I press play again.
The voice is small. Yours, before it became
the one it is now. When you were years away from becoming this version. The
version where your wit has an excellent timing and heart has an impishness which
dismantles my argument and roasts me in the same breath.
It is a voice note on my phone, of a random evening, you telling me a story, because apparently, I didn’t know how. An entirely ordinary evening, the echo of which is now, enough to undo me.
It’s late. You are here, in the same house.
Happily, asleep. Nothing has happened.
I am tearing up anyway.
This is ridiculous. Having the person and
missing them. Looking at you across a room and also looking for you in a
photograph.
Seventeen.
I keep saying it, hoping it will become
less unreasonable.
You, meanwhile, are getting on with things.
Music, friends, school, whatever is currently occupying that beautiful brain of
yours.
Next year, university. We discuss it as a
place you would go to. After the discussion, I just ruminate on the times I
will walk past your room.
I have become very good at appearing
practical. There are things to research, dates to remember, plans to make. I
can do plans. Give me a spreadsheet and I am queen of efficiency.
Then night happens.
And I am back in the photos.
Not even looking for the big occasions.
Mostly, I want the unremarkable ones. Your face caught halfway through
something. A small expression I recognise in the face you have now. A video I
might have forgotten to take but didn’t. Thank god, for my
inability to put the phone away.
I don’t go in order. I jump about. Listen.
Enlarge. Replay. Stay somewhere longer than I intended.
The voice notes are the worst.
Or the best.
I haven’t decided.
And then, in daylight, there you are. Funny, sharp, kind. With an observation I wasn’t expecting and a face that tells me you’ve been waiting for me to catch up.
Being trolled by someone I made, continues
to be a privilege. An expensive one!.
You have an excellent taste in music, which
I am willing to take some credit for, well not all of it, obviously! I love
listening with you. I love being shown something rather than always being the
one doing the showing.
There is so much going on in your head. The
part that needs things to make sense and the part that wants to make something
of them. You can pick an idea apart, then find a completely unexpected way of
looking at it. A libra balance. But it may just be hereditary! Let’s not investigate.
But the thing I keep coming back to is your
kindness.
Not politeness. Not being agreeable. You
have very little patience for bullshit, and I hope you keep that. But let a
friend need you, let someone need help, and you’re already moving.
I love that these things coexist in you.
That you can see through people and still care about them. That being smart
hasn’t made you careless.
You are such good company.
That’s part of my problem, actually.
I haven’t only been raising you. I’ve been
getting to know you. And just when the conversations have become this
interesting, just when you can make me laugh like this, there is university,
standing about with its hands in its pockets.
This is what we wanted. And I still want it. I want you to find your people, your work, the things you haven’t yet thought to want. I want to hear about a day I wasn’t in.
Tonight, your little voice fills the room again. You are saying something very you.
Nobody told me that this will be the last
month you pronounce a word that way. Nobody told me to pay attention on a
perfectly unremarkable evening. I just made dinner. Put you in pyjamas. Answered
a few hundred questions and got one with it.
And years later, here I am, crying over the
evidence.
Sometimes I desperately miss the bedtime
stories, Gibran Alcocer and those haunting piano playlists playing softly while
I waited for you to drift off and fell asleep myself. I would live those nights
again. Just to tuck you in, have you small beside me, and nowhere else to be.
I think of autumn afternoons, the light touching everything and you watching. You love looking at a clouds and sky and the water, admiring them for ages before admitting that what you are looking at is change.
Perhaps that is what I am doing with you.
Looking at how lovely it all is. Wishing,
quietly and quite unreasonably, that it would stay.
Seventeen looks good on you.
The wit, the music, the wonderful workings
of your mind. Your kindness, which you would probably prefer I didn’t make a
fuss about. You are becoming someone I would want to know even if I hadn’t had
the extraordinary luck of being your mother.
And next year, you will go.
I can write that sentence, nonchalantly. I
am less nonchalant at reading it back.
There will be evenings when your room is
quiet and I won’t know what you had for dinner. Some excellent joke will have
happened elsewhere. I’ll hear about your day when you have time to tell me, and
I’ll try not to turn a perfectly normal phone call into a census.
You may need to be patient with me. But you
mustn’t make yourself smaller because I find this difficult.
I want you to go towards your life with
that curious mind and that good heart. I want there to be so much to tell me
that you forget where to begin.
I will be here. Always
Probably asking whether you’ve eaten, and
if you put sunscreen, when what I mean is that I miss having you within
shouting distance.
You are light, my darling. An absolute
blessing, with excellent comic timing.
Happy birthday.
You have made my life so much funnier. So
much fuller.
Love, Ma!
