15 hours ago
4
This picture of my mother, me and my eldest son, Theo, was taken the morning after he was born in May 2002, in University College Hospital, London.
There are a lot of things I love about it. I love the fact my mother is exquisitely dressed – she’s wearing her pearls! She always looked very elegant at this time in her life and enjoyed clothes (we bought that suit on a day out together). I love the composition too – our three dark heads, faces in profile and the way our three hands are aligned. I love the miracle of my son’s intricate little shell of an ear, the nose (his dad’s) and lips (mine) still visible now in his 23-year-old face.
There are other things you can’t see that I love about it too. My mother and father – long separated but still close – had raced each other in deadly earnest down the corridor and across the ward to get to our bedside first and meet their first grandchild; she won, of course. That makes me laugh, but also makes me feel fiercely loved. I also can’t quite see, but absolutely remember, the full body relief I felt when she arrived. I had an easy birth, but it was followed by a rough, restless night in a ward full of babies who tag-teamed their screaming. I recall staggering, leaking alarmingly, to the loo, and alternating between trying to feed this angry, hairy enigma and haggardly eyeballing a lifetime of responsibility in the odd moments he slept. Then there she was: the cavalry. This picture marks probably the first moment I fully exhaled in 12 hours.
I love the way we’re both looking, together, at this astonishing new arrival, like he’s a shared endeavour we’re undertaking. And he was: she was there for me and my partner constantly for the first year of Theo’s life, holding me up when I couldn’t cope (often – I’ve never cried so much) and celebrating when I could, spending hours on the phone to me when she wasn’t spending nights in the crappy spare bed in our flat. She changed trains, missed meetings and made excuses to stick around, even though, as that outfit hints, she had a big, serious job directing a research unit. She took the minor baby wrangling setbacks that felt like life and death to me (he won’t eat! He won’t sleep! He’s got a rash!) and reframed them as low-stakes shared puzzles to be tirelessly chatted through. In another one of my favourite pictures, sitting in my eyeline by my desk, she’s in her dressing gown after staying over, with a beaming Theo, maybe six months old, on her knee. She looks completely content: she enjoyed him intensely and helped me enjoy him too. With her around, I learned to see him as he was – a funny, delightful mystery and entirely himself.
My absolute favourite thing about this picture, though, is her arm around my shoulder. She died 18 months later; I still feel that arm, every day.
