DADI- Donor Against Donor Insemination

No, not a contradiction in terms. I am a former sperm donor who is now totally opposed to the practice of donor conception. This is my story....

Name:
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Friday, March 10, 2006




A Father to My Son



At one end of the room my son sits in uncomfortable isolation.
At the other a man stands facing him, interrogating him,
in an increasingly aggressive manner.

I am standing to one side of his interrogator,
my wife and her son nearby me.

How long have I known him now: this young man
who is a part of me and I a part of him?

Only a year up to this point, perhaps,
but already he has become dear to me.

The man who raised him and pretended
to be his father has come to my home
not just ostensibly to discipline my son
but also to subtly establish his priority over me.

With every harsh word he stabs at my son
I wince with inner pain but yet I feel
I cannot protect him, I cannot intervene.

With his every word, however,
this man diminishes himself.
He shrinks in my estimation.
He no longer deserves my respect.
He is nothing to me.

Within a matter of weeks
my son will set out on a journey alone.

For many months he will live
an almost hermit-like existence
in an isolated part of Tasmania
caring for animals at a sanctuary there.

When he returns I can see that he has changed.

He knows now where he belongs.







Saturday, March 04, 2006



1963



The few books remaining in my father's collection
which he had carried halfway around the world to Australia
were mostly novels about navies and the sea.

Some of the first adult books I read, therefore, were the works
of Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny) and C.S. Forester (Brown on Resolution),
and those of a man with the most intriguing of names,
Nicholas Monsarrat (HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour
and The Ship that Died of Shame).

I am not quite sure why but it was that latter title, itself,
that resonated most with me at the time.
Perhaps it was something to do with the incongruity
to my adolescent mind that a thing composed of metal and wood
and bristling with weaponry could actually be so anthropomorphised
as to feel the very human emotion of shame
and that it might actually die as a consequence.

I cannot now recall anything at all about the details of that tale
but what I do remember is that the endpaper of the book
was curiously somewhat thicker than any of the other pages.

I think I must have let that mystery lie for many months or so
but one day I could resist my curiosity no longer
and carefully prised the endpaper apart from the frontispiece
to which it had in fact been glued around the edges
and discovered my father's secret.

Written there in a beautifully curling and obviously feminine script
was a dedication to my father on the occasion of his birthday
and that this present was a gift of love from Betty.

How I used to linger over every line and every word
of that lovingly inscribed message from the past.

For a long time it was my only concrete link to my mother.
Her presence was palpable there.

For one short space in time, she had concentrated her energy
transforming that empty page into what had now become her memorial.