How James came to be...

I was living with his mother, Saiem. We had a pretty good relationship. I had met her soon after arriving in Cambodia and we had got together fairly quickly. We were a couple other couples wanted to be. Without exaggeration, my friends and colleagues asked where I could meet a trustworthy, loyal and smart partner like her and her friends wanted a man that wouldn’t cheat on them.

People wanted to be like me, instead of holding me up as an example of what not to do, or using me to frighten children into eating vegetables. It was a new experience for me.

We had a lot of fun, we went out all the time and we went away a lot. We took a motorcycle tour around Thailand and Cambodia, we went to Siem Reap, Sihanoukville, Kampot and other tourist spots. I built up a motorcycle rental company with a friend and, with her help, we were known as the best in town.

Life was good.

We had arguments, and plenty of them, but the relationship was essentially solid. I had always made it clear that I didn’t want kids and told her not to get pregnant. It wasn’t an uncommon trick and I wanted to make it quite clear I was aware of it.

Then, one fateful day she had a nasty case of thrush. The medication didn’t make it go away so she went back to the doctor a second time.

She came back with a funny look on her face, a sort of mixture of mild concern and blind, bewildered panic. She announced that it wasn’t thrush at all, it was a small parasitic growth taking root inside of her, that was threatening to destroy everything I cared about… which was basically just my dog.

She told me not to worry, she’d already lined up an appointment to get rid of it.

I just laughed. We had been careful and we hadn’t even been together much that month. She’d been in the province with her family for several weeks, around the time she was meant to be most fertile, so I didn’t think there was any way she could possibly be pregnant. I sent her to get a test, which proved that thinking really isn’t my strong suit.

She peed on a stick and the instructions said that if she was pregnant, it would change colour slowly. It changed colour almost instantly, sealing my fate and giving me that slight sinking feeling you might get if you were chained to a pipe in the engine-room of the Titanic as an iceberg thoroughly ruined your day.

She was flapping about like a fish on a chopping-board and I calmly asked her if she wanted to keep it. Her whole demeanour changed, her face lit up into a grin and she relaxed enough to start actually making the tiniest amount of sense.

We talked it through and I established the rules. I worked and she didn’t, although she helped out with the business and occasionally worked on and off at salons, and dreamed one day of owning her own. I explained that the bulk of the work would have to be done by her, I was getting a bit too old for all this but would help out when I could. She promised it would make a minimal impact on my life.

We already had a dog, I didn’t see how it would be all that different.

I told my parents and family and there were amused and surprised. I knew it would be a boy since I’m the first-born son of the first-born son in my family and that goes back for many hundreds of years. It seems my family only has one working testicle and producing girls is beyond our abilities. Getting them to date us is hard enough…

The pregnancy went without a single issue. She was oddly nervous about the blood test but everything came back normal, she was healthy and James developed absolutely perfectly.

The only minor snag was the birth. James was large, very large. His cranial measurements were literally off the chart. On his first scan, they measured the circumference of his skull and said that he would be smart, he had a very large brain. I can’t tell you what a relief that was. He needed my brains and his mother’s looks, if it came back the other way round he’d be cleaning pub toilets in Glasgow for a living.

By the time he was born, his head was huge. I measured it and compared it to what was considered normal and it was about 2cm off the end of the big end of the chart. In short, there was no way he was coming out of her without a fight and a C-section was our only option. Medical advice agreed with us, and it was what she wanted too.

We decided to have him in Takeo, her home town. Due to the fact she would be having minor, but significant, surgery, it made sense her for her to stay there with her parents for at least a few weeks to recover while I went back to work. We didn’t know quite what to expect in terms of how quickly she would recover, you can never tell with something like this.

The day finally came to pop him out. By then, she was as big as a house and wore a gigantic red tent with arm-sleeves stitched to the side. We stayed at a guest house next to the hospital. I commented, quite correctly but probably in the least welcome way possible, that she looked like a walking version of a big ketchup dispenser, the kind that are shaped like a tomato. The guesthouse managed to lower the bar. As she was signing in, barely able to move her arms across her enormous belly to pick up a pen, they asked her with a straight face, ‘Are you a prostitute?’

“Is that what I look like?” she asked back calmly.

Things are different in Takeo.

The hospital was so bad that I asked if she wanted to give up on it and head back to Phnom Penh. She wanted to continue but it was a daunting place. For $1000 we got a small green prison-cell with a metal bed-frame chained to the wall. The surgery was far more unpleasant.

I insisted on waiting outside while they did the deed. I was told most fathers wait in their rooms but I politely ignored them. On reflection, I might not have been terribly polite.

They wheeled her in and the doctor followed. He had scrubbed up already and was checking messages on his phone, but only handling it with the tips of his fingers. Safety first, after all. Instead of erecting a surgical tent, they just threw a towel over her face and sliced her open with an array of garden-tools.

This wasn’t a day I enjoyed.

After only a few minutes of me fearing the worst, they brought out a pink little blob with a curious expression on his face. I finally got to meet my son.

There is no comparison between the reality of your child and the pictures you get from a scan. On the ultrasound he looked vaguely like the Grand Canyon, or perhaps a really large pile of small sausages.

The next few days were a bit of a blur really. It was just endless small details and enforced captivity. It was good practice for the ‘covid-years’, now that I am able to look back at it fondly.

At first, I didn’t really bond with him as strongly as I thought I should. Sure, I was a dad and I cared for him immediately but there was never that automatic primal connection that mothers get with their offspring.

I talked with Seth, who had recently become a father himself, and he assured me this was not uncommon. While mothers connect at an instinctive level, fathers tend to grow more attached over time as the baby asserts its personality and they get used to the idea of having all their hopes and dreams violently ripped away.

I did some research into this, just in case there was something wrong with me and found that there probably was, but this wasn’t a sign of it.

At first we were very happy. As predicted, it wasn’t really much different to having a dog. We now had a new thing to care for, a responsibility and a new reason to focus on the future. But, I had always been a careful, organised person and this wasn’t the crushingly destructive thing it sometimes is on people.

Saiem was a good mother at first. After a few months of settling in, her mum came to stay with us and we went for a coffee, the first time we had been away from James since he was born. She broke down in tears, saying how she must be a terrible mother for leaving her son. I laughed and reminded her that her own mother had successfully raised 6 children and that our own son was already asleep and likely would be for several hours.

But then, it all started to go spectacularly wrong.

Saiem started to change. At first, there were problems with the house-keeping money. She always needed more and more money for food, and there never was any food in the house. I tried metering the money in different ways, giving it to her monthly and then weekly, giving her varying responsibilities about how to spend it but nothing worked, she was just always asking for more, no matter how much I gave her.

Then there started being problems with the rent. The landlord suddenly wanted a deposit and then more money, and then threw us out altogether. None of it made sense unless she hadn’t been paying him the money I gave her.

I gave her money to buy her mother a television and later discovered she’d kept the money and lied about it. This sort of things became common.

We argued a lot, and she was becoming more aggressive as well as lazier. At one point she hadn’t cleaned the house in a week and unwashed plates were piling up. I was already taking the clothes to the laundry, to save her the job, and was helping out where I could. When confronted by it, she did clean up and seemed proud of herself for doing so but then the problem started right back up again.

To put this in context, when we first got together we lived in a serviced apartment and she refused to let the cleaners in, and tidied up the place herself, did all the cooking and looked after us really well. This really wasn’t the same person.

James was stable. I made sure we never argued in front of him. He was a very easy child, never causing any trouble, never screaming, never even crying. Luckily, he was the baby you hope you’re going to get, he was smart, happy and emotionally balanced.

We moved to a new place and I drew a line under it. We made a new start, I told her. But, within a few months, it had got even worse. Her behaviour was increasingly bizarre and we argued constantly.

By then, my savings had gone. She had burned through whatever money I had and I had even lost my rental business. We had invested in a property deal, buying up a piece of land, and that had turned out to be a scam, clearing out my last $10k. We were now broke and had moved into a new house with an even higher rent than before.

We had one last fight and broke up. James was staying with his grandparents that weekend and she left, with me wondering just exactly what the hell was going on.