From the heart
Becky Dickinson on the bittersweet rewards of seeing your children become adults
The waiter lights the candle and I gaze into the eyes of my dinner date: the bluegrey eyes with flecks of green that I’ve loved beyond measure for 16 years. At that moment, I think back to the first time we met, on a freezing cold January night. He arrived at almost midnight, ashen and silent, after a 48-hour labour that – fortunately – only one of us remembers. Sometimes it feels like yesterday. Sometimes it feels like a lifetime ago. Which in his case it was.
I was terrified of losing him, back then. And now, 16 years later, I’m terrified I’m losing him again, this man-boy, with the square shoulders I hardly recognise and the throaty voice and the bristles above his top lip. It’s often said about parenting that the days are long and the years are short. When my children were young, I so often craved a bit of me time – ahaircut, a cup of tea that didn’t go cold, an hour to myself. It never happened. And then, suddenly, it did. Baby Annabells were consigned to the orphanage of the loft, along with Lego and Julia Donaldson (I never could give those books away), replaced by a swirl of hormones and headphones. And now, as my son stomps towards adulthood, I wonder: when did all this happen? When did I take my eye off the game?
I remember his first day at nursery: he cried so violently that they called me to collect him after just one hour. I strapped him into the Maxi-Cosi and drove home in a fog of exhaustion and exasperation, wondering how I’d ever get any work done, ever get back to anything resembling ‘normal’ again. But also, secretly, pleased that he needed me so badly; loved me as much as I loved him.
For so long, he was this little boy with coils of hair and dinosaurs on his shoes who needed coaxing through the school gates. And yet, in the end it wasn’t long at all. A few birthday cakes later – varyingly dreadful attempts at a train, a treasure chest, Peppa Pig, an Angry Bird, a Pokemon (that one was quite good, actually) and Harry Potter – now he’s this permanently starving, nearly-shaving, door-shutting, teenage Gruffalo. He has breakouts and body odour, an irrepressible appetite and a bedroom that looks like a landfill site.
There are times when he drives me round the bend and back. But he’s also bloody brilliant. He can’t put his socks in the laundry basket, but he knows stuff about gluons and nuclear fusion that’s off the scale – well, off my scale anyway. Plus, he can reach stuff on top shelves, unscrew the lids of jars, and fix issues on my computer (although not without an obligatory eye-roll). He’s also hilarious. Like the other day, when he was foraging for something in the fridge and I told him to look above the cheese, to which he replied
