the innocence of youth

did you ever daydream about what kind of parent you might be, if indeed you ever thought about being a parent at all?

I never imagined that I would become a mother. Not that I actively didn’t want children – just that it truly hadn’t occurred to me, nor did I think I had a maternal bone in my body. So it came as something of a surprise when I woke up one morning in my late twenties with an overwhelming urge to reproduce. It was as immediate as that – one day, not bothered, the next, it dominated my every waking thought. To be honest, until I actually became pregnant, I was pretty impossible to be around. Like most things, once I’ve made up my mind to do something, I take it VERY SERIOUSLY. And so it began, the reading, researching, folic acid, leafy greens, temperature taking, chart plotting and on it went. It was at a time when it felt like everyone around me was announcing their pregnancies and I would congratulate them warmly before turning away and weeping hormonally into my fertility chart. Luckily for all concerned, it actually didn’t take too long before I was staring at two blue lines, one in each window, and so our family started.

Fast forward a few years and we were lucky enough to have two boys, almost exactly two years apart. I was truly grateful for them, but it didn’t stop me hankering wistfully after a third. My husband is quite a bit older than me, and for a guy who hadn’t really planned on getting married, and definitely didn’t see having kids as part of the equation (and ABSOLUTELY NO DOG!), it wasn’t really going according to plan. He really wasn’t keen on a third. There was a lot of heartfelt discussion, late into the night. Long walks, silences and stand-offs. Tears and arguments and finally, he was coming around to the idea.

Then after supper one day, he announced that he was not feeling at all well and hadn’t been all day. He had chest pain and it was heading down his left arm. Given that he works in a hospital and he had been there all day, if it wasn’t so alarming, it would have been really annoying. 24 hours later and we were sitting in front of an over-excited cardiologist who clearly thought all his christmases had come at once. “I’ve never met anybody alive with this before” he said, ” we normally just find it at post-mortem”. He announced that the chest pain was in fact a very bad bout of indigestion for which the treatment was antacids, but went on to say that he had Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (colloquially known as Sudden Adult Death Syndrome) and that the boys had a 50/50 chance of developing it during their adolescence.

It was like someone dragging a needle across a record and within just a few sentences, our world stopped. It took a long period of readjustment as a family to come to terms with that, and it put a swift end to any further discussion about another child. We had already brought two into the world who faced a possible diagnosis – we didn’t feel like we could knowingly do that to another.

After a while, life settled down and we learned to live with the permanent shadow of his condition. My husband was terribly sanguine about it in respect of himself, although we both worried endlessly about the boys. We were told not to wrap them up in cotton wool and just let them me boys, but that was sometimes very hard, not least as they were both playing full contact sports at a national level. The boys had and still do have an amazing paediatric cardiologist who they have seen regularly, and are very used to it all. It is simply part of how life is, and they have long seen those days at the hospital as a day off school followed by a treat on the way home. Bar one or two hiccups along the way, there has been very little to report.

That was 2006. In summer of 2009 I spent some weeks feeling really unwell. I was utterly exhausted, like somebody had cast a sleeping spell on me. I was putting on weight. I felt fragile, overly sensitive, just awful. By September I was still feeling terrible and started to imagine that something was really wrong. My imagination ran wild. Then one day at work somebody asked me if I had anything to tell them. I had no idea what they were talking about and they replied “you know” before winking at me.

Several days later ( I can be mind-blowingly slow) it dawned on me. I went to Boots, bought a test, went home and put it in a drawer. Alone, I did the test and watched as the tell-tale blue line crept across the window. I went hot and cold with fear and blind panic. My husband was out with friends. I sent him a text and told him to come home straight away.

If I’m totally honest, it wasn’t weeks, or months, but years before I quite got over the shock of having little M. I was distraught for weeks at the thought of bringing another child into the world with the prospect of them developing their dad’s condition. There was never any question though, of doing anything other than welcoming him into the world, and so we did, 4 days late, on a bitterly cold day in February 2010. He was due on Valentine’s Day and is still thankful that he didn’t shown up then, for he would have been Valentine (he still is, to me).

A surprise and possibly typical third child, arriving 8 years after AJ and 6 years after The Middle One, he was not close enough in years to be a threat to them and when they were all younger, was something of a plaything. It’s a wonder that he doesn’t have exceptionally long ears as he was frequently picked up by then, and often spun around until he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Now he is a younger brother to protect. Up until the last few years, he has had what some might consider to be a charmed existence. The youngest in our family unit but also the youngest of ten grandchildren, he has indeed had love and attention in spades.

Getting back to the start of this post – I asked the question – what kind of parent did you want or set out to be, if indeed you have travelled that road? For certain, I wanted to be able to give my children the financial security that I felt was missing from my own childhood – so for them not to be embroiled as I was in the constant, gnawing anxiety and shame of living a hand to mouth existence. Not that anybody asked me to become involved in it, I involved myself. Aside from that, what I wanted to do was to instil all the usual things that I presume most of us aspire to – kindness, respect, generosity and so much more. However I have also focussed hard on creativity in whatever form it comes, to foster an imagination that can run riot, and a sense of adventure. To explore the world and all its possibilities in a way that I never did, assuming responsibility as I did at an early age for everybody else’s happiness before my own. Gosh, just writing that has unlocked an aha! moment for me.

Having little M has given me the benefit of another go at motherhood with all the knowledge of having been there before, the wisdom not to sweat so much of the small stuff, and the confidence to not do so many of the things I felt I needed or had to with the older two. Not for him the rounds of swimming lessons ( I taught him myself), beavers, karate, tuition, golf, and all the other things that seemed so necessary before. I had the confidence to let him sleep in and go into school late if he’d had a bad night the night before. The confidence also to stay up late on a school night and head off in coats over our pyjamas with a flask of hot chocolate to look up at a full moon accompanied in the clear and inky night sky by a multitude of stars. The confidence to tell him that it’s OK not to be good at everything, and that knowing the best type of glue for a certain type of glitter is a very important skill indeed.

As a child growing up in the back of beyond, with only my sisters and for years, one other family of two siblings to play with – we had the kind of childhood where the fields and hedgerows, farmland and streams were our playground. Where mum would turf us out of the house in the morning and we would come home only when we were tired or hungry, or if the farmer had chased us out of his hay bales. We made camps in disused tunnels, we trapped newts in jam jars and we told stories into the night. We had an imaginary rabbit, Twinkle, who lived in a tree trunk at the end of the garden. She had magic powers and in exchange for food ( grass on a bad day, on a good day she might have had a jam sandwich or a leftover potato) she would grant us wishes. Naturally, fairies lived down at the bottom of the garden too, along with our pet hedgehog ( Prickles, clearly) who one day did a runner. That was a dark day indeed.

Taking the fondest memories of my childhood, little M and I had long inhabited a world of make believe well before our troubles as a family. Our world involves story telling at bedtime. Our own stories, woven together, of trolls and talking otters, and houses inside tree trunks and mushrooms that turn into tiny carriages for fairies. There has been no gender bias in our world. It’s OK to be a pop-gun-slinging boy fairy with wings, or a girl troll with superpowers in business.

Our house has had resident Borrowers for years. They “borrow” things at night, occasionally leaving behind evidence – once a tiny ladder left dangling from little M’s bedside drawers, once a cheeky footprint in a bar of soap. Sometimes they leave us things too – a discarded shoe or boot, a scooter one day, a tiny book of fairy tales. The leader of the gang, Spiller, has corresponded with little M in a series of the tiniest of letters for years. I have every one, tucked into an old chocolate box, a precious memento of this firm friendship. Little M has yearned to meet him but knows it can never happen, or they will be banished forever to another home. He did see one once, scurrying behind a fireplace, and he worried about that for a while before I told him that it didn’t count on the third Sunday in October.

Similarly, the Tooth Fairy is still alive and kicking, although there has been inflation in recent years – to the extent that when he returned from the dentist with a tooth in his pocket following a very nasty couple of weeks nursing an abscess, the dentist had told him that the tooth fairy paid in note form in those circumstances. And then there is Father Christmas.

He met Father Christmas in Finland four years ago, and he still hook, line and sinker believes. He feels sorry for those that don’t believe in him, and what he says is “it’s because they’ve never met the real one”. We had a magical time on a frozen lake in the northernmost tip of Finland. Starting on one side of the lake we were in Finland, where we climbed into a sled pulled by huskies and were taken across to a church which lit up the night sky, where we had crossed into Sweden. We returned to the camp where we sat around a fire in a makeshift tent, listening to an old woman tell tales of ogres and dragons. There was a faint sound of bells that became louder and louder and turning, a sleigh had appeared behind us. Tucked into the sleigh with piles and piles of rugs and reindeer skins for warmth we set off at a pace across the lake and under the stars. It felt like a very long time before we eventually reached a clearing, and in the dark we could make out a tiny hut amongst the trees. And there he was. Father Christmas and his helper. Overwhelmed, little M climbed up onto his knee and looked at him intently and when asked what he wanted for Christmas, he replied “Lego and for daddy to get better”. A moment never to forget.

Back home and a week later, he was sitting on Father Christmas’s knee at the local Village Hall and looked intently at him, including a tug of his beard, before whispering “I know you’re not the real one but you look nice”.

Some of you will be in the camp of not agreeing with this land of make believe, and that’s OK. Each to their own. I do face a decision or perhaps a realisation before very long, as he moves to secondary school, of whether to let him in on the act or not. I’m not sure it’s a good thing to go up to secondary school still leaving a carrot out on the doorstep for Rudolph. And for those of you who think he’s humouring me, he really isn’t.

We still make time on a rainy afternoon to cover the table with newspaper and get out our glue and paint. We chatter away with the radio on in the background, a cup of tea for me and a cup of chocolate for him, making things for our tiny world or a present for a friend. For a long time, it wasn’t unusual for there to be a tiger at our house who came to tea.

He can still see endless possibilities in a simple cardboard box. We have a life-sized grandfather clock on the landing made four years ago on Boxing Day from the box his brothers hockey stick arrived in. This box was instantly ear-marked for Wonka TV – and oh, what fun we had with it!

I joke all the time about bottling him, and then reader, I did.

My own creative output multiplies exponentially when I am feeling anxious or that life is out of control. As things became more and more difficult at home we have retreated further and further into our imaginary world – a source of great comfort and solace and a safe place to be. Working on a miniature scale is a particular favourite for both of us – creating a tiny world is absorbing and blissful escapism.

I am guilty of having done all I can to preserve his childhood and it’s a theme I return to time and again when I am busy in my hive of creativity. These precious few years are gone in the blink of an eye – and I know the hell fire that could be coming.

“It’s your job to met me go mama” he has said, and so it is. But not quite yet.

I could be accused of molly-coddling him, or teaching him a lack of resilience or leaving him open to ridicule. All of that may be true although so far I see no evidence of it. What I do see is a sensitive, creative, thoughtful and imaginative child on the brink of adolescence, who still believes in the myriad of possibilities that life might being, despite the trauma and heartache he has experienced. And you know what, I’ll offer myself some grace and say…….I’ve done a good job so far.