Just say No

With the nonchalance of tone and certainty of it happening Peanut asked:

'You know when we adopt again, well could we.............'

With the tone of a man who really knows what that means, a broken man no less,  I interrupted sharply:

'Nope, no, never, never, never.......................just no,  I mean it, really stop that before you even start. We are not, I repeat, not adopting more children'

Flossy and Peanut who were feigning disinterest up til that point then joined in.

'It would be cute to have a baby though wouldn't it?'

Realising that this needed to be well and truly stamped out I unleashed the full Fawlty Dad, the whole nine yards, descriptions of how in no uncertain terms I was not going to be the father of another child, how by the time Peanut is 18 I will have been a parent with a child under 18 for 34, yes THIRTY, flaming, FOUR years, how the teachers of my children weren't even born when I started taking my children to parent's evenings, on and on and on I went, a man on the edge.

Flossy and Peanut no longer feigned disinterest, they were genuinely disinterested and Peanut had wandered off bored.

I felt quite traumatised.

What a peculiar paradigm we appear to have created. I couldn't stop thinking about what a strange world Peanut inhabits, quite an interesting model of family we've got going on round here. Aunts that aren't and sisters that are and aren't. Some who can live with us and some who can't. It's her version of normal.

Epilogue

This morning I woke at 4am in a cold sweat.
I'd dreamt that we'd been asked to adopt a sibling group of six, lovely children no bother at all. In the dream I'd thought about saying 'yes' and woke myself up in terror because I'd not said 'no''