First Post

Hello,

I'm T. Well, that's what I'll be going by here. I'm still uncertain about putting too much info out online. But I also wanted to share my experiences as a single dad, so here I am. In this post I hope to lay out a little bit about my past, and how I became a single dad to Geo. (I'm not going to use his real name either, I hope that's OK.) My story isn't tragic, or even sad. Geo isn't the product of divorce. I'm not a widower. It's much happier story.

A few years ago I realized that while I wasn't getting any younger I also wasn't feeling confident about meeting a partner and settling down. I knew I wanted a family, but for all the typical reasons (work, being fed up with the dating scene, etc) I just didn't know that I'd have the time to do all meeting and dating and falling love in time to really be the kind of young energetic dad I wanted to be. So I decided to adopt.

I'd had some friends who had done adoptions so I knew the kind of struggles that could entail. Luckily I found a region that was eager to facilitate a quick adoption. I don't want to share too much about where that was, but it was a poorer less developed part of the world. So much so that air travel there wasn't an option, so I went by ship.

When I arrived I found Geo happily playing in a tree. He was wary of me of course, but that's expected. To tell the truth I don't know if he'd ever seen a white person before. I had done some reading and I knew that I could get him to feel more comfortable if I left him something to play with and then sort of backed off and let him have some space. He seemed really into my hat, so I laid it down and let him check it out. Then I put him in a burlap sack and carried him back to the ship.

(I had some yahoo in a parenting chat group tell me this isn't how adoptions are supposed to work. She said this seemed more like a kidnapping and she was going to try to get the authorities to trace my IP address. Whatever lady. Trolls gonna troll I guess. I mean look, if someone wanted him I don't think he'd be out wandering the jungle unsupervised. Duh. Also I heard he was one of seven siblings who had faced homelessness and a house fire, so I'm totally doing this family a solid.)

Anyway, once I got Geo back to the ship I decided to let him explore a bit. I think parents these days are too over protective and I'm dead set on not being a helicopter parent. Besides, Geo is pretty mature. He's certainly older than most adoption cases, though I'm not sure of his exact age. Still, I think because he spent his early years isolated from the modern world he has this wonderful and playful innocence and naivete, this sense of wonder about the world that is just beautiful to see. For that kind of little one you have to let them have some freedom to get to know the world around them. Still, in this case it almost backfired. Geo was playing with some gulls and ended up falling overboard. We saw it right away, and Geo is a remarkably good swimmer for his age, whatever age that is, and he was able to tread water until we could get him back on board. He was cold and a little shaken up, but I gave him a hot meal and a pipe and he was right as rain. The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. Any time Geo got rambunctious I found that a little pull of this Indonesian pipe weed the sailors had got him settled pretty quickly. I'll have to see if I can find some here in the city.

I think that's a good place to stop for now. I think over the next few weeks I'll share more of my early days with Geo until I get caught up to present day. Thanks for reading and I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

-T, AKA: The Dad in the Yellow Hat