240 days on earth — Story Time

Between passes, you poke your fingers into the crochet holes in the blanket. First the pink section, then the blue. Throwing the ball becomes secondary to your attention – you seem to do it to please me and then return to the blanket. It is your blanket, it was given to you. If you wanted to pick it up and shred it to pieces, you could, I wouldn’t mind. If you told me that you never wanted to see it again, I’d help you lose it over the fence. But you can’t comprehend what this means yet, the ‘it being yours’.

You turn your head when you hear a wood pigeon, and get distracted by the new landscape revealed through this action. When your eyes return from the loud green beauty of our garden, you don’t notice the tennis ball by your toes. So you look at me expectantly. And as you wait you pound your chest with your tiny fists and smile. I roll the tennis ball back. You grasp it with your clever grasping hand. The ball should be too big for you to pick up, but you’ve mastered the right pressure at the right time and it looks as though your hand and the ball share velcro.

You use your hands like a bug its antennae. Feeling out, sizing up, inching forward into some wet and numerous pile of something. Before you discovered your index finger, your hand would cup like a paw and bat against new objects. Now you get a more sensitive picture of the world by pointing into things. Like this crisp and perfect leaf with the long serif stalk. I know that when you get around to putting that stalk into your mouth, it’ll make you gag. And then you’ll log that feature too, like you would the texture of cat’s fur.

Out here in the garden, I’m trying to drink you in. I’m trying to drink you in because today I’m afraid that one day you might die, and I won’t have noticed every milli-second of you. Afraid that I won’t have scrawled into my permanent record the way your hair has wings at eight months old. The way your miniature legs rest on the cushion when you breastfeed. The way your animal eyes search for me in the bedroom at night. It’s OK, I’m not being morbid. It’s because I watched a documentary last night, and it just stirred a few things.

It wasn’t just the fact that since filming, the man’s son had died. It’s also the fact that he had four beautiful sons in the first place. That struck me. That he could do all the things he did while having four sons. Yes he’s not the mother, I know his sacrifices would have been different. Less. But these facts don’t matter, I’ve been inspired. He says something like ‘I write and I write and I write and I don’t question why. If I were to question why, it would all fall apart.’

I question why.

In the documentary, the man tells a story of his father reading him Nabokov. And as he reads he unlocks the secrets of the text and he shines. In those moments the father is the best man he can be. When I invite art into our home, I feel like the best I can be. This lockdown has kept me occupied with nervous, surface family concerns. We’ve been bogged down with watching the news, I’ve wondered too much about the cleaning. But watching that documentary last night... I realise; I can look at the world with dreaming eyes and I can be your mother. You will want this for me, and it feels like an awakening. It feels like growing up in England, and stepping out into the sun.