A few things about Arthur

Arthur is my Son. I still can’t believe he is mine even though he is now 2 and a half years old. Moreover, I can’t believe how little of him has been committed to celluloid, digital or the written word. You see he is a second child and the younger brother of a force of nature type sister, photographed, talked about, Miracle Mabel. Arthur was a bit of a surprise baby, skidding sideways into the world only 18 months after his sister's dramatic arrival and while his struggling parents were only just learning about life with 1 child never mind 2. Forget about finding time to record his coming, we only just found time to attend to his basic needs. The last weeks of my Pregnancy with Arthur were fraught with emotion. Scans had picked up an inexplicable anomaly in his heart which demanded a fair bit of scrutiny in a specialised cardiac unit and there was, until a fortnight before he was born, (when the anomaly was proclaimed low risk after all) a question mark over the wisdom of having him delivered in my local hospital becuse if a potential need for extreme Neo natal intensive care and such. During all of this, although I was very keen that he should be well on arrival, I was pretty detatched from the baby within and was instead obsessed with making the transition from only child to sibling easy on my first born. I spent nights beating my breast worrying that introducing another person to the family could only detract from my time with her and I was quite sickeningly convinced that it was all huge mistake and would destroy our family unit and turn the lovely first child place of completion and unity into a warzone littered with yet more shitty nappies and crying infants. Mabel was clingy, I cried a lot about it, internalised it and decided it was Arthur’s fault even before he was born. My midwife told me quite bluntly that I ought to try and address the clinginess before the birth and having to go into hospital if only because my tiny baby would need to be able to get near me if I intended to feed him and a limpet toddler was going to make it tricky. I tried to argue that I wouldn’t go into hospital but rather give birth like a cat in the cupboard under the stairs and not tell anyone, so I could just pop the baby by the fire in a basket and go about my business in the aftermath and the toddler would not notice any change. This was met with a stony tumbleweed silence followed by the sigh that told me that was absolutely not going to happen with my weak uterus and that resistance to medical intervention in my particular case would be a grotesquely selfish risk. And in the end sense and Linda the Midwife prevailed. On November 15th 2011, I left my toddler for the first ever time in the care of my sister Liberty and, Arthur was delivered by C section in a very calm operating theatre with Daddy and the afore mentioned diligent midwife in attendance. I watched the delivery, I chose to have no screens shielding me from the procedure, I wanted to witness his birth having been so removed from my first birth by the state of emergency, and since he was in good condition when they pulled him from me, he was handed directly to me, slime and blood and all and it was completely wonderful. I remember just saying over and over again, “He’s huge, He’s huge” he was 7lb 4oz. During his first hours I fed him and fed him and fed him, he barely came up for air, and they put us in a room together and kept leaving me alone with him and I couldn’t quite believe it. The first time I had a baby it was days until I was able to touch her without help. And so this was extraordinary to me. And yet Arthur was a stranger in my life. An alien. In my first pregnancy, I had named my daughter at 20 weeks and I saw her all the time in my minds eye, pictured her in her little outfits, and invested in her the personality I imagined she would have and although she arrived in a scramble, this imagined character was what I focused on to manage the separation from her that came with her prematurity. I at least had ownership of her imagined personality even if only in my mind and I felt I knew her and was bonded immediately. But none of this with Arthur, we had known him by another name during the pregnancy and then when he was born it just wasn’t his name, I had to call him Arthur, it was the only name that fit him. And then following the early feeding frenzy, he dozed off, sated and demanded almost nothing from me for the first 3 days of his life which were spent in a room in the hospital sometimes receiving visitors but often just we two. I remember pacing around his little Perspex crib looking at him and wondering if I had imagined him coming from me, he didn’t look like anyone I knew and he didn’t seem all that needy. And then on the fourth day I took him home and as I had said I would do, I parked him by candle light in the corner or the fire lit room and every 3 hours I fed him and other than that in the main he was pretty easy to manage. I reveled in this time being undocumented and unencumbered by medicine, it turned out the heart anomaly was present but super minor and so we just got on with the business of having a normal and very lovely baby boy to get to know gradually. And I did bond with him, more as he became more wakeful week by week and he was sunny and smiley and biddable and tolerant of toddler fingers up his nose and the sharing of her blueberry oatcakes with him at only a few weeks old. Honestly though, not having documented it all, there is so little I can really remember about this time in my life. There is sharp focus on his arrival in my mind and the early days were heady and full of wonder as well as sheer terror at having bitten off more than was chewable and time when first left alone with both my children when whole days were spent sitting on the living room floor crying and just trying to contain the mess while waiting for help to come but, as is often the way when managing multiple small people, a vacum crept up on me and gobbled about a year of my life in one hungry mouthful. And suddenly, somehow he was sitting up, chuckling, eating lumps of cheese, growing teeth ( a full set of 20 between 6 months and a year), pulling, up on furniture, crawling, making friends and stealing hearts and I felt like he was self motivated and self taught, and then we were presented with a chance to move to the British Virgin Islands and we took it. Before moving we decided to have a huge Baptism for Arthur in September, and on a surprisingly sunny day we had him dunked in a river in a Dorset field in the shadow of a 16th century thatched chapel and we roasted a whole sheep for lunch and sang Jerusalem on the riverbank with the entire parish and our family and I made a very hazy speech about how Arthur’s arrival in our little family was like the arrival of a sunny morning after a long night. And it was. And he was and is like the very sun. I meant it at the time but I mean it more as he gets bigger and sunnier. His first birthday was spent moving out of our beloved cottage in Dorset and saying goodbye to our many supportive and loving friends in the November drizzle. I cried more that day than the day he was born, as much as I love change, it makes me a bit hysterical but I also remember feeling guilty for allowing his birthday to be consumed by the chaos. Thank god for my amazing friend Lucy who invited all our friends over for lunch and made Arthur his own cake with his name on it and we did celebrate him, even though he threw up his lunch all over me and his friends. And we departed Dorset upon a wave of nausea and Arthur vomited for 3 days all the way to Antigua. And he just had to cope, we didn’t have time for fussing about it too much and he was so good about the whole thing. And so it was we arrived in BVI with a Toddling Mabel and a crawling, busy 1 year old Arthur and again I was thrust into a tailspin of sorting shit out with the little people in tow. I suppose the point of all this ramble is to articulate that I recognise that Arthur was a boy who happened while I was busy doing stuff. But like a potato vine he has prospered with very little help and Arthur has come into bloom in the BVI. He loves the sunshine and his ginger bread hair is bleached blonde. He is a sucker for a boat, it was his first word, and we often just pass time watching boats on the Francis Drake Chanel from our Balcony. He is frighteningly verbose and has a vocabulary to rival children twice his age. He has lovely manners and a way with all people, and chats happily with interested adults and children alike . He has a team of colourful Caribbean women who care for him at his nursery, he came home at Christmas singing the calypso version of away in a manger in a big, gravelly, copied from somebody very West Indian voice and when he is cross with me these days he will shake his head and tell me “Oh Jesus Mummy” in his broadest Dominican accent with a totally straight face. There is something about Arthur that makes strangers want to stop and watch him. He’s very engaging and is very engaged with the world around him. When you speak to him he responds with unnerving sharpness. He has gone through many standard boy phases of obsession including Tractors, Diggers, Aeroplanes, Dinosaurs. At the time of writing, the thing is Fire Men and all things Fire Man related. He is constantly looking for an imaginary pole to slide down, a door frame, a table umbrella, a leg of a passing stranger (yes he has done this) all the while proclaiming “Fireman Arthur to the Rescue, Make Way, Here I am, Nee Naw” It’s adorable. And he sings all the time. His whole life is narrated in song, he likes to sing what he is doing while he is doing it to the tune of the farmer in the dell. “I am going to the loo, I want to have a poo, ee eye adio, I did it in my pants” And now I have managed to dedicate an entire paragraph to Arthur alone without intrusion of his sister but it is impossible to talk about Arthur for long without talking about Mabel because they are as essential to each other as night is to day. Following all my anxiety about his coming equalling the apocalypse of her happiness, the very opposite has been the case. He has enhanced every part of her life. From the first moment she stumbled across the hospital bed to meet him almost smothering him with her sticky kisses, to the time she announced that she wanted to move into his room with him. Then into the present where they love sharing a bedroom and indeed they share everything with almost no jealousy beyond the obvious minor spats about who gets to use the spoon with the giraffe handle today and similar, they are yin and yang, very different and yet unable to do without each other. Recently the two of them had some sort of animalistic angry set to, and I pulled them apart and set about discussing the rules of handling one another with them and I told them, “You are brother and sister, you don’t hurt each other, you are what each other has when there is nothing else and you will love each other and treat each other well” and although moments later they were cuffing and biting each other again and I was rolling my eyes, I was glad to have said this aloud for my own benefit. They did not need me to say it because it is a giventhing, but it thrills me to feel the enveloping certainty that as long as they have each other they have someone who loves them implicitly and in the most real and raw way. This alone is the greatest gift I have ever given myself and I know that each other is the best gift I will ever give either of them. And So Arthur is essential to the family picture. I can’t imagine how we managed before we had him and I want to freeze in time his last bit of babyhood and drink it in so I can’t ever forget it but equally then to see into the future and know what an awesome Son and Brother and Friend and Partner he will become. Watch out world, I've got a good feeling about this boy.