Chez Spud

Diggy, yesterday, just before the start of the nursery Nativity play. Thankfully he was a ‘shepherd’ just like Bertie was last year, no last minute fiddling around with pillow cases and tea towels for a costume for me. Oh no…just a bit of rummaging in the the dressing up box. Job done.

Today Bertie performed in his first school play, ‘The Bossy Christmas Fairy’, that well known seasonal story (?). He was a fairy light. It involved a reasonable amount of sitting on the stage without fidgeting, a lot of singing (loudly and with great enthusiasm) and some dancing. He loved it and took it very, very seriously and told me he’d practiced it ’900 times’.

Diggy also took it very seriously and knew all the words. Sometimes he even took his thumb out of his mouth so we actually had a chance of hearing them. He really got in to Bertie’s play today and went dressed as Superman (you never know) and joined in with all the songs, despite never having heard them, and danced like a pro. Mostly he laughed like a drain throughout the older children’s production of ‘A Midsummer’s Night Dream’ … well, what do you expect with a character called ‘Bottom’? It’s like a 3yo’s idea of comedy heaven.

I wept a bit of course, but mostly I felt very nostalgic for my own childhood productions and, in a second, I was up there as an angel, a ‘green star’, ‘Fanny’, ‘the Prince’, ‘Old Green Grasshopper’ ‘Belinda’ etc etc. I didn’t really get this kick of ‘the old days’ last year as the nursery play is a very low key affair. But the school play is a much more professional affair, on a stage, with two showings on the day…just as it was during my childhood.

I remembered, oh so keenly, how it felt to be on the stage and overexcited, unable resist the temptation to look out at the audience to spot my mother (mostly) and (oh oh oh hopefully!) my dad. Sometimes neither could make it due to work commitments and I tried so hard not to mind. I’d understood from when I was tiny that my parents couldn’t always be at school for ‘events’ since one was a teacher and the other a police officer. But, honestly, it kind of destroyed me to look out and them not be there. Or, very often, neither would be there for the afternoon performance but mostly one of them would make it for the evening performance. And I’d be totally, totally GIDDY for the evening performance. For me, I was only performing for those special one or, if I was lucky, two people. I love the applause and the adrenalin, but what I really craved was for my parents to be there and to enjoy it and be proud.  Right now, as I’m writing, I can remember the kick of pleasure I got looking out at the audience on the first night of an opera I sang in and seeing my mother in the audience. I knew my parents were due to come the following evening but, as a surprise, she’d come on the opening night…unable to resist seeing me sing in my first major opera role. Really, right now I can physically feel the JOLT of pleasure. I was 16 so, of course, I had to pretend I didn’t care and that it meant nothing to me…

I watched Bertie on the stage today, assured, confident, calm. But I saw him look out in to the darkness for a minute, slightly anxiously, searching for me. I’d told him I’d be there, and MrSpud for this evening’s performance. He couldn’t see me, although he knew I was there, I was too far back in the crowd and it was too dark anyway. But I watched his face and remembered how it felt. And I wondered how the years have skipped by so fast, how it has fast forwarded like this…so that now it’s ME sitting in the audience and not on the stage, giddy with excitement.

I remembered my First Holy Communion, age 7, standing around the back of the altar in a circle with the rest of my class and sneaking a look in to the congregation. There, at the front, were my parents and my Dad (a non Catholic) was kind of crouching down and not kneeling, head bowed, like everyone else. He risked a casual wave. I didn’t wave back of course, how could I? In church? Noooooooo. But I beamed, I’d had ‘my moment’. I was up there, on show, and my Dad was watching and was proud…and he’d waved. That’s all I needed.

Neither of my boys spotted me in the audience during their plays. It didn’t matter. I was there. They never doubted that I wasn’t, because I am always there. They didn’t see me, but I saw them and inside I was waving. Drowning in my tears. And waving.

Most Commented Posts

• To my boy on starting school…
• Happy Blogoversary to me…and a little giveaway
• Lurkers…DELURK!
• FINALLY…Secret 30…I am a Big…Fat…Liar…
• Fantastic competition: win a family trip to New York! And a giveaway…a cool camera