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lprovenLife has changed beyond anything I could imagine in the last seven or eight months, and I am struggling to adapt.
I decided I was happy over here back in about 2015. I debated selling my house back in Mitcham with the estate agent I’d hired to rent it out. She strongly endorsed the plan. I said to her that I was considering selling, but I’d long thought that I’d hold back until it fetched at least twice what I paid for it – which is to say, £300,000, an absurd amount of money. She laughed in my face and told me that if she couldn’t get £350,000 then she wasn’t doing her job. And after fees, taxes and so on, she did – I got a little under a third of a million pounds for it.
I wondered how I’d know when the sale completed. It occurred to me that I could just put my British bank card into an ATM – a “bankomat” over here – and check my balance. I did. In Czech crowns, of course: in those idyllic pre-Brexit times, £1 was worth KzK 35. The balance looked like a telephone number. An international one.
Although I hadn’t lived there for about a year, it was a dizzying moment. I went to a Toastmasters event that evening and a friend asked me why I seemed dazed. I showed her the slip from the ATM.
She looked confused. “No,” she said, “this can’t be right – where it should have the balance, they’ve printed your account numb—OHH!”
A few days later, at the end of my working day, I made a series of Skype calls to various British phone numbers. I paid off the Inland Revenue – some £15,000. I paid off my First Direct overdraft -- £3,800. I paid off Barclaycard – nearly £10,000, if I remember rightly. I paid off every outstanding bill I had, and after an hour on the phone, that was it. Totally debt-free for the first time in over a decade.
But last February, Jana gave me the most shocking, terrifying weekend I’d had since the late May bank holiday in 1994. First she took me sledding, down a mountain on the North Czech border – the second biggest mountain in the country, I think. She saved me from shooting right across a ski piste by kicking my completely-out-of-control sled out from under me, leaving me with the relatively modest problem of sliding down a ski slope on my face, trying to decelerate with hands, feet, teeth and attempting (and signally failing) to think sexy thoughts.
She told me that she knew I was approaching by the Doppler shift in my scream as I hurtled down the sled track.
When my pulse dropped back down to the low 300s, I did the next bit on the back of her sled, then walked the rest of the way down. I needed about four beers to stop the worst of the shaking. Oddly, she refused any.
Then, just as I put her on her bus home to Brno on Sunday night, she told me she was pregnant.
I was already flat-hunting, but suddenly, it gained new urgency. I found a decent little place in Kobylisy. It’s not perfect – it’s in a tower block, a “panelák” as they’re called over here, but only a small, eight-storey one. It’s on the ground floor, but it’s raised – passers-by can’t see in. There’s a balcony, and two basements (one tiny, one small). There’s step-free access. I’m now renting a third basement, which is huge – about 35-40m². It costs me about £30 a month. It’s in a housing estate, but right at the top of a hill – past my building, there is only some woodland. I’m right at the end of a tram line, by the depot, which means a very regular service day and night, as well as half a dozen bus routes and a brisk 10 minute walk downhill walk to the metro.
And there’s a spare room. Do come visit.
I’ve never bought a house in a foreign country before, one where I don’t speak a useful amount of the language. I’ve never bought property in cash before… and there’s a lot of stuff the bank does for you when you take out a mortgage that you have to do yourself without one.
I went to the city registry office in Brno and with the aid of an interpreter – thank you, Helena! – I registered as the father of the child. The law predates antenatal scans and the like, so we had to register male and female names. Czech law also only recognises two names: given name and family name. No middle name.
We had decided on “Ada” for a girl. I argued for Ninkasi, but it’s not in the Official Czech Book of Names so no, and there are no middle names. As a small tribute to my late father, I wanted “Ian Terence” as the male name, but no. “Terence” is not a name in Czech law. In vain did I point out Sir Terence Pratchett, Terry Scott, Terence “Spike” Milligan. No. She didn’t want to allow Ada or Ian either, but both were in the book, so they were duly recorded.
I moved out of my comfy if slightly shabby city-centre room in a shared flat into an empty flat on the outskirts. I had to start buying furniture again. I had a month or so to settle in, then a heavily-pregnant Jana moved in with me.
This did not stop her painting and decorating, incidentally. Czech womenfolk are hardy.
About six weeks or so later, Jana phoned me at work. Her waters had broken, but no contractions had started yet. I asked her if she had called a taxi to the hospital. No, she said, there were no contractions. I told her to go, immediately. No, it’s fine, she said. She had lunch and then took a tram. Czech womenfolk are very hardy.
They induced her artificially. The next morning I was in Bulovka maternity hospital watching her give birth. (Remember the Ashya King case, the little boy with a brain tumour whose parents abducted him for proton beam therapy? That hospital. He’s alive and well, by the way.)
It was very harrowing indeed to watch. The tiny cone-head alien that emerged from her was yellow, with a purple head that came to a point. Within an hour it turned pink, though. The next day, the point was very rounded, and the next day, it had a human-shaped head.
The day after that, they came home.
Life is very different now. I don’t get to out very much. I hardly ever get to just go for a beer with friends. Jana gave me a membership to a “beer of the month” club instead, so I get the occasional one at home. I have almost caught up with “Game of Thrones” though, and am making headway on “the Expanse”. “Rick and Morty” failed to grab me, but I am happy to say that Jana enjoys “Invader Zim”.
The first month or month and a half were exhausting – mainly for her, but for me too. I only got a week’s paternity leave, so only a few days after they came home, I had to return to work. In the evening, I would come home and take over caring for baby Ada, feeding her formula, changing her nappy, walking around with her on my shoulder, while Jana got a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
I lost about ten kilos in weight. Sometimes, when I got in from work, I was just too tired to eat, or simply forgot. That and the reduced beer intake were enough. Colleagues started to comment on it.
Babies are not like you imagine. For example, yes, we all know they cry, and we all know they make gurgling goo-goo noises… but they in fact they make tons of noises, all the time. They gasp and wheeze and pant, they murmur and squeak and moan and groan and snore. They very audibly strain when they poop, and they poop a lot. I don’t know why they strain so much as it’s liquid, and yes, Robin Williams was right, it’s green at first. But grunt and strain and cough and sneeze they do, a lot. They fart a lot, too.
They can see early on. They love faces, including their own. Ada was fascinated by the bookshelves in my living room. Two walls are floor-to-ceiling books. One wall is SF & fantasy, and it’s quite colourful. The other wall has all the hardbacks, the nonfiction, the non-genre fiction, the graphic novels, etc. They aren’t sorted yet and a lot are not spine-outward, but blank paper-side-out. Oddly, that is the wall that fascinated Ada from a month or so old.
We also have a big bold pattern of red stripes on the main bedroom wall, which we kept from the previous owners. She likes those stripes a lot, too.
Evolution is an interesting thing. At about two months, just about the point when we were starting to consider that King Herod was a much-misunderstood man, she started to smile at us. That changes everything.
At three months, she started tracking moving objects with eye and head movements. Her favourite thing now became the clockwork mobile of bunny-rabbits and teddy-bears endlessly circling a yacht which hangs above her cot. The mechanism also contains a music-box, whose melody has at times pushed me to the brink of sanity, but it’s OK, I didn’t fall in.
A snag was that by month three, Jana was able to produce enough breast milk for us to stop giving her artificial formula feed, and within weeks, Ada would no longer accept a bottle. This meant I could no longer feed her, which I found I really missed. It was valuable bonding time.
If placed on her tummy, at this age, she could lift her head up and look around her. Before that, if placed on my chest, she laid her head on me and just went to sleep, which I found delightful and quite amazingly relaxing, like deep meditation. (No, computer, not deep medication.) But she wasn’t and isn’t yet strong enough to hold her head up like this indefinitely, and when she tires, she cries.
Soon after this, she started reaching for objects, but she didn’t know what to do when she got them. I also had my beard trimmed much shorter at this time.
At four months, she would reach out and grab anything interesting and if she got it, she put it in her mouth. Her range of vocalisations has also been steadily increasing and now includes most of the vowel sounds. Imitating her utterances back at her seems to delight her.
At about five months, she started to giggle at things occasionally. It’s still not often but it happens. It’s a gurgling, coughing sort of laugh, but it’s laughter. If she’s distracted by toys, she will stay on her belly for quite a long time now – maybe half an hour or so. She likes rattles and things but spends more time chewing or sucking them than shaking them.
She’s nearly five and a half months old now, and we’re starting to give her food other than mother’s milk. She seems to like puréed carrots, carrot and pumpkin, and she will drink carrot juice from a bottle, so I can occasionally feed her again. It is, of course, a quite heroically messy process, and thus far she will only take a few spoonsful, but it’s a start.
Early winter was cold. My cheapo Primark Berlin trainers were no longer adequate, so I bought a pair of cheapo Lidl trainers instead. Not quite as comfy but fine. However, within days, I developed knee-ache. First in the right leg, the ostensibly-undamaged one, then in the left too. I stopped wearing the trainers and switched to boots but the knee pain didn’t abate. It just transferred mainly to the left knee, the one in my metal leg.
One day, a week into December, the pain was bad enough that I took a walking-stick to work. That evening, on my way from Marks and Spencer with a backpack full of Yuletide goodies, the bad knee gave out altogether when hastening to catch a tram. It emitted a sort of twang noise as if something snapped inside and I nearly collapsed. Luckily I managed to grab a concrete wastebin to save myself from falling. Sadly, with the hand holding my phone, which suffered.
After 10 minutes of extreme pain, I found it would hold my weight if kept locked straight, so – as I’d been given a rare night off to go to a pub quiz – I went to the pub. I mean, I did have a walking stick. The next morning, I went to hospital – the proton-beam one – where they couldn’t find anything wrong but decided none of my metalwork had come adrift or moved. It didn’t swell up which is apparently a good sign.
I was on crutches for weeks, then a stick for some months.
It’s still not right now, in March. I’ve had three injections of hyaluronic acid directly into the knee joint, which lubricates it and temporarily makes it work better. The doctors all think it’s due to the bike crash. I should start physio soon and get some orthotic inserts for my shoes, which may help, but it’s not right.
As a result, all the weight I lost is back and more. Which, of course, doesn’t help the knee or the failing hip either. It’s a salad for lunch every day, even less beer, and generally less food. I am slowly creeping back down again. I can’t easily take Ada in a papoose, which is a great pity.
Fatherhood is not quite what I expected. Yes, the mess, the crying, the disturbed sleep, the baby stuff everywhere, all that. Yes, the dramatically curtailed lifestyle, but honestly, since I hit my fifties, that was getting too much for me anyway. In Brno I still did quite a lot of carousing and partying, but since I moved to Prague a few months before my fiftieth birthday, that’s almost all stopped. I bought bifocal spectacles, then soon afterwards, fell and dislocated my left shoulder, leading to months of pain and major inconvenience followed by significant surgery.
Now the arm is stable again, and I wear varifocal lenses, but of course the knee is problematic. In a couple of months, it will be the 26th anniversary of my bike crash. It will, literally, be half my life ago.
Since then, I’ve been engaged, tried polyamory and failed, been clinically depressed, had therapy and antidepressants, quit drinking alcohol, got my head together somewhat after some years, stopped the antidepressants and started drinking alcohol again in greater moderation. I rebooted my career, right before the financial crisis destroyed it again. I sold my second book, giving me a little money to pay for to train as a teacher of English as a Second Language. I’ve moved abroad, lost my new job, found another one, sold my house, returned to freelancing, semi-retired, got bored, gone back into work, changed cities and started a new job, back in open source again, working with Linux – and which soon will be the longest I’ve ever stayed with one employer. I got a steady girlfriend for the first time in years.
But all that pales in comparison with becoming a father.
I am, to be honest, struggling to adjust. My life has changed more in the last 6 months than in the preceding six years. Even changing countries did not compare. I feel like a pinball, ricocheting from bumper to flipper to kicker to slingshot, punctuated with occasional ramps and flying saucers and more. My work is suffering, and so is what I laughingly call my mental stability.
And yet, when I cuddle Ada, it sometimes feels very very good. When I come home from work, her mother carries her to greet me and they both smile at me, and while it echoes many cultural stereotypes, it also feels very good. I am a family man now.
My mother, initially sceptical, is utterly besotted with her tiny new granddaughter. I took the whole family to the Isle of Man for Yule. I think I have never seen my mother so happy. At 82 and only a few months after significant leg surgery, she got down onto the floor to play with the baby, and back up again, unaided. She also changed her first nappy in about fifty years. She kept my christening clothes, my hairbrush, and my first cutlery set all this time, hoping that they would get used again, and they did.
I don’t know what will come next. I am on a fixed-term contract which ends in August. It’s already been extended once, but a second is not possible – the person for whom I’m standing in should return from maternity leave in September. Either way, I will be looking for another new job. Around the time Ada turns one year old, I will be facing new challenges.
Only slightly more than a year ago, everything was very very different and very much easier. Now, almost all my savings are gone, and what’s left may go on a family car. But I own my home outright and I don’t owe a cent to anyone. I am an Irish citizen now, so Brexit doesn’t directly affect me. I retain my right to live and work wherever I want in the EU. For now, though, I have applied for permanent residence here in Czechia. It took two tries and the assistance of a professional agency – don’t believe anyone who tells you that things like getting official residence, or a second citizenship, are trivial formalities: they are not. But they took my forms. It should go through.
The older you get, the faster life passes. I’m heading for my mid-fifties and the years jush whizz by in a few subjective weeks. But moving to a new country and starting over certainly slows things down for a while. 2014 and 2015 felt like they lasted a year each, and that hadn’t happened in decades.
But since autumn 2019… wow. A lifetime. Ada’s lifetime.
I hope she gets a lot more than I fear she might, and I hope that I’m there to share the first couple of decades of it.
I decided I was happy over here back in about 2015. I debated selling my house back in Mitcham with the estate agent I’d hired to rent it out. She strongly endorsed the plan. I said to her that I was considering selling, but I’d long thought that I’d hold back until it fetched at least twice what I paid for it – which is to say, £300,000, an absurd amount of money. She laughed in my face and told me that if she couldn’t get £350,000 then she wasn’t doing her job. And after fees, taxes and so on, she did – I got a little under a third of a million pounds for it.
I wondered how I’d know when the sale completed. It occurred to me that I could just put my British bank card into an ATM – a “bankomat” over here – and check my balance. I did. In Czech crowns, of course: in those idyllic pre-Brexit times, £1 was worth KzK 35. The balance looked like a telephone number. An international one.
Although I hadn’t lived there for about a year, it was a dizzying moment. I went to a Toastmasters event that evening and a friend asked me why I seemed dazed. I showed her the slip from the ATM.
She looked confused. “No,” she said, “this can’t be right – where it should have the balance, they’ve printed your account numb—OHH!”
A few days later, at the end of my working day, I made a series of Skype calls to various British phone numbers. I paid off the Inland Revenue – some £15,000. I paid off my First Direct overdraft -- £3,800. I paid off Barclaycard – nearly £10,000, if I remember rightly. I paid off every outstanding bill I had, and after an hour on the phone, that was it. Totally debt-free for the first time in over a decade.
But last February, Jana gave me the most shocking, terrifying weekend I’d had since the late May bank holiday in 1994. First she took me sledding, down a mountain on the North Czech border – the second biggest mountain in the country, I think. She saved me from shooting right across a ski piste by kicking my completely-out-of-control sled out from under me, leaving me with the relatively modest problem of sliding down a ski slope on my face, trying to decelerate with hands, feet, teeth and attempting (and signally failing) to think sexy thoughts.
She told me that she knew I was approaching by the Doppler shift in my scream as I hurtled down the sled track.
When my pulse dropped back down to the low 300s, I did the next bit on the back of her sled, then walked the rest of the way down. I needed about four beers to stop the worst of the shaking. Oddly, she refused any.
Then, just as I put her on her bus home to Brno on Sunday night, she told me she was pregnant.
I was already flat-hunting, but suddenly, it gained new urgency. I found a decent little place in Kobylisy. It’s not perfect – it’s in a tower block, a “panelák” as they’re called over here, but only a small, eight-storey one. It’s on the ground floor, but it’s raised – passers-by can’t see in. There’s a balcony, and two basements (one tiny, one small). There’s step-free access. I’m now renting a third basement, which is huge – about 35-40m². It costs me about £30 a month. It’s in a housing estate, but right at the top of a hill – past my building, there is only some woodland. I’m right at the end of a tram line, by the depot, which means a very regular service day and night, as well as half a dozen bus routes and a brisk 10 minute walk downhill walk to the metro.
And there’s a spare room. Do come visit.
I’ve never bought a house in a foreign country before, one where I don’t speak a useful amount of the language. I’ve never bought property in cash before… and there’s a lot of stuff the bank does for you when you take out a mortgage that you have to do yourself without one.
I went to the city registry office in Brno and with the aid of an interpreter – thank you, Helena! – I registered as the father of the child. The law predates antenatal scans and the like, so we had to register male and female names. Czech law also only recognises two names: given name and family name. No middle name.
We had decided on “Ada” for a girl. I argued for Ninkasi, but it’s not in the Official Czech Book of Names so no, and there are no middle names. As a small tribute to my late father, I wanted “Ian Terence” as the male name, but no. “Terence” is not a name in Czech law. In vain did I point out Sir Terence Pratchett, Terry Scott, Terence “Spike” Milligan. No. She didn’t want to allow Ada or Ian either, but both were in the book, so they were duly recorded.
I moved out of my comfy if slightly shabby city-centre room in a shared flat into an empty flat on the outskirts. I had to start buying furniture again. I had a month or so to settle in, then a heavily-pregnant Jana moved in with me.
This did not stop her painting and decorating, incidentally. Czech womenfolk are hardy.
About six weeks or so later, Jana phoned me at work. Her waters had broken, but no contractions had started yet. I asked her if she had called a taxi to the hospital. No, she said, there were no contractions. I told her to go, immediately. No, it’s fine, she said. She had lunch and then took a tram. Czech womenfolk are very hardy.
They induced her artificially. The next morning I was in Bulovka maternity hospital watching her give birth. (Remember the Ashya King case, the little boy with a brain tumour whose parents abducted him for proton beam therapy? That hospital. He’s alive and well, by the way.)
It was very harrowing indeed to watch. The tiny cone-head alien that emerged from her was yellow, with a purple head that came to a point. Within an hour it turned pink, though. The next day, the point was very rounded, and the next day, it had a human-shaped head.
The day after that, they came home.
Life is very different now. I don’t get to out very much. I hardly ever get to just go for a beer with friends. Jana gave me a membership to a “beer of the month” club instead, so I get the occasional one at home. I have almost caught up with “Game of Thrones” though, and am making headway on “the Expanse”. “Rick and Morty” failed to grab me, but I am happy to say that Jana enjoys “Invader Zim”.
The first month or month and a half were exhausting – mainly for her, but for me too. I only got a week’s paternity leave, so only a few days after they came home, I had to return to work. In the evening, I would come home and take over caring for baby Ada, feeding her formula, changing her nappy, walking around with her on my shoulder, while Jana got a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
I lost about ten kilos in weight. Sometimes, when I got in from work, I was just too tired to eat, or simply forgot. That and the reduced beer intake were enough. Colleagues started to comment on it.
Babies are not like you imagine. For example, yes, we all know they cry, and we all know they make gurgling goo-goo noises… but they in fact they make tons of noises, all the time. They gasp and wheeze and pant, they murmur and squeak and moan and groan and snore. They very audibly strain when they poop, and they poop a lot. I don’t know why they strain so much as it’s liquid, and yes, Robin Williams was right, it’s green at first. But grunt and strain and cough and sneeze they do, a lot. They fart a lot, too.
They can see early on. They love faces, including their own. Ada was fascinated by the bookshelves in my living room. Two walls are floor-to-ceiling books. One wall is SF & fantasy, and it’s quite colourful. The other wall has all the hardbacks, the nonfiction, the non-genre fiction, the graphic novels, etc. They aren’t sorted yet and a lot are not spine-outward, but blank paper-side-out. Oddly, that is the wall that fascinated Ada from a month or so old.
We also have a big bold pattern of red stripes on the main bedroom wall, which we kept from the previous owners. She likes those stripes a lot, too.
Evolution is an interesting thing. At about two months, just about the point when we were starting to consider that King Herod was a much-misunderstood man, she started to smile at us. That changes everything.
At three months, she started tracking moving objects with eye and head movements. Her favourite thing now became the clockwork mobile of bunny-rabbits and teddy-bears endlessly circling a yacht which hangs above her cot. The mechanism also contains a music-box, whose melody has at times pushed me to the brink of sanity, but it’s OK, I didn’t fall in.
A snag was that by month three, Jana was able to produce enough breast milk for us to stop giving her artificial formula feed, and within weeks, Ada would no longer accept a bottle. This meant I could no longer feed her, which I found I really missed. It was valuable bonding time.
If placed on her tummy, at this age, she could lift her head up and look around her. Before that, if placed on my chest, she laid her head on me and just went to sleep, which I found delightful and quite amazingly relaxing, like deep meditation. (No, computer, not deep medication.) But she wasn’t and isn’t yet strong enough to hold her head up like this indefinitely, and when she tires, she cries.
Soon after this, she started reaching for objects, but she didn’t know what to do when she got them. I also had my beard trimmed much shorter at this time.
At four months, she would reach out and grab anything interesting and if she got it, she put it in her mouth. Her range of vocalisations has also been steadily increasing and now includes most of the vowel sounds. Imitating her utterances back at her seems to delight her.
At about five months, she started to giggle at things occasionally. It’s still not often but it happens. It’s a gurgling, coughing sort of laugh, but it’s laughter. If she’s distracted by toys, she will stay on her belly for quite a long time now – maybe half an hour or so. She likes rattles and things but spends more time chewing or sucking them than shaking them.
She’s nearly five and a half months old now, and we’re starting to give her food other than mother’s milk. She seems to like puréed carrots, carrot and pumpkin, and she will drink carrot juice from a bottle, so I can occasionally feed her again. It is, of course, a quite heroically messy process, and thus far she will only take a few spoonsful, but it’s a start.
Early winter was cold. My cheapo Primark Berlin trainers were no longer adequate, so I bought a pair of cheapo Lidl trainers instead. Not quite as comfy but fine. However, within days, I developed knee-ache. First in the right leg, the ostensibly-undamaged one, then in the left too. I stopped wearing the trainers and switched to boots but the knee pain didn’t abate. It just transferred mainly to the left knee, the one in my metal leg.
One day, a week into December, the pain was bad enough that I took a walking-stick to work. That evening, on my way from Marks and Spencer with a backpack full of Yuletide goodies, the bad knee gave out altogether when hastening to catch a tram. It emitted a sort of twang noise as if something snapped inside and I nearly collapsed. Luckily I managed to grab a concrete wastebin to save myself from falling. Sadly, with the hand holding my phone, which suffered.
After 10 minutes of extreme pain, I found it would hold my weight if kept locked straight, so – as I’d been given a rare night off to go to a pub quiz – I went to the pub. I mean, I did have a walking stick. The next morning, I went to hospital – the proton-beam one – where they couldn’t find anything wrong but decided none of my metalwork had come adrift or moved. It didn’t swell up which is apparently a good sign.
I was on crutches for weeks, then a stick for some months.
It’s still not right now, in March. I’ve had three injections of hyaluronic acid directly into the knee joint, which lubricates it and temporarily makes it work better. The doctors all think it’s due to the bike crash. I should start physio soon and get some orthotic inserts for my shoes, which may help, but it’s not right.
As a result, all the weight I lost is back and more. Which, of course, doesn’t help the knee or the failing hip either. It’s a salad for lunch every day, even less beer, and generally less food. I am slowly creeping back down again. I can’t easily take Ada in a papoose, which is a great pity.
Fatherhood is not quite what I expected. Yes, the mess, the crying, the disturbed sleep, the baby stuff everywhere, all that. Yes, the dramatically curtailed lifestyle, but honestly, since I hit my fifties, that was getting too much for me anyway. In Brno I still did quite a lot of carousing and partying, but since I moved to Prague a few months before my fiftieth birthday, that’s almost all stopped. I bought bifocal spectacles, then soon afterwards, fell and dislocated my left shoulder, leading to months of pain and major inconvenience followed by significant surgery.
Now the arm is stable again, and I wear varifocal lenses, but of course the knee is problematic. In a couple of months, it will be the 26th anniversary of my bike crash. It will, literally, be half my life ago.
Since then, I’ve been engaged, tried polyamory and failed, been clinically depressed, had therapy and antidepressants, quit drinking alcohol, got my head together somewhat after some years, stopped the antidepressants and started drinking alcohol again in greater moderation. I rebooted my career, right before the financial crisis destroyed it again. I sold my second book, giving me a little money to pay for to train as a teacher of English as a Second Language. I’ve moved abroad, lost my new job, found another one, sold my house, returned to freelancing, semi-retired, got bored, gone back into work, changed cities and started a new job, back in open source again, working with Linux – and which soon will be the longest I’ve ever stayed with one employer. I got a steady girlfriend for the first time in years.
But all that pales in comparison with becoming a father.
I am, to be honest, struggling to adjust. My life has changed more in the last 6 months than in the preceding six years. Even changing countries did not compare. I feel like a pinball, ricocheting from bumper to flipper to kicker to slingshot, punctuated with occasional ramps and flying saucers and more. My work is suffering, and so is what I laughingly call my mental stability.
And yet, when I cuddle Ada, it sometimes feels very very good. When I come home from work, her mother carries her to greet me and they both smile at me, and while it echoes many cultural stereotypes, it also feels very good. I am a family man now.
My mother, initially sceptical, is utterly besotted with her tiny new granddaughter. I took the whole family to the Isle of Man for Yule. I think I have never seen my mother so happy. At 82 and only a few months after significant leg surgery, she got down onto the floor to play with the baby, and back up again, unaided. She also changed her first nappy in about fifty years. She kept my christening clothes, my hairbrush, and my first cutlery set all this time, hoping that they would get used again, and they did.
I don’t know what will come next. I am on a fixed-term contract which ends in August. It’s already been extended once, but a second is not possible – the person for whom I’m standing in should return from maternity leave in September. Either way, I will be looking for another new job. Around the time Ada turns one year old, I will be facing new challenges.
Only slightly more than a year ago, everything was very very different and very much easier. Now, almost all my savings are gone, and what’s left may go on a family car. But I own my home outright and I don’t owe a cent to anyone. I am an Irish citizen now, so Brexit doesn’t directly affect me. I retain my right to live and work wherever I want in the EU. For now, though, I have applied for permanent residence here in Czechia. It took two tries and the assistance of a professional agency – don’t believe anyone who tells you that things like getting official residence, or a second citizenship, are trivial formalities: they are not. But they took my forms. It should go through.
The older you get, the faster life passes. I’m heading for my mid-fifties and the years jush whizz by in a few subjective weeks. But moving to a new country and starting over certainly slows things down for a while. 2014 and 2015 felt like they lasted a year each, and that hadn’t happened in decades.
But since autumn 2019… wow. A lifetime. Ada’s lifetime.
I hope she gets a lot more than I fear she might, and I hope that I’m there to share the first couple of decades of it.
