It’s ten years, almost to the day when our son was born. He was the miracle baby that my wife and I prayed for at the Kotel (Western Wall) in Jerusalem when we were there on our honeymoon. It took a little work to create him for various reasons that I won’t go into here as it’s not appropriate to do so, but eventually he arrived. I will never forget the prayer I made at the Kotel where I asked the Eternal One to grant us the joy of offspring, where I pleaded with Eternal One to do for us the miracle that He did for Abraham and Sarah. I didn’t think at that time that the Eternal One would do the same miracle, the miracle He did for Abraham and Sarah, twice in history, but He did.
When he arrived I announced his arrival on this blog by stating that we had been delivered of some ‘wondrous turbulence’ and that is exactly what parenting has been like, wonderful but turbulent. There’s nothing on this earth that is like being a parent it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done even though at times it can be incredibly difficult. It’s been so difficult in fact that at some times I’ve wondered whether parenting is more challenging than doing some of the jobs I’ve done in the past such as being a public disorder photographer at events like the Poll Tax riot, the Wapping Dispute and various other bits of aggro. At least once in the last decade I’ve thought that being smacked in the chest by a police baton, which has happened to me, might be preferable to some of the stuff we’ve dealt with as parents. But, seeing our child grow, to be happy and healthy and to see him reach various milestones such as when he ceased covering a pub floor with scattered bits of salad or letting go of his hand for his first day at nursery or primary school is better even than getting an image on the front page of the Sunday Times. Last weekend we had another milestone as he stood nicely and quietly with my wife on the Bimah at the front of the synagogue whilst my wife read from the Torah in honour of the anniversary of her mother’s death. I was and will continue to be very proud of him.
Parenting has been both what we expected and also not at all what we expected. My wife and I didn’t expect to have to have a policy, when he was six, of having to always be tooled up with two way radios when we went out which we used for child apprehending purposes just in case he did one of his random bolts in for example a supermarket. This was because the moment we let go of his hand to get something off of a shelf he would run away to both explore and to play the ‘lets get Mummy and Daddy to chase me’ game. That sort of stuff might have been a game for him but for a while it caused us intense worry.
Being mid life parents we sometimes worried that we were knackered all the time because we were mid life parents but we’ve talked to other younger parents and they assured us that this is relatively normal, many other parents are also knackered all the time. Parenting is hard but probably the best and most important thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.
There’s been some incredibly funny things we’ve had to deal with that are worth recounting, even though they were not funny for us at the time. There was the time he decided to paint himself with coal in order to better represent being Cinderella (he’s always adored dressing up and playing in character). Then there was the, thankfully temporary, habit he had of stealing other kids shoes at playgroup which got so bad at one point that as soon as he entered the room all the other parents quite obviously hid their own children’s shoes.
Because he grew up surrounded by CCTV because of our fears of crime and our experience of living in very crime riddled environments (we also monitored his cot on CCTV from day one because I had a friend whose baby died from cot death and for that reason neither of us wanted to take our eyes off him for even one moment when he was tiny) he later became quite early on a master of CCTV evasion. He got so good at that evasion that when he was four I took him to a local pub where he traversed the length of the pub garden to get to the play equipment by dodging around the bushes. Another customer asked me why he was doing that and I replied that he was attempting to avoid the pub’s CCTV eliciting the response from the customer ‘he’s either going to end up being a burglar or a member of special forces’.
There was also the time when was much smaller when he got hold of one of our two way radios and changed the channel and caused a significant amount of communications disturbance to some local ‘crane operations’. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must have been for a tower crane operator to suddenly have our then toddler child jibber jabbering in their ears whilst trying to do some difficult lift of building materials. However I’m also incredibly proud of the fact that our child learned to use a radio with a push to talk button way before he encountered a mobile phone. On that note, also when he was small, I recall driving around town and suddenly the CB radio burst into life with our child repeatedly saying ‘Daddy on the radio please’ on Channel 19 the calling channel to the great amusement of all the lorry drivers on the same channel.
It’s not all been plain sailing some of the stuff we’ve dealt with has been extremely difficult. The Covid lockdown really did adversely affect his social skills and some of our time since things opened up have been trying to repair the damage that lockdown did to him. He’s much better now and has an almost completely normal relationship with his school friends and stuff like that although he’s still a bit frightened of crowds. But even there he’s got better and took part in the Young Voices choir event in Birmingham recently and performed magnificently. My wife and I were both worried that he wouldn’t be able to cope being among thousands of other children and were concerned that he would bolt and hide but he didn’t. He did exceptionally well. He also went through a phase where at after school activities he would not listen to instructions which is why he got banned by the organisers from both trampolining and indoor climbing centres a few years back. However now he’s got a whole lot more sensible and understands that if he doesn’t do as he’s told then he doesn’t get to do the activity that he likes.
Our child has also had losses that must have affected him badly. He lost both his two remaining grandparents in quick succession and also lost due to a heart attack his favourite baby sitter. The issue of the loss of the baby sitter still rankles with me as it was at the start of Covid and I believe that she could have been saved had not the ambulance staff not spent an excessive amount of time getting into biohazard suits before they made the attempt to treat her.
He loves dancing and has signed up for cheerleading at a local community centre and he absolutely loves it. He comes out of the venue supremely enthused about what he’s done there and it’s a joy to see him so excited about his dancing. He loves performing for an audience like with his dancing and his singing and I see those skills and enthusiasms being useful for him in the future.
Our child has turned out to be literate and extremely creative and nearly every part of our walls is now covered by his artwork and scattered around the house are the many books that he is reading. It’s an absolute joy to see him sitting reading or doing his drawing and painting and we swell with pride when his teachers tell us he’s had a good day or done good work. He’s also shown a brilliant inherent ability to work with fabric. He’ll make his own dressing up outfits and is becoming extremely adept with a needle and thread. I was taught needlework at school but his abilities in this area are so far and away better than mine. If nothing else he can go in to the coat trade because people will always need coats.
The only disadvantages I’ve found in being mid life parents are the negative attitudes of others especially other parents. They appear to see us as dinosaurs transplanted to the modern world but that’s their view and I don’t let it bother me. Things have definitely changed since I grew up as when I was a child sometimes for the worse but other times for the better. We have tried to give our child the same freedoms that we had but it’s not the done thing these days the world is different and far more unsafe. However some things are without doubt better, unlike kids of my generation he will not be left to traverse puberty with no support or information or be reliant on inaccurate playground gossip to be ‘informed’.
There is however a major advantage of being mid life parents and that’s an immunity to bullshit. My wife and I have lived through a whole host of different social, educational and childcare fads including, in my case, Plowdenism which saw teaching grammar as ‘oppressive’ and harmful to children’s expression. Our lifetimes of knowledge meant that we were well placed to challenge stuff from schools that we didn’t agree with whether it be gender identity nonsense or dishonest teaching about certain religious paths. We’ve also been able to bring our own educational experiences, both positive and negative, out when dealing with teachers and schools. We do seem to ask more questions about how our child is being educated and be less blindly accepting of what teachers say to us than some of the other younger parents do. In addition we’ve shocked some teachers when they’ve realised that we were educated in an environment that would be totally alien to them such as the selective schooling and O levels which were a factor in our young lives. We’ve also managed to acquire a 3000 volume library in our home which is a damned sight better than some parents have been able to manage. I was appalled to hear from a Health Visitor that most homes now contain less than ten books.
Our child has been described by teachers and other child care professionals as ‘very individual’ and we’ve accepted that and run with it. One thing we’ve learned over the years is that you have to work with your child’s personality rather than against it. If your child is bookish and creative then it’s pointless trying to point them in the direction of Rugby or other sports and vice versa. As regarding his ‘difference’ I don’t see how our child could be anything other than ‘different’ as both my wife and I have in our earlier lives also been described as ‘eccentrics’. We comfort ourselves that at least he isn’t talking to or building an imaginary world around empty drink cans with faces painted on them as I did when I was a child.
We also learned that whilst baby and childcare books are helpful they cannot encompass everything and sometimes you have to improvise. Baby books are guidance not commandments and every child is different. I distinctly remember when we were out, needed to prepare a bottle but had forgotten to bring the steriliser and therefore had to run the bottle and the teat under the hot tap for a few minutes to clean it. It freaked us out having to do that but no harm came of it. We learned from that experience and mostly we learned that sometimes with parenting you can occasionally cut corners without too much of an issue.
Do I have any regrets about being a parent when many people might be thinking of grandchildren? No not one. Well maybe just one. I wish I’d met my wife earlier in life so I could have given her seven babies and not just the one. Children are an absolute joy even when it might not seem like that at the time when we have been stressed beyond belief.
It’s the honour of my entire life, better than anything I’ve ever done or anything that I’ve ever achieved to make my wife a mother. My wife is a fabulous mother and every day I say ‘Baruch Hashem’ (bless the Holy Name) for who she is and what’s she’s done. I often tell her that the Eternal One couldn’t have found a better woman for me to be a parent with. Neither of us had thought of being parents until we got together and we realised that whilst we might not have wanted to be parents with some of our previous partners, we wanted to be parents together. I will always remember the pride on my wife’s face when we had his circumcision party in Surrey and her speech which contained the words ‘at least I didn’t have to wait until I was in my 90’s to have a baby like the biblical Sarah did’. My wife has done amazingly and often in quite difficult circumstances she is truly an Eshet Chayil or ‘woman of valour’ whose worth is truly above rubies. Babies do change you and I also remember, when our child was about a year old, her laughing at an article in an Orthodox parenting site which asked ‘does your life change after your tenth child’ and her saying to nobody in particular, ‘not as much as when you have your first’.
Parenting is truly in my view the best thing anyone could do. You learn stuff about the world and about yourself in ways that you wouldn’t never had learned if you are not blessed with offspring. Parenting is a rollercoaster with no brakes but it is a ride well worth getting on. My wife and I have not had a proper ‘date night’ together in four years but the sacrifice has all been worth it.
Finally I’m inordinately proud of my child. I’m proud of what he has achieved, proud of the difficulties he’s overcome, proud of how he’s doing in school and in his non-school activities. He was a beautiful baby and is now a beautiful child. He’s turning out to be a mensch and not a lobbus if you know what I mean and you know a little British Yiddish. He’s maturing into a wonderful, creative and talented young man who would likely be an asset to any tailoring or dressmaking business so good is he with cloth. The turbulence he has brought to our lives has truly been wonderful and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I thank the Eternal One, my wife and all those whose medical and other assistance helped us get to this point.