believe what he’s saying when he tells a woman “I love you, will you marry me?” or “I love you, I want to have your babies?” Probably not. Most of the times they are saying this because they want to make a woman happy, because making this woman happy has suddenly become the most important thing in their lives, and because by making this woman happy they too will become fulfilled and their lives will gain meaning and depth. And of course, they are saying this because they know that if they don’t, they won’t get laid any longer, because when the biological clock is ticking women will not be persuaded to wait. Now this last point is not exactly my case (the getting laid bit), but pretty much everything else is.

So this is how we should rephrase the questions: did I want to have babies before I met Lady V? Absolutely not. Did I want to have her babies after realising that she was the most extraordinary woman on Earth, and that my purpose in life was to make her happier, and by doing so to secure my own happiness by her side for many years to come? Absolutely yes.

Basically, like so many other males, I was trapped by the female of the species and in due course discovered the true meaning of life and the unspoken secret of human reproduction. Not bad for a lazy August morning on a Tuscany hilltop.

Merchant Ivory manqué

Oh, I do love the contradictions in the father of my child. The way that he can effortlessly segue from listing the unsavoury locations of his sexual conquests to a bit of old-fashioned tutting about family values and the need for children to have both a mum and a dad.

But then, I’m not averse to a few contradictions myself. And like him, I’m still trying to figure out how all this baby business came about.

I too had a religious childhood, raised by parents who at various times embraced evangelical Christianity, the composition of rock gospels, faith healing and even – in my father’s case – the clergy itself. Oh, and with a bit of French Catholicism popped in there for good measure. But it wasn’t really what you’d call conservative.

My parents got married aged 21. Not so very radical. Around the same time my mother’s French pen-friend married her cousin. A bit odd in the 1970s North, but still, not that strange. Then the two couples bought a bankrupt sheep farm in the Lake District and moved in together. That was pretty scandalous. The valley pursed its lips, muttered about wife swapping and hippies and waited for them to fall out and move on. But they didn’t, living together until my aunt’s death years later, after all 5 of us children had left home.

Perfect preparation for communal living, you might have thought. Not so. Each of my siblings/cousins ended up respectably married, living happily ever after in their nuclear families. I embraced the anonymity of London, loving the solitude of the British Library, where, after a few false starts, I began to write books, blocking out any last vestiges of noise with industrial strength ear plugs. For years, I lived on my own and liked it, with a radio tuned to Radio 4 in every room to keep me company.  Family was something I visited at birthdays and Christmas, but kept at arms’ length.

As for men, I pretty much shared Papà A's opinion of them. At around age 16, heavily influenced by 70s polemic, I declared myself a radical feminist, of the old school all-men-are-potential-rapists variety. By the time I’d left university I’d refined my opinions a bit, realising that most of my close friends were in fact, male. But by then I’d come out as a lesbian, and my thoughts had turned to women.

When I hit 30, and my biological clock began to tick, I still didn’t imagine myself as part of a family, or at least not one that included a man. I don’t share Papà A's views on gay parenting. If I were to have a baby, I thought, I would be a single mother of a girl, whom I would raise to be an independent little creature whilst somehow managing to build a career as a bestselling novelist . Or it would be with a girlfriend, a cosy threesome with a donor for a daddy, tall and dark to breed out the Lady V sturdy but stumpy Northern figure. 

So how did I end up here, 9 months pregnant, living in a houseful of men and waiting for another one, a baby boy to - as Papà A so delightfully puts it - burst out of my vagina?

Well, I suppose the answer is, he asked. When Papà A popped the question on that sunny Tuscan morning, I didn’t hesitate for a moment. I might have wondered if I was selling out, if I was somehow becoming straight, if I was condemning myself to a family life that I had never imagined for myself, a life with a man, bringing up our children together. But I didn’t. None of that crossed my mind at all. Someone I loved, with whom I had the best times, who made me happy and whom I wanted to make happy too was asking me to have children with him and bring them up together. It made strange but perfect and absolute sense.  And so I looked at him, and smiled, and yes I said yes I will yes.