Chez Spud

I’m very late with this week’s Gallery entry, partly because I’m enjoying being mostly analogue this week but mostly because I really struggled with this week’s theme: “memories”. How to choose? Like every life mine is filled with huge highs and huge lows as I look back. There are precious moments, painful moments, days I’ll never forget, times I wish scrub out of my memory…how to choose just one from a lifetime of memories?

In the end I’ve plumped for a precious memory, and one which is totally personal to me. I told my mother-in-law this story recently, she was present when it happened but she has no recollection of it happening. I guess that just shows that what is one person’s precious memory is just another moment in time for someone else.

I found motherhood second time around rather difficult. Diggy was a very demanding, high needs baby right from the moment he was born and the combination of that plus a 15 month age gap nearly sucked me under. I hadn’t wanted another child and I felt an unhealthy amount of resentment that Bertie’s baby days were effectively cut short by the arrival of another baby, thus immediately promoting him to ‘big boy’ status. The early days of 2 under 2 were pretty dark and veered wildly between feelings of irrational resentment towards this helpless little baby and guilt at feeling so ‘unmotherly’ about the whole situation.

Diggy was a good few weeks old before my mother and late father-in-law were able to visit the new arrival and I was already swamped in the depths. Diggy cried. A lot. It was unbelievably wearing and he wouldn’t be put down, day or night, without howling. He wanted to held constantly and, ideally, by me. You get the picture.

Enter my lovely father-in-law, a man of careful words and not given to showy effusiveness. He always told it like it was. And this is my memory. I can remember handing him a bawling buddle of utter fury, screaming blue murder. But my father-in-law didn’t make any attempt to hand him back, he just kept holding him right up to his face so he could inspect him properly. And then he beamed (father-in-law, not the bawler), he beamed and he beamed and he looked thrilled to bits. And then he said, ‘Super little chap! He’s a SUPER little chap. Yes, he is…super little chap’. And he just repeated it for a while, all the time beaming and not looking at all put out by the yelling. It wasn’t a prediction, it wasn’t hyperbole on his part because he just wasn’t given that kind of nonsense…it was statement of fact.

His words meant so much to me, both at the time and now. I can remember feeling guilty at not sharing his feelings of my boy being a ‘super little chap’, but I do remember a huge wave of relief coming over me that everything would be OK because if my father-in-law thought Diggy was a ‘super little chap’ then he must be. And that, no matter that his mother was a bit adrift, Diggy would be just fine and would be a ‘super little chap’ because my father-in-law said so.

And Diggy IS a super little chap. My father-in-law was right and I wish he were here so I could tell him how much his words meant to me at the time, how they felt like someone throwing me a line. More than that, I wish he were here so he could see with his own eyes that his second grandchild is, indeed, a super little chap. Just as he said right at the start.

If you liked that, you might like this ...

• The Gallery: My Photography Resolution
• The Gallery: Phone Photo
• The Gallery…shoes
• The Gallery … 3 word gallery
• The Gallery…Dads