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Chris McCausland has heartbreakingly recalled the moment his daughter realised his eyes were ‘broken.’
The comedian and Strictly star, 47, hasn’t been able to see since his early 20s when he lost his sight due to a hereditary condition called retinitis pigmentosa.
In 2013, he welcomed a daughter, Sophie with his wife Patricia Mazure, and also admitted that he felt ‘guilty’ about becoming a dad as he thought his ‘blindness would stop him being a proper parent’ to his daughter.
Discussing a difficult moment in his memoir Keep Laughing, he wrote: ‘Patricia was in the bedroom with Sophie and told her to go and help me find it.
‘Sophie asked, “You can’t find the cup, Daddy? Because your eyes are broken?’
‘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.’
Although his partner Patricia never doubted him, he was worried his condition would hinder him from being a ‘proper dad.’
He recalled attending football matches with his own dad, but that was something he wouldn’t be able to do with Sophie.
Chris also had concerns he could pass on his genetic condition to his children, but explained how the ‘coin landed favourably’ with his daughter.
He has been open about his concerns and in a previous interview said being a father wasn’t something he was confident he could do.
He said: ‘The idea of being a parent and all of the things I was going to be unable to do properly, all the things my dad used to do with me as a kid, I thought to myself: ‘How am I going to do all of those things? I’m not going to be a proper dad; I’ll be a half dad.’ And that caused me a lot of torment in my head.’
However it was Brazilian-born wife Patricia who gave him the confidence, and they now live on a new-build private development in Surbiton, south-west London, not far from Kingston University where Chris studied computer engineering.
Friends say that initially Chris found parenthood ‘really hard’, but he soon discovered a way of making it work as a blind father. ‘My daughter knows nothing else but me not being able to see,’ he says.
‘She learned that she could point at things for my wife, and she put my hand on things with me. That’s how she learned to communicate with us.’
Chris also found a way round not being able to see Sophie. As a computer engineer, he movingly described how he’d been able to devise a way to ‘bring her image to life’ using AI.
He takes photos of Sophie and uses specialist technology to get a description of her and what she’s doing, as well as the expression on her face.
Chris and Patricia’s love story began when he was a fledgling young stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2005.
She was a TV producer for Sky making a programme about the festival. When the cameras stopped rolling there was an instant connection between them, and they were soon spending more time together back in London.
Romance blossomed and was cemented by a shared love of music. In fact, when Chris took Patricia to see rockers Pearl Jam in London’s Hyde Park in 2010 he vowed to himself that he would propose to her if the band played their favourite song, Black.
They did, and she said yes – right there in the middle of the gig – and the couple married in 2012.
