Blind dad feels way through perils of parenting

Vancouver writer Ryan Knighton, who wrote about the loss of his sight in the 2006 memoir Cockeyed, has always found comedy a reliable guideline to getting through life.

In his new memoir, C'mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark, he uses comedy to feel his way through life as a nearly blind father.

He recalls the difficulty of bonding with a baby who can't talk, his doubts about how he could push a stroller, the time his daughter Tess put his hand on the TV screen and asked him who the person was that was speaking.

"The thing I was doing with Cockeyed was come to terms with two things at once, coming of age and coming of age as a disabled man," he said in an interview with CBC's Q cultural affairs show.

"The strange thing when I was a dad was it really threw me back into some of the old stuff I thought I'd taken care of," Knighton said.

As a blind man, he'd had to learn to trust strangers to help him with things he couldn't do himself, and he learned to take risks. As a father, he trusts fewer people, including himself.

"No one wants a blind man to strap their baby on and go out for a walk. Once we dealt with that, we thought it's not going to get harder," he said, recalling how his wife Tracy balked the first time he put little Tess in a backpack.

"But it did get harder. Tess grew up and started running around and then you think, 'I can't take her out because she bolts,'" Knighton said.

Parenthood yielded unexpected joys

In C'mon Dad he is willing to find the comedy in the time he lost her in the snow, because the incident ended well. He relates the series of improvisations that has helped him cope with life with his daughter, now age three.

Tess didn't want to hold his hand, so he now holds her elbow as he does when he walks with his wife. That little change in the authority dynamic pleased the little girl and she stopped running away.

Knighton relates the journey of any first-time parent, but with the additional twist of not being sighted. He admits to finding unexpected joys.

"The way we bond is she tells me what the world looks like and inside my head, the world is illuminated by what she describes. That's a pretty strong intimacy," he said.

Stories are important to father and daughter, as Tess discovered that Mommy can read a book, but Daddy can tell a tale.

"I like sit with her in the backseat and she says, 'OK, I want a story. Me and my best friend Stella go to the beach with a surfer and there's ice cream and a giant ape. Go!" and you just make it up," Knighton said.

"It's just like any other parent because you've lost a lot of independence but you've gained this whole other consciousness because you're constantly viewing the world through this little person."

Knighton, a member of the English department at Capilano University, received a Stephen Leacock award nomination for Cockeyed. Knopf Canada released C'mon Papa: Memoirs of a Dad in the Dark this spring.