Navel Gazing

the kids are all grown up

I’ve been thinking about motherhood this week. Partly because of someone I am mentoring who is writing about it. Partly because my kids’ birthdays are coming up. The writer and I were chatting yesterday about when the umbilical cord stump comes away in the first two weeks of a baby’s life. As we were talking I reminisced about how horrified I had been when the stump had come off my daughter’s belly during a nappy change. As I was talking I realised that the force of my shock had to do with seeing that the stump was the last bit of my flesh to go, leaving my baby completely and utterly herself. Alone. I remember looking at the beautiful new belly button that had appeared in awe. This was it. She was a perfectly discrete little being, an individual with her own needs and desires, and from now on there would be only so much I could do for her. It was a terrifying realisation.

She will be twenty-seven next week; her younger brother will be twenty-five two days before that. Twenty-seven and twenty-five. Every year I feel this sense of bewilderment. I have photos of both my kids all around the house which I gaze at every day, missing them as I do now that they have left home. I should feel more disbelief at my daughter’s age that at my son’s, but in many ways she has remained more consistently herself since childhood than her brother has. Her looks have not changed dramatically, nor have her mannerisms. Whereas her brother has morphed from an elfin-faced, squeaky, bouncy little creature, all elbows and knees, into a deep-voiced, six-foot, chisel-jawed, serious young man. My daughter’s interests have not changed enormously either since childhood. Her life has always revolved around friends and social life in a grounded, real-world way, and her friends are still everything to her.

Her brother on the other hand was a quirky, attention-seeking little boy who lived in his imagination and thus was always creating some new plan, be it a zoo in our house - ‘Elephants in the garage! Seals in the pond!’ - or a method of flying from the roof of the garden shed on to the trampoline - ‘I can use umbrellas for wings!’ He used to make grand announcements at breakfast such as, ‘When I grow up I want to be a Nelf and work for Father Christmas’, or ‘I would like to be a Traditional Pirate. You know, the kind that sails a boat backwards and steals sugar.’ Now he is a Civil Servant and likes going to the theatre and classical music concerts at the weekend. I am sure he still giggles and has fun with friends, but with me he is rather more detached and sensible. So I suppose it’s only natural that on and around his birthday, I feel an indescribable surge of emotion as I remember his childhood. I also dwell on his birth. And the fact that I nearly lost him. Twice.

My husband likes to tease me when he sees me getting sentimental. ‘No one would believe that you were so worried about having a boy!’ It annoys me that he reminds me of this. But it’s true, I was. I was ridiculously anxious. I had had a girl first and it was worrying enough having a baby at all, but a boy? I knew nothing about boys! I had a sister and, apart from Dad, my family was predominantly female (and the females were predominantly dominant). Most of my education had been amongst girls only, and most of our teachers had been women. My close friends were women. The male friends I had made at university had drifted away pretty quickly once they had found partners, and in any case our friendships had been mainly about fun and hadn’t gone as deep as my female friendships. I didn’t understand what made my husband tick most of the time, so how was I going to be a mother to a boy?

As soon as my son was born, those anxieties vanished. The relief at having a healthy baby does wonderful things to a woman, however hard the pregnancy and birth have been. And my son’s emergence into the world had been fraught with difficulties. At sixteen weeks into the pregnancy, having only just arrived in France to start a new chapter of our lives with our little toddler daughter, I began to bleed heavily. I was whizzed into hospital where I had to learn a whole ton of vocabulary that definitely was not on the syllabus at university so that I could fathom what was happening. I had a minor placental abruption (basically a hole in the placenta) which meant I ran a high risk of miscarriage. It was a nerve-wracking time, until I had a scan which showed the risk was over.

The birth itself was induced and hideously painful as the epidural did not work, but this was nothing compared with the emotional pain that came two months later when I went to wake my tiny son from his nap and found him feverishly hot, completely floppy and unrouseable. Another rush to the hospital and more tests and scans - he had a nasty case of pyelonephritis. More vocabulary to learn, more existential fears clutching at my heart.

For three years he was on antibiotics and going for check-ups. I was always on the watch-out. So it is perhaps unsurprising that each birthday brings this tidal pull of emotion. As one of the French surgeons once said to me on reading my son’s notes, ‘Son existence est une chance inouie.’

Returning yesterday to the thoughts I had on seeing my daughter’s beautiful belly button appear beneath the crust of her cord stump, I realised that of course both my children’s births are this - an incredible stroke of luck. There has only ever been so much that I can do for them. But they have made it into their twenties as independent, strong adults, and this perhaps is the best gift of all.

Twenty-seven and twenty-five…

Happy birthdays, kiddos. (They’ll never read this…)