Gratitude

Ted is 20 months old, give or take a few weeks. He’s a toddler now, not a baby, and we’re gradually starting to realise that we need to start pushing him a little with things like counting, shapes, colours and manners – this is where his real learning and development is kicking in. Nursery is a huge help, but we have plenty of work to do to make sure we’re turning him into a well-rounded individual, and everything that entails. No pressure.

Some of this development can be maddening: once he learned to shout “MORE!” (in combination with other favourites like “cheese” and “snacks”), life was briefly an endless loop of re-reading that week’s favourite book and constantly filling his cereal bowl with granola as he scattered it around the living room. Then there was his phase of lying on his back in puddles, or pulling entire rolls of toilet paper off the holder. But in general, it’s actually awe-inspiring looking at the leaps and bounds he’s made this year.

Quite often he’ll surprise me with his understanding of what I’m saying to him. There was the discovery that he knew the names of a whole bunch of animals that we’d never heard him say aloud (but could identify in books when prompted). The times he’d repeat a word or short phrase that Maddy or I said to one another (“lullaby” was a recent one). Or when he’ll quietly concentrate and paint a—reasonably—straight line on his canvas, or assemble a tower of bricks in the right order. Some of these moments are blink-and-you’ll-miss-it.

But what the last six months or so has really taught me is the two-way nature of this relationship. For all his development and growth, this little boy is so dependent on the two of us. Just last night he woke up crying at 10pm and I went into his room to pick him up and hold him till he fell back asleep. In that moment, sat in almost complete darkness (thanks, blackout blinds!), I realised just how dependent I am on him, too.

This year has been hard. We’ve been unable to get support and spent months without childcare. We’ve argued and snapped at each other after spending most of a year cooped up in the same house living a kind of domestic groundhog day. We’ve had to avoid seeing family and friends in often difficult and challenging circumstances. But when I sit in the twilight cradling my son against my chest, feeling his body soften and relax as he recognises my touch, even in the dark – I know that this is soothing me, too, and even healing some of that damage this year has done.

Sometimes as he’s about to fall asleep, he’ll lift up a little hand and his fingers will stroke my hair until they reach the crown of my head. “‘ead”, he says softly, reaching his hand back to his own hair to repeat the gesture. He reaches back to me again: “nose”, he tells me, returning his hand to his own features to press his nose in confirmation. Then all at once he’s asleep again while I smile in the dark, so grateful for the presence of this tiny gift in my life.

Kids can be absolutely exhausting. The experience so far of parenting has been the most difficult thing I’ve ever attempted in my life (and we’ve been lucky with it). Sometimes you feel despair, anger, depression and helplessness all in the same day. I keep finding myself envious of everyone going through all this without children, wondering what I could have achieved with all the extra time. But then I snap out of it when I see Ted giggling with pure, unbridled happiness as I pretend to be a dragon for the sixth time that morning, or when Maddy reads him a favourite story, or when his Grandad John appears on Facebook video chat with a new kazoo to amuse him with. This is what I’m doing all this for – the sense that for this little guy, we mean absolutely everything. And he’s keeping us going, too.