Mothers and sons 2

Yesterday was blissful. I only realised how blissful, when I woke up last night and realised I was laughing in my dreams. I like the idea of laughter in the dark. I fell in love with my husband for any number of reasons - one of them a habit of laughing in his sleep. (I presumed, of course, that he was not laughing at me.) I had not realised, I could snatch the habit and make it mine.

Daffodils die back. You think: "Shame, glory gone." Then, tulips arrive: "Ta-da". Trees applaud with branches of budding leaves and Spring moves on. I spent a spring yesterday with my six-year-old. Him and me. Just him and me. Innocent in gardens. We watched the sea spill down stone stairs, chased each other through avenues of pink blushed blossom and cast coin wishes. Northumberland is full of castles. He wants to live in one. He told out his wish, loud and proud and made a listening stranger laugh. As for me, I cannot tell my wish. The day moved on; we plunged back into another Eden, took a jar and microscope and watched insects turn to monsters. Naturally, we tamed them and set them free.

Later, a strange thing happened. The garden at my cottage has a secret, dappled corner where a stone bench rests its tired back against a wall. Purple flowering aubretia spills over the wall down to the moss matted, wooden seat. A small plaque with an engraving is embedded in the bench: "The kiss of the sun for pardon, the song of the birds for mirth. One is nearer God's heart in a garden, Than anywhere else on earth." The man who created our beautiful cottage garden has been dead for four years. I liked him extremely. I more than liked him. The plaque was in his mother's garden; when she died, he found a place for it in his. It reminds me of him and I like to be reminded. Last night, I looked out of the kitchen window of this rented house. I was standing by the sink. I try not to stand by the sink. I find standing by the sink attracts the washing up. I have lived here 10 weeks. Yesterday, I looked up to see a small stone birdbath standing in the garden. On the side of the bowl, I could make out the faint tracery of letters: "The kiss of the sun...." Ever felt you were meant to be some place?

Blonde bombshell

I was reading the boys a bedtime story and my six-year-old starts combing through my hair with his fingers. It reminds me that I haven't checked for nits for a while and I really should. Check the children that is, not me. If I get nits, I am shooting myself. He says: "Mummy, you have blonde bits in your hair like I do." I think this unlikely. I am the dullest and most resolute of brunettes. He pulls my hair closer to his eyes as if he was thinking of buying it. "A sort of grey blonde." I know my hair is now threaded with grey. I just pretend not to.

There is an advantage in having children late in life aside from an impressive number of City Breaks in your thirties; people presume you are younger than you are. I have a baby. That means I could be anything between a clueless 13 and an ambitious 47ish.(Older, if I was desperate or deluded.) Ofcourse, I do not have spots and I do have grey hair, apparent even to juveniles. That rules me out as a teenage mother then. According to a photo, a friend sent me this week, when I smile I also have score marks down from my eyes, stretching diagonally across my cheeks out to my ears. I was not impressed. Who sends their friend a photo of herself looking like her granny? I had noticed the lines criss-crossing my face when I got up in the morning but I hoped they shook themselves out after a few hours. They do not shake themselves out.

I can no longer fool myself. Nobody in their right minds would think I was in my twenties. I am clinging onto the semblance of thirty-something looks and rapidly losing my grip. The last time I went to London, the only men to eye me up were in their sixties. When did that happen? When did I turn into eye-candy for granddads? I am old. My children have started to notice. That is how old I am.

Holiday blues

I have gone away and left everyone behind. It is just me for a week and I am guilt-wracked and tense about the whole idea of a holiday on my own. Not so guilty that I did not get on the plane though. It has been such a long time since it was just me that I do not know if I can do it any more. What if I am really bad company?

I left my husband a note.

Be patient with the children
Be more patient than I am with the children
Remember the six-year-old likes peas, hates beans
Remember the four-year-old hates peas, likes beans
Both eat raw carrots but hate boiled carrots
Do not try to make them eat boiled carrots
Remember the six-year-old needs a Comic Relief red nose for school on Friday
If the six-year-old has a red nose, the four-year-old will want one
Best get the baby one so she does not feel left out
Remember to ring my mother at least once while I am away
Remember to hear the baby if she cries at night
Remember the binmen come on Tuesdays
Remember you love me.

Back soon.

A Table Monarch

"When I'm king," said my four-year-old tonight, fork in hand, pasta sauce on face, "everyone will wear pants on their head. Apart from Granny. I love Granny."

Daddy's home

My husband is back. This is a good thing because I get to point the children at him and say: "Look children, daddy is back. Mummy is just going for a bath. I'll be out in three days." We have only had one row so far because he made us late for a children's party. We are driving along; he is behind the wheel and I am wrapping the fleecey, black, baa-lamb puppet present in paper that says "Merry Christmas". My husband has been home for three hours. I am not in a good mood. I would go so far as to say, I am in a bad mood. Snipping off a dangling piece of cellotape, I said: "This party was really important to the boys. I really did not want us to be late for it but you had to take them out. You couldn't just let them play for half an hour and get them ready. If I had been on my own with them, we would not be late." My husband psshawed (if that's a word, he made that sort of clapped out steam engine sound anyway) and snarled: "That's outrageous." All this, by the way, in glorious sunshine, driving too fast along country roads which are too narrow . My six-year-old spoke up for sanity in the back. "Daddy's been away for a long time Mummy. He's still getting used to it. OK?" I hate the way men make you feel so unreasonable.

Today

This cash for honours thing is gaining currency. As BBC Radio 4's Today programme mumbled on, my four-year-old lifted his bed-haired head from his rice krispies to ask: "Is Tony Blair going to prison?". Milk dripped from his spoon as he waited for my answer. "No," I said, "I very much doubt it." Difficult to judge which way my four-year-old would jump if breakfast focus push came to infant ballot but his brother is firmly behind TB. Already on his muffin, my six-year-old chimed in: "I think Prime Ministers should be allowed to do what they want." That's TB and a six-year-old then.

Smile for the camera

The album which keeps my baby photographs is worn and grimy with the years - a bit like me. It is a pale and padded plastic blue with white buttons; held whole with tape that has begun to curl and a sorry silk tassel whose burlesque days are through. When you open it, joints creak and it sighs a little. The inside cover, once virgin cream, is now a rusting and unpleasant brown, as if one day, I snatched it from a hearth where it was smouldering.

Many of its flattened subjects hold me tight in there and once loved me. Some still do. But others I could not keep by me: a father, two grandmothers, godmother, godfather, a curly-haired aunty and her cross-legged son. The blood list lost, goes on. Then, they were mine and I clutched their fingers. Now, they are mine only in memories and an album - for as long as they smile "Cheese" and the page is open.

I think the album sad, though it show-cases a content and lace-dressed child. Perhaps the thought that these days have come and gone, arrives too soon for me. On the very first page, a suited man relaxes, leaning against the rails on the windy prom at Blackpool; a cigarette between his fingers. You can only lean so long. Look again, he is sitting down on a wooden bench, my mother's leather handbag and a parcel beside him. The snaps are of my father who should perhaps have tossed the cigarette into the cold black and white sea behind him. My mother tells me I was six weeks old when she left with him for three or four days in Blackpool. Her husband - the first - my brand new father, had not confessed to coughing blood but pleaded for a seaside break. "I didn't want to leave you," she tells me, "but I knew he wasn't well and so we went."

One year and eight snap-filled pages later, the cigarette has quite gone out, the coughing stopped and there is no more suited man. Instead, another trip this time to Ireland; the camera shutter closes on a young matron in a tilted, black straw hat with her solemn fat-faced babe. My widow-weeded mother holds me forever in her arms in front of roses, river, bridge and church. He may be gone but I am her victory over death, a triumph in pantaloons and bonnet. I think she may be sad then. I'm sure she is, as she carries me around with her, a memory of him, until, in the way of things, she meets another kindly father man, marries him and smiles again.

Here is the confusion. I opened the album up because twice lately, I have had the sensation as I looked at my own daughter, that I was looking at myself. I never felt that with the boys. My sons are my lions; terrorsome and grand. See how they go; march and strut and shout. But the other day, as I gazed at my baby standing proud in the grass, deciding should she walk or not, I felt: "That's me. I'm looking at myself". Again today, I held her in my arms at the bathroom sink, glanced up at the mirror and thought again: "That baby in my arms. That's me." So I dug out this relic of the past to see if my baby-self had escaped her black sugar-paper prison. But no, she was still there, safe in her mother's arms.

Picking up the pieces

I broke my six-year-old's favorite egg cup. This was not good. I was trying really hard at breakfast. I had scrambled some eggs for one of them, boiled an egg for another, made porridge on request, fed the baby, spread three different flavour jams (pear and raspberry, raspberry and strawberry) in stripes on one piece of bread. I had not laid down silent on the crumb-strewn floor. I remained upright and mobile at all times. Then I broke the egg cup. Technically, the baby broke it, but really it was me because I said to my eldest: "She'll be fine with it, don't be silly" when she grabbed it and he wanted to take it back from her. She looked straight into my eyes to thank me for my trust in her, slowly opened her porridgy fingers and dropped it. The cup, last year's gift from the Easter Bunny, smashed leaving a yellow spotted cheetah holding nothing but disappointment in his arms. My six-year-old gulped, he folded his arms together, laid them on the table and buried his head in them. The despair I think was half because of the egg-cup and half because of me. My four-year-old came over. He laid a consoling little hand on his brother's heaving back. "Never mind," he said, "you can share my lion."