In my heart I wanted to be his dad (Story)

In my heart I wanted to be his dad Jim Roberts had an affair with a Muslim woman who was trapped in an unhappy marriage. Then she got pregnant. But was the little boy his – or was her husband the father? A DNA test was the only solution … Father and son ‘The news came from the clinic as I sat at my desk. I took a deep breath and opened the email …’ Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian On a beautiful, hot, sunny day in London, in 2005, I cradled two-month-old Sami in my arms, looking at his face for clues, waiting for some sort of epiphany. I was with Amber, his mother, in a small park by Canary Wharf filled with City workers having their lunch. Our meeting, as the others had been during our brief affair, was an illicit one. Was he my kid? Was I, at this moment, a father? Or was little Sami the other guy’s kid? If anything, he looked like the other guy, his mother’s husband. They were both Asian muslims and I was white, and Sami looked like them to me. Surely, as I held him close and stared into his deep brown eyes and stroked his jet-black, curly hair, I would have felt some sort of primeval gut feeling, a magnetic connection. But there was nothing. He was cute and had chunky legs and sweet bootees and all that. But I was none the wiser. Amber said she could not be certain who his father was, although it sounded as if she was happy that way. For six months, that’s how it remained. Amber’s marriage was not a happy one, but she got on with being Sami’s mother. I occasionally saw her, and we got to know each other better. Sometimes she would bring along Sami, and we would wonder what the truth was. The nagging doubt of not knowing grew. Amber kept on seeing my features and facial expressions in Sami’s face, and it started to spook her. During one of our shifty meetings, we finally decided it was better for everyone if we found out, and the three of us got our mouths swabbed in a DNA clinic at a local hospital for £400. Even if it meant that I became one of those secret biological fathers who parks near his son’s school and watches from afar as he is picked up by his other father; even if it meant Amber would have to carry such a huge secret through her marriage and beyond, we wanted to demystify our lives. The news came in an email from the DNA testing clinic, which popped into my inbox as I sat at my desk at work. As my hand hovered over the mouse to click it open, I knew in my heart that I wanted to be Sami’s father. I was 36 and despite the terrible circumstances, I was ready to be a dad. If ever there was a dramatic, life-changing, forked-path moment, this was it. I made sure no one was near my desk, took a deep breath and opened the email. “The level of evidence constitutes virtual proof of paternity … The figure corresponds to a relative chance of paternity of over 99.9999999%.” With seven nines after the decimal point and two before it, that was a lot of nines. The truth had arrived in stark science and maths. I was Sami’s dad. My body flushed with excitement and, although I knew my life was about to go spinning out of control, I was happy and I couldn’t help smiling. I met Amber and we absorbed the news together. I told her that whatever happened, whether there was a future for us or not, I would do my best for Sami. I also said that if she chose to freeze me out, I would cope with that, too. I asked her to promise me that I could see him every few months or so, or every year, whatever was possible. A lot of fathers talk about the emotional and physical bond they quickly develop with a child after birth. A form of love like no other. But by the time I found out Sami was my son, I had only been able to see him a handful of times, probably for about four or five hours in total, in the eight months he had been alive. Whatever notions I had in my head, in reality, my bond with Sami was biological, but minimal. Now I was his father, I couldn’t wait to hold him and look at him. And I wanted to get to know him. But I had to temper that emotional pull. In the real world, he was someone else’s son. I knew that with every time I saw Sami, and the more I built up a bond with him, the harder it would be to keep a distance and live with the fact that while I had a son, I would not be his father. The next time I saw him, at my flat, it was an undeniably different experience. For the first time I was staring at my son, rather than a child who might be my son. I was elated. I saw him for a few hours twice a month. It was all Amber could manage. On New Year’s Eve I was at a friend’s house and Amber dropped round for a few hours with Sami. I loved it. I was showing off, bouncing him on my knee, making him laugh, feeding him and changing his nappy. Just like a proper dad. At this time, I started to develop a feeling of a greater responsibility towards Amber and Sami, which I had never felt about anyone else. I felt that whatever happened, even if I had to watch from afar, I would look after them. In having to deal with such a huge situation, Amber and I became closer. Our relationship moved from being purely sexual to one where we started to become very friendly. She knew that if she wanted, and was able to tell her husband the truth and leave him, then I would be there. Moreover, her marriage was at breaking point and she could not hide her secret any more. The grim aftermath of our stupidity was about to unravel. Amber’s husband was devastated when she told him Sami was not his child, and instead was the result of an affair with a white man. His reaction was surprisingly calm, although there were periods of intense anger and threats during the following six months. Amber and Sami moved to her ashamed parents’ house, and had to lie low for 10 months. There was talk of the three of us having to move out of the area – possibly to another part of the country, or even abroad. I saw Sami every two or three weeks, usually in my dismal rented attic flat and I became less of a stranger to him. Tentatively at first, around the time he was 18 months old, when Amber felt more confident about our relationship, he started to call me Daddy. It’s an amazing moment for any father when his child starts calling him that, but for me it was a long time coming and felt sweeter for it. If there was a moment when Sami and I bonded for sure – and the same can be said of Amber and me – it was when we were invited to a friend’s wedding in Italy, and decided to travel around the countryside and make a week of it. We deserved a break. It was a week of total bliss. The three of us were never apart for seven days. Amber and Sami moved out of her parents’ home and into their own flat. Surreptitiously, I moved in. We didn’t function as a normal family – I could not walk down the high street with them, in case I was spotted and had to run out of the back door when her parents made surprise visits. But it was the first time – when Sami was two and a half and I was 38 – that I had an idea of what it was like to be a full-time father. Bonding with Sami was gradual. It was a simple case of time and effort. As the days went by, Sami increasingly started to see me as his dad. He would run to me if he was hurt, come to me when he was upset, and sometimes would prefer to hang out with his dad than his mum. Two years down the line, when Sami was four, I met Amber’s parents. We got married in a small ceremony in our living room and bought a house. Now Sami is seven and he can’t remember much of life before he was three. Amber and I still feel the terrible guilt of what we did to her husband, who, fortunately, married again and had a child with his new wife. To have subjected someone to such an ordeal still haunts us. We also put at risk relations with our families, although the damage has largely been healed. But from such turbulent beginnings, I have become a fully hands-on dad to Sami, who is a happy, sociable boy adored by all his family. My lost years have been lost to him too. It seems that he doesn’t know any different. A cousin, who had obviously overheard her parents talking, once told him he had two fathers, but we told Sami she was making it up. We will explain everything one day. While he has been lucky enough to get his mother’s beautiful looks, Sami’s personality is a dead ringer for mine. His new teacher told me recently that he has selective hearing, a tendency to let his mind drift off and spends too much time fooling about. Names have been changed. -RNK