Categories: uncategorized
Date: 25 December 2006 17:54:10
I was glad.
At this time of year the verses from Isaiah "to us a child is born, to us a son is given" are bandied around a lot. I know what they're about, but they inevitably put me in mind of the day six years ago when my son was "given" to me. He was born a week before, but he and his mother spent seven days in hospital before coming home on Christmas Eve. (No, there was nothing seriously wrong, just a touch of jaundice and the desire to make the most of the available advice on breastfeeding). For those first days my son was almost like a hobby - a thing of a couple of hours a day, fitted around the rest of life. I did spend enough time in the ward to have a Bob the Builder video imprinted on my brain (yes, it was that year), but the scales were still balanced somewhere roughly in the middle ground. Then on Christmas Eve my family came home and the scales went, well, off the scale. My life shrunk down until it became that little bundle of joy and screams, and nothing else. That night we were awake every hour. We fed him and then tried changing him, burping him, rocking him.... all the things that a new parent (i.e. someone who hasn't a clue what they're doing) tries. Nothing worked. I remember at something like 3 in the morning turning to Jedburgh and listing what we'd tried and agreeing that at least we knew it couldn't be hunger cos he'd just stuffed his face with milk not long since. But we thought we may as well try again and, sure enough, he was ravenous. That process of confidently ruling something out as the problem only to find that, sure enough, we were wrong and the problem was exactly the very thing we'd ruled out, well, that seems to sum up my approach/experience of child-rearing.
Somehow we got through the night - bags under our eyes the size of airships, but I remained over the moon at this beautiful bag of life in my arms. At the service that morning the pastor asked who had been up as early as 7. Then he asked who'd been up at 6. Then at 5. Then 4. We stuck our hands up each time and I think by 5 or 4 we were the only ones with hands up. Whereupon everyone noticed that we were there, with the baby that they all knew was due, but not all expected it to be there on Christmas morning. What a lovely feeling to have the whole church smiling at our little one and giving us a virtual hug. But the warm feeling that engendered was, and is still, nothing compared to the joy at seeing that child arrive, and grow. One of the wonders of parenthood for me has been being able to look at Cambuslang as he his now, marvel at that, while also seeing kaleidoscopically, his 5-year old self, and his 4-year old self and all the earlier selves right back to that first "proper" (for me) night. I can see them all imprinted one on top of the other and if one picture annoys (he's not perfect all the time, funnily enough) then most of the other pictures make up for it and show the many good sides that put the few bad sides into perspective. I could do with seeing other people that way too....