It’s official: Darcey’s a spunk

I’ll spare you the details about the birth except to say there were times when we didn’t know if we were all going to make it. I’ll skip the bit about the doctor’s early diagnosis of Darcey’s mysterious birthmarks and the possible implications for her future.

I won’t even mention the bleak weather that accompanied our first visit to the Royal Children’s Hospital, nor will I explore the bizarre experience of two dozen doctors prodding and pawing our daughter as if she had fallen from space.

I’ll spare you all that because I hardly know you, and to be honest, it doesn’t really matter at the moment. At the moment, the undeniable, doting-Dad truth is that Darcey is a spunk. She’s a healthy, blue-eyed, blonde bombshell with a smile to melt an iceberg and all the charm of a cheeky princess.

Our dog doesn’t quite see it that way. He’s a good looking mutt but compared to Darcey his cute factor has plummeted to minus five. The day we brought her home he thought she was a squeaky toy.

He twitched around the house like a goalie, waiting for us to throw her down the hallway. To his great disappointment that never happened, and then, adding insult to injury, he was denied a half-decent lick of her head.

Still, he has a dream that one day they will be firm friends and Darcey will share her teddy bear collection. Until then, he is happy to sit in front of the heater in her bedroom and luxuriate in the exotic smells emanating from her nappy.

Like any baby, Darcey has her fair share of spew and pew stories. I won’t go into the nitty gritty except to say that Kate (her Mum) and I have replaced the Standard & Poors Financial Index with the Spew & Pew Intestinal Index.

The Spew and Pew Index awards points according to the severity of each atrocity. Spew in the hair is worth 30 points. Spew inside the sleeve is worth 50 points (60 if it reaches the elbow) and spew on a friend or visiting relative is worth 100. I’m sure you get the picture though I’m not so sure you want to know what gets you 100 on the pew scale.

On a productive day of intestinal trading the S&P Index hovers around 150. On an exceptional day when Darcey’s stocks are running hot, the brokers are on the verge of jumping out the window.

That’s the thing about Darcey, she loves to give. But her wily ways stretch far beyond the S&P. It would be slack of me not to mention her talent for breathing so softly in her sleep that we prod her to see if she stirs (thankfully she does, but only to vent her lungs with the gusto of an oncoming freight train).

And I should take a moment to mention her clever impersonation of a bobby dog on a car dash as she tries to hold her head up. There are other tricks; such as her mysterious ability to extract her arms from the pythonic grip of a well-constructed bed wrap or her chameleon-like ability to look exactly like her Mum or Dad - depending of course on whose relatives are visiting at the time. 

And then there’s that other thing she does. That canny knack of connecting us to special people, like those who cared for her during her early days in hospital or the friends and family who have visited our home to wish us well and share our happiness.

And she has a no-nonsense way of defining the joys of fatherhood or what it means to be truly vulnerable in a world where the highest walls offer little protection against the unknown.

But most importantly, and this is quite remarkable for a girl her age, Darcey believes she has uncovered one of the great mysteries of life. I thought I was imagining it at first. I thought sleep deprivation and the onerous task of nudging Kate out of bed at three in the morning to feed our girl was doing me in. But as the days rolled on and Darcey lit up our lives, it was impossible to explain her behaviour in any other way.

“Darcey knows,” I said to myself one day. “Darcey knows something special.” I could see it in her smile and hear it in her baby chatter. I could smell it in her milky breath and feel it in her wispy hair. I could sense it in every floppy-arm effort to roll over, every angelic pose of deep, deep sleep and every full-blooded battle cry for a stint at the breast.

So one night on the change table I just put it to her.
“You know something, don’t you?” I said.
“Yep,” she said with the biggest, cheekiest grin available.
“It’s as plain as the button-nose on my face Dad. Wherever, whatever, whoever, she is, God exists, Dad. She exists.”
And I s’pose she must.  With a girl like Darcey, how on earth could I argue?

by Bruce Atherton

This article was first published in Australian Family Magazine, October 2002.