Silencing the past. Rewriting this narrative.

I didn’t have the happiest childhood. My childhood was full of heart break and divorce and I have struggled with abandonment issues for most of my life. In fact, it wasn’t until I met this wonderful husband of mine that I actually learnt to trust that someone who loved me, would stick around by choice.

I don’t want to write a feel sorry for me post, it’s not about that at all. Just today I realised that my son is probably older than I was when my parents got divorced. I think about my earliest memory, it’s a sad one. And I’m aware that at almost 4, Oden is starting to build memories that he could possibly carry with him forever.

I sit in the room and I hear him, playing in his room, on his own. Singing. He sings made up songs. His singing voice is just like mine, terrible. But that doesn’t stop me and it certainly doesn’t stop this little boy.

There is no sound that makes me happier than hearing him sing made up words to made up songs. He is always laughing. He is always singing. He is such a happy child.

I didn’t want children for almost all of my life. Until I wanted Oden with every part of me and then I was told it wouldn’t happen and suddenly, by some sort of miracle, there he was. I don’t want him to ever feel like he wasn’t wanted. I wanted this child more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

But the memories, and the pain of my own childhood and most of my life made me wary of bringing someone into a world full or problems and drama and fire. I didn’t want a child to grow up feeling so many of the things I felt. I was too scared that somehow, history would repeat itself and I would damage him. Truth is, I probably will anyway but for now, I hear this child sing and I feel like against the odds, we have managed to get these first years right.

A child who says goodbye in the morning with hardly a backward glance, so confident knowing that at the end of the day, we will be back. A child who sleeps so soundly, in his own bed, all night, knowing that when he wakes up, we will be there. A child who leaps without questioning if we will catch him. Who looks at me like he couldn’t question my love even if he had the words to do so.

I am not trying to write a post about how awful my life was, it is what it is and it was what it was. I am happy now, I turned out half okay and I’m strong as fuck after everything. But how happy it makes me to know that somehow, we manage to make him feel like he can sing at the top of his lungs, even if he doesn’t know the words or how to keep a tune.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

George Bernard Shaw