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.