Strictly Come Dancing winner Chris McCausland has opened up about the heartbreaking moments he’s shared with his daughter Sophie, 13
Chris McCausland(Image: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images)
Comedian and Strictly Come Dancing winner Chris McCausland has opened up about the “guilt” he experienced when his daughter was born.
Looking back on childhood memories of his father taking him to funfairs, reading him bedtime stories and, as a Liverpudlian, “watching the Mighty Reds play at Anfield,” Chris was troubled by fears he wouldn’t be able to give his daughter Sophie the same experiences.
“I thought that my blindness would preclude me from being able to do the things I thought a proper dad should do,” he wrote in his memoir Keep Laughing.
Whilst his wife Patricia had “made her own choice” to share her life with Chris, despite his condition, “a child doesn’t get to choose their parents,” he observed.
Yet children are remarkably resilient, and Sophie – now aged 13 – has matured knowing her father’s sight differs from her mother’s. But Chris remembered one particular moment when it became clear she understood he couldn’t see, reports the Mirror.
He described an occasion in his kitchen when he was searching for one of Sophie’s plastic beakers that had dropped onto the floor: “Patricia was in the bedroom with Sophie and told her to go and help me find it,” he explained.
Sophie questioned him: “You can’t find the cup, Daddy? Because your eyes are broken?”.
It was a striking realisation, he confessed: “This knocked me off my stride for a moment, as it was the first time she had made this connection with the understanding that I couldn’t see.”
He disclosed that at that point in his life, he’d grown “comfortable in his own skin” and was flourishing as a stand-up comedian, but Sophie’s question forced him to view himself through a different lens.
Understandably, Chris also feared the possibility of transmitting his condition – Retinitis pigmentosa – to his daughter.
This hereditary disorder causes a progressive deterioration of vision beginning in childhood, and Chris is delighted to confirm that Sophie appears to have escaped this particular genetic inheritance.
“It has now been several years since we passed the point at which the symptoms of my condition should have made themselves known,” he revealed, “and I’m pleased to say that they never have. The coin landed favourably this time, and if she hasn’t got it, she can’t pass it on.”
And, he acknowledges, he’s come to terms with his original “guilt” about Sophie: “There is lots I’m unable to do as her dad, but she doesn’t care about that and neither do I any more.”
