An ‘instant’ dad finds that fatherhood truly is a blessing

I mused a few days ago about being childless and forgoing the pleasure of watching my own kids open Christmas presents. Way too sappy for some readers, but it prompted others to do some reflecting.

My favorite -- which I hereby proclaim this year’s official Christmas column -- comes from Dennis Flanagan, another longtime childless guy until ... well, he tells a pretty good story, complete with life’s unexpected twists.

“When I left my own childhood, I left children at Christmas behind,” he writes, noting that 10 years ago he was turning 50 and divorced from a woman who had not wanted children. Neither of his siblings had children either.

In November 1996, things changed. “My older sister adopted a little 3-year-old Chinese girl from an orphanage in Shanghai,” he writes. “She arrived with just the clothes on her back, literally. This little girl had been abandoned at birth, her parents were unknown. I remember the joy of her first Christmas with us and the overwhelming thrill I had shopping the toy stores and clothing stores for her.”

He and his sister showed the little girl how to open presents and, in what must have seemed miraculous to a girl adopted out of a 10-story orphanage with thousands of children, made it clear that she could keep them. “My cup was not completely full, perhaps,” Flanagan writes, “but at least it was no longer completely empty.”

He didn’t have a daughter, but he had a beautiful niece.

Little did he know.

Three years later, Flanagan’s sister became seriously ill. Six months later, on Memorial Day weekend of 2000, Dennis got a phone call while visiting friends in Palm Desert. His sister’s health had taken such a significant downturn that she needed a permanent care facility.

Six-year-old Jade needed a parent. As the one who had agreed to be her guardian in case anything happened to his sister, that someone was Flanagan.

He hadn’t signed the guardianship papers grudgingly but says he figured that if he and his sister lived a normal life expectancy, he would outlive her by a few years.

Instead, with his sister incapacitated and facing a dire prognosis, Flanagan, in his mid-50s and a bachelor, suddenly was rearing a 6-year-old girl.

But Flanagan’s story isn’t that of having unexpected parenthood thrust upon him and quashing his carefree bachelorhood. Rather, it brought unexpected moments of unbridled happiness. He writes: “A few weeks before that first Christmas in 2000, my little niece said to me one day, without preamble, “Uncle, we have to move to a new house!” I asked, “Why on earth do we need to move? Her reply: ‘I don’t think your chimney is big enough for Santa Claus to come down.’ ”

Two years later, in October 2002, Joanne Flanagan died, a week after Jade turned 9. I talked to Flanagan Friday afternoon to tell him how much I liked his story of belated “fatherhood.” He’s now 60; Jade is a 13-year-old going to intermediate school. In 2004 they moved from Santa Barbara to Trabuco Canyon in Orange County.

“I used to joke that most people have nine months to prepare for their first kid,” he says. “I had about nine minutes. I was thrown into the deep end with no manual and told to sink or swim.”

Did he think he could do it? “I knew it in theory,” he says. “I felt it in my heart. I felt I could be a good father. I was amazing myself. I don’t know where I was finding the tricks and techniques and things I did, but I found it was working and she was responding and we were bonding.”

To be a full-time parent, he’d quit his job when his sister was hospitalized. He may go back to work when Jade is older.

“To raise a child is such a blessing,” he says, “and to have it happen after I had let it go as something that would ever happen, then have it come to me, carries so much more meaning.”

Since my original column was primarily about kids at Christmas and how the years fly by, that’s where I’ll end this story.

“It comes tinged with a certain sadness, which I did not suspect,” Flanagan says of parenting. “As a child passes through the stages of development, we must grieve that which is lost. My niece and I are spending our seventh Christmas together. I miss making the trip to see Santa, and I once again pass by the toy stores with all the goodies for toddlers. But I now have the memories of those experiences to cherish and my niece still has the giggling joy that comes with opening presents.”

If only to honor the memory of his sister as Jade’s mother, he doesn’t call himself “father.”

But he ends his e-mail by describing jeans-shopping last week for his now in-between-sizes niece. He hedged his bets by buying two different sizes and got clued in on the exchange policy by the saleswoman, who asked if he were shopping for his granddaughter.

“With my ego surprisingly unfazed by the reference to my aging appearance and with my heart full of joy and pride,” he writes, “I answered, ‘No, I’m shopping for my kid.’ ”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at [email protected]. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.