The night I found out I was expecting my firstborn, I was alone in an echoey house. Our plumber Nigel had pulled up the floors to replace pipes along the hall and I tiptoed out along balance beam boards, pulling the door shut behind me before driving to the big Tescos down the hill for a pregnancy test. It was late and the aisles were empty. Under bright store lights, I looked, without daring to hope, at the white box in my hand before taking it to the till. My nine months had already begun.
The night my son was finally born, after a long, strange labour — a story for another place — I was shaken and exhausted. I took a bath and watched my husband strip off his shirt and hold our baby to his chest. I saw him cry, smile and coo, and for a while I felt numb. My love came in with my milk, a rushing flood. All that night, I couldn’t sleep — I studied the baby’s sleeping face, overwhelmed by perfection.
I’ve been reading lately that the years you have all your children living at home are the happiest, the most precious. Sometimes, in the messy, noisy chaos, this can be hard to believe. I am deep in those years still, but this morning I woke in the owl-song darkness and I counted the months that remain before my firstborn leaves home.
There are nine of them.
Finding myself crying over the John Lewis Christmas advert before I had even drunk my coffee, I tried to explain its story to my husband and cried even harder. ‘There’s a moment’, I sobbed ‘where a Dad looks at his teenage boy and he sees him as a toddler, and then as the baby he used to be… I see that too, all of the time.’
Sometimes, when my seventeen year old is reading a book on the sofa, I study his face, overwhelmed by perfection. Behind his angular cheekbones, I see a smaller, squishier face, equally enthralled by a book, I see a sleepy toddler, curled up beside me on the pillow as I read him a bedtime story. Deep and low in my belly, where I once felt the fluttering of his first movements, I feel the twisting pain of love.
My nine months have already begun.
A small and perfect story. Sparely written, powerfully framed. Thank you, Laura.
When I was younger I was looking at photographs with my parents asking all the usual questions about when they were young. Suddenly dad said he didn’t want to look at any more because it was making him feel upset. At the time, in my unknowing youth, I was bemused that he should feel that way. Now when I gaze at pictures of my children as toddlers I am sad for what is lost. Those faces that are all at once the same and yet so different. Of course there are compensations and my adult children are funny, loving and wonderful company, however that exact moment in the JL ad completely got me and the tears fell. Enjoy your 9 months and celebrate when he flies your lovely nest because I am sure you have made a wonderful adult.