Well, you have one now.

You know when you really look forward to things, how they never quite live up to your expectations? The party you planned for months that falls flat. The barbeque which gets rained on. The presentation you give at work only to realise, just as you begin, your prompt cards are all out of synch. The date with the really gorgeous bloke you fancied for ages but who turns out to be a total dullard and crap in the sack to boot! Well, meeting my Dad was the complete opposite of that.
I had 30 years of dreaming up scenarios and fantasising about meeting my father. Being a person often accused of having an overactive imagination I had certainly spent many hours picturing the moment we first laid eyes on each other. Would we formally shake hands like two business acquaintances? Maybe we run slow-motion, rom-com style towards each other and fling ourselves into the others arms? There was of course the chance we wouldn’t recognise each other, rather like an awkward blind date.
As it turned out when I walked through the sliding doors and into the arrivals hall at Melbourne airport he was nowhere to be seen. I’d had a minor meltdown in the passport queue. “I’m here but if I could just get straight back on a plane home to London right now I would” I had texted to my husband. I didn’t mean it of course, well maybe a little, I had come too far to turn back and I mean that on all levels.
When the possibility of meeting my father had first arisen there had been some debate between my husband and I as to what the best course of action would be. My father wasn’t able to take time off of work to travel until some months later and if he came here where would he stay? I was reluctant to introduce a virtual stranger to my children and I was aware it was likely to be an emotion period and I felt they had witnessed far too many tears recently. If he came and stayed in a hotel it would totally defeat the object of a visit as I wanted to spend as much time as possible getting to know him. We debated going as a family to Australia but we didn’t have the money to fund such a trip and in any case taking my family would be a major distraction. Going by myself seemed like the best option but my husband voiced serious concern that I would be somewhat alone in a family I didn’t really know and have no support of my own. This really worried me too, my new family were warm and welcoming towards me in their emails but I had no idea how they were really reacting to all of this and what reception I would face on arrival. Still it seemed like the best option and as a well intentioned friend pointed out “You get you go to Australia!”
The journey had been pretty traumatic. The day of my flight was the first day of a school holiday. We had scheduled it that way so my husband, who is a teacher, could take care of the children without me during that time. However this meant that I was flying out on the busiest flight day of the year and not only that but the way to the airport was the M4, the motorway leading out to the westcountry where most of the families taking a holiday in the UK would be heading. My gay best friend roped his boyfriend into giving me a lift. Whist sat in solid bumper to bumper traffic watching the minutes tick rapidly by, feeling my blood pressure rapidly rise my friend, no doubt in a bid to take my mind off of things, decided to tell me tales of near misses and turbulent flights that he and some of his friends had been involved in.
“Thanks for that” I said after a particularly hair-raising story about a plane heading to Jersey which had to dump its fuel in the ocean before an emergency landing, “I feel a lot more relaxed now”.
“Oops, sorry. I wasn’t thinking” He grimaced.
Finally after what felt like about a week I settled down into my seat on the plane. The check in had been smooth an uneventful but the security was on high terror alert and the queue to get through trailed back, past the shops, around the corner, past the prayer room, down the stairs and past the check in I’d just been to. “You’re fucking kidding!” I muttered when I reluctantly joined the back of the line. Thankfully I have always been the kind of woman who views arriving at the airport as being all part of a trip and am more likely to be found traipsing around duty free for 4 hours than pleading with a check-in clerk to let me on my flight ten minutes before it takes off! Clearly the paranoia was in my genes as my father had spent the days approaching my trip getting himself more and more tied up in knots. “I’m concerned about the snow.” he messaged me for what seemed like the hundredth time. I sighed and emailed him a photo of the lovely sunny day.
The flight went well except for a brief moment just as I had drifted off to sleep when I was woken up by another passenger screaming for help. She couldn’t rouse her mother and had presumed that she had suffered a heart attack. This journey was all consuming to me and one of the most important things I have ever done so I instantly switched to selfish mode. “Oh great” I thought, “we will have to make an unscheduled landing.” I checked the flight monitor to see where we were. Kazakhstan!!! I’ll be honest I was just desperate to get to Australia and meet my family and as much as I like travel Kazakhstan is not on my must see list. As quickly as it began the drama was over, from what I could gather the older lady had taken some sleeping pills and neglected to tell her daughter. After that I allowed some movies to wash over me and tried to sleep as much as possible.

Stepping into the arrivals area at Melbourne I was very aware of how loudly my heart seemed to be beating. I was thinking about of my facial expression, it felt that something normally so natural and unconscious needed to be controlled and managed. There was a rail in front of me and exits either side, I had expected them to be there but they weren’t. I was at a loss of what to do and stood for what was probably only a few seconds but felt like an eternity wondering what next? A terrible thought ran through my mind that this was some spiteful trick and they really wanted nothing to do with me, but then I heard it. For the first time in person, in my life, my fathers voice calling my name. I turned and saw him. I’m afraid I cant tell you if I ran or if I walked, if I needed to take one step or one hundred to meet him. I can only say that I didn’t think about how to react to him, I fell into his arms and he into mine, to hug my father was as natural as breathing and he didn’t feel like a stranger. He felt like family, as if I had always known him and the separation had been momentary. He was silently crying as I had expected to but my sense of relief to finally be there was so overwhelming nothing else could really come to the fore. I felt a little sorry for putting this kind man through so much emotional upheaval and I wondered if what I had to offer and bring to his life could somehow make up for the pain I had caused. Presently I heard the girl who was my sister call out “she’s here mum, we missed it.” I was greeted warmly if somewhat cautiously by my step mother and my sister. The two woman looked tired and shell shocked and I again had a sense of responsibility for inflicting this bizarre situation upon them.
The day was unlike any other, it was early when I arrived and the weather was overcast and there was a chill in the air as their autumn began. I noted with interest that although Australia didn’t have that foreign smell I had noticed elsewhere it did sound completely different. The gentle chirp-like singing was of the English songbirds was replaced by the tropical squawks of parrots or some similar breed of bird I had had previously only encountered in a zoo.
I myself felt like an exhibit in a zoo. I don’t think I made a single move that day without the three of them watching me. I felt their eyes follow me around, watching, waiting as if I might be merely an illusion. I wondered what they made of me, if they saw something they recognised in me, if I looked like family to them.

In the afternoon we went for a walk on the beach. It was a lovely little bay, we parked by a café and walked over some sand dunes to reach it. At one end was a small marina and the bay curled around to reach some black rocks around half a mile along. The sun began to appear from behind the clouds and their dog bounded happily ahead of us. To begin with we all strolled together then in a clearly choreographed move the girls walked ahead and my father and I were left to privately talk. He described what had happened between my mother and him and was impressively candid. Some parts of his story tallied with what I’d been told. Other things were new. Some just another side of the coin. He gave the impression that he was the keener of the two, that he would have happily continued the relationship but I also read between the lines that he was retrospectively romanticising things and had I not appeared he may not have seen it in that light. He told me that some time after the relationship had ended his sister, whose husband worked with my mum, told him that my mother had a baby and jokingly hinted that said baby resembled their mother. Cleary she was teasing but something hit a nerve with him and he made that fateful call to my mother. If only he’d turned up at the door, she couldn’t have denied it then for he would have definitely seen that I did indeed look just like not just his mother but his whole family. Through it all he maintained something I believed very strongly, if he had known I was his he’d have been there. He’d have insisted, he’d never have left. I wondered if my mother had realised this too and maybe it had played a part in her decision to lie to him.
Then he asked me how my life had been and I told him the truth, for the most part things had been good. I’d been loved and cared for but there was another side, some people had told me I would amount to nothing. In Austria, in particular, I’d been teased and isolated. I remember when I was very small at a cousins wedding. Just like we have here there was a table for all the kids. I can’t remember how it came to be known but the kids started asking why I had no father, at first it was just a few, then sensing some drama more crowded around, all demanding in the language still a little tricky for me, “where is he?”, “doesn’t he like you?”, “is your mother a slut?”. “I just don’t have one” I protested, as the questions were fired at me I felt increasingly upset, I knew everyone else had a daddy, I just didn’t understand why I didn’t. Through the crowd I saw my cousin, he was only a few years older than me but at the time it seemed like a lifetime. I looked desperately at him silently imploring him to rescue me, as he broke eye contact and turned away from me my heart sank and I choked back the tears that were burning my throat, eventually when the questions became more spiteful and the tears began to spill out an older girl came over and put his hand on my shoulder, “Geh Weg” she said, “Leave her. She doesn’t know.” The incident might not seem like much but the humiliation branded me, I’ve gone through my whole life thinking other people knew more about my parentage than I did.
So I said to my father, “I’ve been ok, you know but there were times.” My voice started to falter and I had a strange bitter smile plastered across my face. “Times when it was hard…Not having a dad.”
We walked along in silence for a few moments and then he put his arm around my shoulders and kissed the top of my head. “Well, you have one now” he whispered. Finally all the supressed fear and pain and anxiety and happiness I had kept tightly packed inside burst out and I cried like a child would into my dads chest while he hugged me and soothed me and finally things were as they should have always been.