What did I most fear in becoming a father?
Well, you start out with a lot of suppressed fears, long before the prospect of imminent fatherhood arises. When single, its: 'Will anyone love me? Will anyone want to marry me?' And then, when you’ve found that someone and you’re planning the wedding, it’s: 'Will we even be able to have children?' This last one, especially, taunts as you get older and older and all the newspapers and scientific studies frown on your hopes.
All these things I feared, but then Tereza (pictured) came into my life, and life stopped being so panic-stricken and started feeling sensible again.
We had accepted that at our ages, forty-six and thirty-nine respectively, parenthood may be beyond our reach.
Then, one day, I came home and my wife broke the news to me, in September 2006, about nine months after we’d been married.
Such are the absurdities of life that, at the very moment she told me she was pregnant, the thing I most wanted to do was go to the bathroom — not out of any reaction to what she had said, but simply because I had just arrived from a long trip in the car and, well, nature called. Of course, one can’t be told by one’s wife that she is expecting a child, and instantly ask to be excused; I held on for a full twenty minutes, embracing her, while all the while thinking, 'When can I go?'
New fears emerged. Of course, the most common one is about money. Would we be able to support a child, on one salary? Tereza had come to Australia as an immigrant and was still to find a job, and let’s face it, who was going to employ a pregnant immigrant?
I was worried about the world, its politics, its wars and its environment, and what life might be like for the little one, forty, fifty, sixty years down the track. Every parent must have worried about the future since, well, time immemorial.
But, no, the principal worry for me, strange as it may seem, was not these things. It was this: 'would I become just another jealous parent, defending my family at the expense of the needs of others?'
Let me explain.
For some years I have believed that it is not primarily racism which is the cause of trouble between different nations, but a