Dear Son,
I am afraid of spiders. I am afraid of cockroaches, mean looking dogs and dark alleys. I don’t like it when people shout, I feel lost a lot of the time and 8 times out of 10 I still need my mother to tell me it’s going to be OK.
I am what they call a grown up. I am also your mother. My feelings and my emotions are alive with continuity, not just the straight line I follow as I age and get my wits about the world, but the Richter scale of every single new emotion you feel and that I do too by parental osmosis.
Today, like every day, I saw your look. Your eyes wide open as that child pushed you away, her hand on your head, making you hit the side of the big wooden train in the middle of the playground. Today you just took it. You looked at her with all the questions a toddler could possibly have without yet having the words to express them. Your helplessness was palpable and so was mine. There were no tears, just a look I know I will see forever and again, even if it will be changed over the years by the tactics you will acquire to conceal the disappointment, the hurt, the rejection, and the realisation that we never fully learn how to deal with certain blows, we just manage our portfolio of pitfalls in an effort to fit in. And I could see all of your tomorrows. And it fucking gutted me.
We are the grown ups, the ones with the tools, the knowledge to frame 100 pushes against wooden trains, walls, corners and hope they can be used as part of the building blocks of well rounded, balanced personalities. We know these are unavoidable and necessary experiences. And yet all it takes is one push against our own to turn us into wounded lionesses, having to reach deep down into the memory bank of sensible approaches to quiet the primal rage, the blood red pain, the feeling that we have never been pushed before, never so hard, that this is all new to us too, that all we want to do is push back and push back hard. Whoever said we couldn’t go back to the beginning didn’t factor in the basic tenets of reproduction. Part of this parenthood malarkey is branching out into a new version of ourselves that gets to experience the world all over again just as our kids do for the first time and it’s not all blossoming daffodils and the first taste of ice cream.
Inside of us, you babies grew sheltered as we nurtured you. You formed limbs and a heart and we grew inches and another heart too. Now you’re seeing the world and experiencing both its overwhelming beauty and brutal cruelty, trying to decipher the wondrous and the hurtful and we are too. All too acutely, we are also aware that one day you may be on the other side of the fence, delivering the pushes, the blows, the knock outs. And again we will have to split into three, four or five because there will be times when you, the ones we call our very own beating hearts, will be absolute little shits to others and we will have to sieve your behaviour through our biased parental filters, teach you a lesson and spare a thought for the mother of the kid you pushed.
When I found out I was pregnant with you I was thrown into a vortex of emotions, mostly joy sandwiched between the gut-wrenching, adrenaline fuelled suspicion there was gonna be a lot more to this than I had bargained for. What I didn’t immediately grasp was that this was also life’s way of making me come face to face with all the bullets I had consciously or unconsciously dodged by running away from painful situations or awkwardly tackling subjects like my own experience of being bullied.
This time there is no way out, nowhere to hide. I cannot cover my ears, turn my attention to food, or play the class clown to drown out the noise. I am going to have to face the big fat ghosts of the past so I can be your role model and hold your hand, your growing brain and heart into making the right choices and facing your blows head on.
London, 24 March 2017
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