I put great effort into being a mother - knowing it was the bedrock for my son's ability to win or lose in life. In summers I took him to LEGOLAND or Chessington Zoo each and every day - even I enjoyed the rides and the animals and the getting stuck in the rowing boats and going backwards while we laughed and laughed. Winter was a fun fest of Kings Rd with hot Cornish pasties - shopping up a storm in Toys R Us with his wrestler men. Golden Autumn was a bluster of long walks in wellies in Kew Gardens or Richmond Park collecting fauna while we put the world to rights or discussed creative writing projects. On rainy days we would paint canvasses that line the walls of our rented homes - and during times off school, holiday in America, Italy and explore the world together through travel and books and other people.
I have a photograph of Arthur sporting a Henry the Eighth hat that I bought him at the Tower of London - he was set to play Henry in his school play and I spent seventy pounds in that shop on a red velvet cape, a fake gold crown and the feather trimmed, jewelled hat. He had wanted some books on royalty and I berated him as we walked back to the car. He said that the only thing he cared about in life was what I thought of him. I stopped and turned to look at his beautiful little face, his rosy peachy cheeks and his golden custard coloured hair and immediately I stopped my lecture over money. This is it I thought ..... 'me and he' and one day he won't care so deeply about me like this .....so sod the seventy pounds I should just forget it and make the most of this moment.
......and so we ate strawberry ice cream on Tower Bridge in the hot sunshine and we talked about how he would be the best King that ever was. I had been the happiest I had ever been. We went back again to the Tower of London shop to buy him the books he had wanted. They sit on my shelf unread, but are hard copy memory of that day when I had been the happiest. Friendships came and went, as did men, but my angel was permanent. I often wondered about my older friends whose children had grown up and gone. Anne Hardy whose son Tom had made a splash in Hollywood warned me that losing your son to growing up was 'like a death and you would pine' - just as she did for her golden haired little boy even though he had become a God in America. I ignored my girlfriends - my life would be different - my son and I would stay close - because it had been just the two of us. The snow came in and built up without me noticing it until it had closed me into my icy little house of 'just me.' Was it an incident or a drop in temperature I had just not noticed? I don't know, but one day I felt it arrive - my aloneness. He has slowly turned away to focus on other things - on school friends and he was getting so tall, so big that he towered over me. Sometimes I looked at him and I knew he was going and my heart shot through with a sharp ache - but then he would laugh and grab me and laugh that laugh that made me tell myself not to be so silly, he was still a child. Yet each day I looked out of the windows of my eyes and saw the snow build up around the house of 'just me.' I wanted my own Mother - then - only why it makes you feel like that I don't know. I wanted to eat childhood biscuits and cry on the knee of my Mother. 'He's going Mummy - my sweet boy, my best friend ... he's going to just walk out of the door and leave me.' But she was dead - two years ago of cancer and we had not been on good terms when she had left me. I remembered my friend Pat who had told me to go see her when she was dying. I had gone and now it was all I had to cling to. Something about searching down a partner like hunting a fox scares me. I felt like a leaf falling and tumbling and then I remembered words - things I had read in the Bible. 'Never put anyone above God - love God with all your heart' - and I knew then I had put my beautiful son above God. I had loved him far more than God. It wasn't a command, but a protection! God would never leave me - he would not die or grow up, or become a man and walk out the door. God was right there beside me and always would be. I wrapped myself in a soft warm blanket I had bought for my recent birthday and I prayed that God would melt the cold white snow that had grown up and frozen me into my cold, future solitary home.
My son is going to walk out the door- to find love... to leave me. But I had the fires of the heavens to warm me and my house would not have snow around it ....my house would have a fire inside of it and it would be warming and it would burn brightly - a beacon for others to come inside it.
