I have asked for too much...

As emotionally taxing as my life is right now, today is especially so. Six years ago, on this day, my mother died. Or "gave up the ghost" — as one of her quaint northern English sayings would have had it.

This morning I went down to the garden at the bowling club, where my parents had so much fun — and where I scattered their ashes — and spent some quiet time, remembering, giving thanks... and generally having a natter with Mom and Dad.

When I turned away from my reverie to look at the bowling green where my Dad and I once played a few ends — "Just so you can get a feel for it, Sport" my bowls-mad father had said — I could see him, white teeth flashing in his brown-as-an-oak grizzled face, dancing with joy as his "wood kissed the kitty".

I remembered his flowing banter with his bowls mates, the flirtatious humour directed at the ladies in whites, while my Mom sat quietly at the side of the green, lost in her thoughts and looking forward to tea-time. And how could I forget how their bowls colleagues stood back at post-tournament dances and applauded as my dad, so nimble and dexterous, swept Mom around the dancefloor in one beautifully gracious and seamless movement. Aye, they could dance, those two.

On Saturday, I might get the news that I am, finally, to give them a grand-child they will never see in the physical realm. it will have been two weeks since the first attempt at artificial insemination and Caroline will do a pregnancy test to see if it has "taken".

Ever since I have been in Durban for "The Insemination", I have had children around me, connecting with me, my inner child, the father I want to become. I see the children of others everywhere I go, I have had teddy-bears given to me to hold. I never knew there were so many creches, kindergartens, pre-schools in Glenwood. It is as if I am being prepared for my new role.

When I last had a reading done with "my Spiritualist Woman", she saw a woman, probably my Mom, holding a child spirit, a child which was "waiting for the right time, for me to find 'the how' to enable him or her to come into my life".

That time may be close. Tomorrow I will drive with a very good friend north from Durban to see Verna again, to once again receive spiritual guidance and possibly reassurance that I am doing the "right thing". Afterwards, we will walk the beach where I spent just about every sun-rising morning searching for cowrie shells, once used both as currency and as symbols of fertility in Africa and Asia. I hope to stumble across a special cowrie shell tomorrow, a sign that my dream is to come true.

But, it would seem, as one dream might be born, another shall die. As I have written here before, Susan, the woman I love, cannot handle the magnitude of what it is I am trying to do. It is two weeks since I left her to pursue "Project Egg". We have spoken regularly. It is both warm and strange. Estranged. Much continues to happen in her life. It is, as we exclaim with forced bonhomie, a month of "March Madness". I saw this month coming last year. I foresaw much change to happen in March, 2012. It is happening. It cannot be avoided. As I have said to Susan, I "just could not step around the opportunity to become the father I am destined to be". And, as she has replied, she simply cannot do anything but step away from it all.

"It is too big for me to handle, I cannot join you on this part of your journey. You are beautiful. We are beautiful together. But I must leave you now to follow your chosen path alone."

I wrote a few blogposts ago that, in Susan, I had been given a beautiful gift. I asked if I could dare hope that I be given another wondrous gift, the gift of fatherhood. I wanted both. The love of a special woman, my soulmate, and the love for — and of — my very own child.

It would appear that I have asked for too much. I have gone too far. I'm too far gone.

‎"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." ~ T.S. Eliot.

I hand over my sperm

It's 2.50am. I'm staring at a white page, this screen. Yes, one of those. I'm heavy-eyed, listening to Radio Paradise (Mumford & Sons' Awake My Soul currently playing) and going outside every 10 minutes to drink tea and smoke under the palm tree, the flickering panorama of Durban's city and harbour winking at me up on the ridge. An owl is wheezing in the trees that surround me in night-green. But I'm not really taking it in. I'm staring into my future and, as usual, not a lot of it looks familiar. "You were made to meet your maker" is what Mumford & Sons sing. Yesterday I made an investment for my future.

I gave a doctor a small plastic bottle with a whitish-grey viscous gloop in it. My semen. It crossed my mind to walk out of the room, throw the bottle into the bank of sub-tropical greenery and return to what is familiar. Susan. Back in my home village in the Western Cape where she waits, wondering whether I will go ahead with this. Project Egg.

I am. It is on my life path. And I simply cannot step around it. I give the bottle to the doctor and, while her mother prepares to lie back, have her legs locked high in stirrups for the "insertion", to have her follicles fed with the future, I take Keira to the hospital restaurant for croissants and coffee.

She selects cheese with her croissant, I jam. I look into her child-wise grey-blue eyes and ask her: "Keira, when my sister was born I was three and my mom tells me I was really unhappy that this baby came along and took away all the attention I had been getting. Do you think you might feel like that when Egg arrives?"

The nine-year-old looked at me, smiled and answered: "Yes. Because when mom or dad take me shopping or whatever, people say 'wow, your daughter is so pretty' and I think when the new baby is here, people will say things about it and forget to say that I'm pretty."

"I understand. It will probably be like that." I don't know what else to say. I am smiling at her. She looks up at me and smiles. She understands. And she looks so pretty. And her eyes speak of wisdom.

She shows me the book she is reading. One of three books she is currently reading. I want to read it. To better understand the mind of a child I once was. It feels like time to go back. To the doctor's rooms. Perfect timing. Keira's mother is coming out of the doctor's office. Beaming. "The doctor said he got me at just the right time. We don't need to do another insertion on Monday. The second follicle was open and receptive."

It takes me a while to absorb this. A girl? The talk at the previous night's birthday dinner was about a daughter invariably being the result of a first, shallow, insertion using unfiltered semen and a second, deeper, insertion using cleaned and carefully selected sperm more likely to produce a son.

What, we're not going to bother trying for a boy? Caroline says, "How about a coffee at The Corner?" Fantastic idea.

We bump into friends. Old Durban friends of mine, friends of Caroline's. A unicyclist and tree feller. A vintage clothing shop owner. A fellow journalist with a razor-sharp sense of the absurd. He makes me laugh. And he has his two-year-old daughter playing on the ground at his feet. I feel paternity. My phone rings. It's Susan.

I had said to her that Caroline would be at the peak of her ovulating powers this weekend. Susan has sensed that the job has been done. I haven't been completely open. Or communicative. Protecting. No, deceiving. I confirm this. I feel selfish. I tell her. She soothes instead of seethes. "You're not being selfish. You have done what you needed to do." So rational. I think I would understand anger better. I deserve her anger.

Susan is sorry. Sorry that she can't share my excitement. "I'm not big enough to deal with this," she says. My head is spinning, swimming. Words are hard to find. The noise of plates clattering in the sink of the nearby kitchen has become deafening. I'm not hearing Susan. We agree to talk later. I go back to another coffee in the bright sunshine. Bright faces. My cloudy mind.

I feel an overwhelming tiredness. The tree feller gives me a lift home. I am toppled. I can't breathe. I can't sleep. I watch rugby. It hurts. Susan phones again. We talk. and talk. And talk. but the pain doesn't go away. She wants me to be excited about the new life I am creating. She just can't feel the same. "I don't want to spoil your excitement," she says. Nor do I. But I am holding back any elation. It doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel right to celebrate the possible birth of something beautiful at the expense of the possible end of something that is beautiful.

After we have finished, I think of the analogy I didn't think of while we were talking. I feel like a man who has parachuted from a plane for the first time. He should feel excited after the jump. But the broken legs he sustained upon landing means that pain is all that he is feeling.

My head swims again when I try to catch up on sleep in the late afternoon. Before I can sink into oblivion, Susan phones again. She wants to know how I am feeling. I say the same things. I am wondering how she is feeling. "You don't know how I felt physically when you told me Caroline and you had gone to the hospital to do the insemination." "Stomach?" I say. "I felt an intense pain in my uterus." Wow. I thought, "Wow." That's the best I could come up with. I think I might have said it. But both of us heard silence. Felt the chasm yawn between us. How else could it be?

I smoke and drink tea. And I cannot sleep. 3.57am. And this, right now, is just as it is. It is as it is. Lay Me Down, by The Audreys, is playing on Radio Paradise. "Just lay me down, lay me down, lay me down, lay me down... down... down..."

I go outside for one last smoke. The owl is still calling out to the darkness. I'm not breathing in. I stretch to get a lungful of fresh, cool night air. My shoulders slump. I am so, so tired. It feels like I don't belong in my body. It's been emptied.

Reaching out for 'Egg'

As I strode out to the aeroplane, Susan burst out of the airport terminal buildings, shoes in hand, and sprinted across the tarmac. "Wait! I'm coming with you. We'll do this together. I love you! I'm not letting go of you.... I belong in your dream!"

Wonderful. Except it wasn't. On the way to the airport, from where a plane would take me to meet Caroline with a view to co-creating our child by artificial insemination, Susan had again brought up the prospect of us separating temporarily. So that I could go right ahead and - selfishly? - create my child outside of our relationship. Outside of her. So that she could clear her head. And deal with the difficult and draining stuff that swirls around her life. "Your wanting a baby is too big for me to deal with right now," she had said

I knew that Susan was finding it extremely difficult to come to a decision about the separation we had talked about on several occasions. I decided to make it easier. As we drove through the mountain passes to the airport and towards my child-destiny, Caro Emerald warbling of love and loss on the stereo, I gave Susan a stark choice. I wasn't being brave. Or cavalier. I was reacting to an instinctual demand that I rush towards my truth. And try to heal the wounds later.

It hurt. But I said it: "Susie, by the time we reach the airport, I would like you to have made a decision. When I get on that plane I want to know if we are in this thing together or not. I'm sorry but I need clarity on this. We need clarity. To go forward."

She fell silent, toyed with her hair a lot as she drove.

I played mock-happy, drumming the beat of the song on my knee. "Little girl, just keep on waiting, for that man to give you a life... you keep on hoping, so this prince can save you... keep on dreaming his scandalous lie..."

The airport was upon us. I pushed my luggage towards the check-in... to check out. Susan checked out. She sat on a stainless steel pipe, the myriad lights of a sterile airport bouncing off it, the sounds of comings and goings ringing in our ears. Her tears welled up. her beautiful face crumpled. "I'm sorry..."

It's OK, I said. I understand. You need to do this. And I need to do what I'm about to do. Journeys. I kissed her. And pressed into her hand the tiny brass buddha I wanted her to keep with her, come what may.

As the aeroplane sank into a bright, blue-eyed descent into the sweaty body of Durban, I felt a fire run wild across my forehead. It seemed as if the blood vessels across the top of my eyes were all bursting at once. I briefly considered asking the nice Muslim man next to me to alert a air hostess.

Instead, I sat back, breathed deeply as if in meditation and asked the burning to go away. It refused point-blank. Only once we had landed did this runaway forehead fire start to subside.

Then there were friends to meet. Humidity to envelope me. Memories to snake through my head and heart and shake my spine. Marriage. Death. Divorce. Collapse. Rebirth.

Two hours later, I had blood drawn from my body. Two large phials of it. HIV and Hep B. I was having my body approved to take the next steps to recreating my flesh and blood. Soon enough, when Caroline's ovulation reaches its peak, I will spurt semen into a small, transparent container. And hand it over. Over. Beginnings. Ends. Comings. Goings. I don't know whether I'm coming or going. I feel strangely calm. I am trusting.