Hello, fellow web 2.0 people.
So… I’ve decided to blog about stuff. I’ve called my blog “My Five Minutes”, because hopefully each of my blog entries won’t take you much longer than that to read. Thus, the hopefully very occasional “less than fascinating” entry will be mercifully brief.
Sadly, this also means that any gems of literary blogging genius will be over all too soon. However I’m quite sure we’ll all cope, regardless.
My first blog is going to be about family. Yours… Mine… We are all of us blessed in various ways with all sorts of familial connections and arrangements. Some people consider certain family members to be their inspiration, still others to be their strength, their love, their “reason”, their pride, their bane(!)… We are all connected in one way or another, and these particular connections always seem to create the strongest emotions and thoughts. It’s these connections that I wish to talk about today, if I may.
Let’s wind the clocks back a bit, to around Christmas 2007. I had just moved away from my home town for a new job at Sun, where I’d been trying to get a job for years. I knew nobody in the area, and I was a hundred miles from my nearest family. I was also living alone for the first time, having just moved out of the house I had been sharing with my best friend back home and into an apartment all by myself.
Needless to say, it was an interesting time. Full of the promise and excitement of beginning a career at Sun, but also sad because of the familial isolation I was suddenly experiencing. That Christmas when I travelled back to see my folks for the holiday, I genuinely regretted moving away.
Only a few weeks later, I met Holly. At the time, she was living a hundred miles away (in the opposite direction to my hometown!) but as luck would have it, headed to a university near my apartment later that year. We fell in love almost immediately… And then there’s her kids. Anyone who knew me before that Christmas will tell you, I was no “natural” around children. To be honest they made me feel nervous, uncomfortable and awkward. And I’m pretty sure that didn’t take long for kids to realise!
However, when I met Holly and her boys, I decided to really make a big effort to get over this child-fear issue…! They didn’t have much of a father to speak of. He had removed himself from their lives entirely, and prior to meeting me they were a single parent family unit.
Over the following months, the boys endeared themselves to me, and I got to share some pretty cool parenting moments with Holly too! The first time the youngest boy managed to pedal his bike properly (still with stabilizers though) was a great moment, and I caught myself feeling genuinely massively proud of him at that moment!
Things have certainly changed since those days. We’re all living together now in a beautiful house, and we have a new arrival on the way! Holly and I will be having a baby, which will be my first baby, due october 11th. The boys now look to me as their father figure… In fact I had to smile to myself a few weeks ago when the youngest introduced me to a new friend of his as his “ben-dad”, which was really sweet!
I originally thought that living alone would be cool… I had images of being some sort of attachment-free bachelor, living in a cool pad filled with gadgets and inanimate things… But all things considered, I honestly couldn’t think of anything more depressing for me. Family is definitely where it’s at! Being a parent is so much fun, seeing the world through a child’s eyes as you help them to make sense of the world around them is as much a learning experience for me as it is for them.
The connection I’ve found between myself and the boys is amazing. They recently went away for a week to visit their aunt, and I found myself really missing them. I was really pleased to see them yesterday when we went to get them, and they had both genuinely missed me loads! It’s the little things that matter in life… Like when your 3 (nearly 4!) year old comes and gives you a great big hug and a kiss, and says “I missed you, I love you!” – truly amazing, and really very special.
