This is the story of my first real coming of age. The first of a few events that changed the course of life for me, and everyone in my little bubble. A document, then, of an almost overnight snap from childhood to adulthood, written by a thirty three year old man, just a few days after we celebrated our eldest son’s sixteenth birthday.
Part One – Wet Concrete
One of the strangest things about becoming an expectant father at seventeen years old, is that everyone around you speaks about your life in hushed tones. As though you’ve walked into a funeral like Del Boy, dressed as Batman spraying silly string over grieving relatives. I think I was numb to it at the time – at least to some degree. It was very difficult to be interested in the opinions of my peers outside my real friends. I was still struggling to focus on my A Level exams and this life-altering news that I, was going to be a Dad.
A Dad, to me, was my Dad. An all seeing, all knowing, powerful man with the answer for everything and a confidence plus a street acumen that successfully bluffed through everything he didn’t. A kind, strong, mighty man who had, to me it seemed, long since mastered the art of the deal and the key to life. He managed to combine taking huge risks whilst also being the place I felt safest. A daunting task for a teenager to measure up to.
It was some years after he had died that I realised that he too, had been on the journey. A different order to mine, but he’d learned his craft through life’s college just the same. The art to adulthood, it strikes me, is largely constructed from a series of improvisations under increasing pressure, and success is making it look natural.
At seventeen, I had none of this down. I was doing my thing, man… I had my car – a hotted up Mini with a noisy exhaust and huge subwoofer that took up the entire boot. I had a hot girlfriend (it’s okay, I can say that. She’s Archie’s Mum and now my hot wife). I was fed up with school and acutely aware that university wasn’t going to be for me, but I was on the cusp of realising my childhood dream of joining the Royal Navy. I was racing. I was drinking pints in the pub and playing my guitar, earning just enough money on the side to fuel the car and kit myself out with old leather jackets, tan Caterpillar boots and Levi jeans.
I could be wrong but I seem to think Mandi told me she was pregnant at Christmas time. My memory is a little hazy after all these years. I do remember sitting on the floor in the room I stayed in at my parent-in-law’s house, building an Airfix-type model of a red Mini until the early hours of the morning. Contemplating what it all might mean… I’ve still got the Mini on top of my wardrobe. I also remember not many weeks after walking with my grandfather in the snow, just talking about the elephant in the room. So it must have been around then…
I remember being a complete headless chicken. I lurched from one extreme emotion and thought process to another, as you’d expect I would I suppose… I had to grow up quickly, but Mandi certainly got there quicker than I did. A common theme in our lives! But we are who we are, so with the benefit of hindsight I don’t hold tooooo much of it against myself. If I carried guilt for everything I’d ever done that I look back and cringe at, I’d never move for the weight of it.
It revealed a rare chink in my Dad’s armour really, if I’m being honest. He took it all pretty personally, and it culminated in just about the opposite end of the support spectrum from what I needed most from him at the time. He ran the business with just one other employee, who never knew my son existed until he was well over a year old; that probably tells you what you need to know, in a nutshell. In truth, it never really came across as the support I needed at the time, more a standoffish distance that struck me quite dumb given the incredibly close relationship we had. Again, with hindsight, I can see that two things coexisted together: he loved me deeply, but he did not know how to respond.
Mum was more grounded, and I credit her hugely, and also my grandfather on her side at least in part for sowing that seed of stoicism. His perspective; “He’s not the first, he won’t be the last. He’s going to be okay.”.
Special mention really goes to my in-laws at this point. I’d always felt like part of the family, but even more so in the situation we found ourselves in. Being the father of a daughter now, I think I’d probably have killed me!
Everybody meant well. I truly believe that. I always felt loved and supported. But. Fear has a smell to it, and even just over the ‘edge of seventeen’, I could pick it up a mile away. Fear of what? Fear for me, I suppose. Perceived death of opportunity. I’ve concluded since that I was looking to borrow a lot of stability and confidence from my own parents, being a little bit short on them on my own.
Keeping in mind my earlier comment about adulthood being mostly constructed from a series of improvisations, and with an added context – my own eldest son is now just a year younger that we were when he was born. He seems to me just barely an adolescent himself, and I’m sure it was just five minutes ago he was getting ready for his first day of school – I can only now begin understand the layers my folks must have had to wade through to accept what was happening, and further on from that, to understand what flavour of support I needed at the time. There’s no Haynes manual for this stuff, eh?
For my part, I felt like wet concrete that was being asked to hold up a building. I’d love to be able to tell you that some kind of primal paternal instinct kicked in and I got it all down right off the bat, but that wasn’t how it was. Not stupid. Not reckless. Not heartless by any stretch. Just… Unfinished. Part baked.
I do remember the moment it kicked in, though.
Part Two – Natural Born
May 6th, 2010. I’d walked out of the sixth form side gate on a free period to meet Mandi in her little red Ford KA. I can’t remember whether we were going to a scan, or whether she’d had the scan and had been referred to the hospital… The latter, I think, but I can’t be sure. I do however remember the midwife having a hushed conversation with someone at the hospital, and in hushed, worried tones: “He’s small. Very small.”. Or maybe I remember Mandi telling me that’s what she said… Christ!
Around the middle of the afternoon, Mandi was taken by ambulance from Ipswich hospital to a more specialist hospital in Cambridge – Addenbrookes. And I remember collecting my car and haring up the A12 – my little Mini flat out at about 91mph. The Mini was screaming, and I was sobbing like a little girl behind the wheel. Willing with every fibre I had, for Mandi to be okay, and for our baby to be okay. If you could pin it to a moment, that really was the moment my mindset changed; I aged about ten years in an hour and a bit. I became sure of the kind of man I wanted to be, the kind of partner I wanted to be, and the kind of father I wanted to be. I hadn’t really worked out the ‘how’, but I knew what I was aiming for. I was going to give them the very best I could.
I’m still on that journey now – trying hard to give my family the best I can. I haven’t always given them the ‘best’ – but I’ve always done the best I can with what I know. I sleep okay with that, and work hard at letting myself off the hook for my past mistakes. Less successful there! But I do think that if you have two people the exact circumstances Mandi and I have faced through life so far, no one else could have had a better outcome. I try these days to look upon seventeen-year-old Alex with more compassion than I used to.
Archie was born at 10.10pm on May 6th 2010, and he was born to music. Specifically, ‘True’ by Spandau Ballet, a song that Dad loved so much he played it on repeat. My brother and I dubbed it ‘the torture song’ – I did allow myself a wry smile in the operating theatre at that. Dad also named him – Archie, after Arch Stanton – the name on the grave that holds the gold at the end of the Good, The Bad and the Ugly! So I guess, in a way, he managed to show love in his own style.
He was born weighing 1lb 7oz. A little over 650 grams, and approximately the length (not height yet) of the span of my hand.
I haven’t talked much about Mandi yet in this piece, but she was a-mazing. I don’t know if it’s women in general who grow up quickest but I suspect it’s her remarkable personality – she did it so, so quickly. My instincts might have taken a while to kick in but hers were there from months before Archie was born. We had a full year in hospital, bouncing from one to the other, settling down in Norfolk and Norwich for a couple of nigh-on six month stretches, and Mandi never left his side unless she had to. Just once in that year I think, I managed to persuade her to have a night off and we went to a restaurant and a hotel before heading back to care for our beautiful baby boy. On the rare occasions she had to sleep at home, she’d make the hour-and-a-half journey there and back every day. The little KA sustained so much rust following gritting trucks up and down the A140 that it took a good deal of saving to get it through the mid-year MOT!
Mandi also developed hugely as a person during the course of the year. Gone was the shy, quiet, girl-next-door that I’d fallen for, she’d risen to the challenge of dealing with doctors, nurses, consultants and through necessity became a woman capable of dealing with a whole host of men with doctorates and superiority complexes in tandem. The relentless monotony of hospital life, and the emotional roller coaster of a son who endured necrotising enterocolitis, two stoma bags and a host of complications you cannot imagine. Mandi is academically brighter than me – top 5% across the school, she could have been anything she wanted – and she chose to be Archie’s Mum. We’ve done this journey hand in hand, through every storm that has come our way since. Never has anyone sacrificed as much as she did for the good of her family. I credit the unbelievable fortitude and love Mandi showed during this time as the principle reason I can sit on this sofa, as I am right now, with my handsome, strapping sixteen-year-old son, and watch a James Bond film together on a Sunday afternoon.
Part Three – How My Son Raised Me
So, the longest year – through my eyes.
On that journey to Addenbrookes, through the fog of high emotion, a few thoughts emerged from the haze.
I knew the course of my life was changing. I knew I would let go of the Royal Navy dream, of any aspiration I had to be a professional musician. Not because Mandi wouldn’t ‘let’ me, or it was no longer possible – quite the contrary – but because I had realised that now, there was something more important in my life than my own dreams. Some things would have to make way for better things. I didn’t want our son to grow up with an absent father, but more than that – I didn’t want to be absent. As much as I was sure I wasn’t capable of being a Dad yet, I was determined to be the best I could be, and if I had some growing to do alongside him, well – I’d work at it.
I knew I was a work in progress. I was acutely aware of my own shortcomings, my naivety. I contemplated for a while how much I still relied on my parents – my Dad, who if you remember, seemed to have all the answers to everything until now. Aware that the time was coming when I would have to be that person for someone else. They felt like elephant-sized shoes to fill.
I was also highly conscious of the responsibility one bears as a parent, even then: how children ‘turn out’ is often credited or blamed on the parents. I was aware that children scarred from poor upbringings carry those scars into adult life – deep rooted trauma that can shape the person you become. I didn’t know how, but I was determined that Archie would not suffer a difficult upbringing in spite of his father’s age and lack of worldly wisdom. As I arrived at the hospital and composed myself (before getting senselessly lost in the rabbit warren corridors of Addenbrookes on the hunt for Rosie ward), I was determined to get this right.
And so began the year: I was working at Dads garage for the majority of the time, a position I took seriously. I think I’d left my Monday evening shift at the Co-Op by this point, but I’d also made a lifelong friend and connection with a guy who would become very important to me throughout my journey, and was also working on his fleet of bus and coaches when required. Trying to move my career as a casual wheeler and dealer of motors, to a fully fledged mechanic and motor trader. I was fairly sure this was where I needed to be and what I wanted to do. I had a natural ability and one hell of a mentor in Dad, and despite his assertion when I was a child that never, ever should I enter the motor trade, I found myself right at home.
Every other night after work I would make the journey to Norwich Hospital, occasionally bringing Mandi’s friends and family with me to visit. Always returning home in the early hours of the morning, I didn’t want the visits to end, it never felt right having them so far away. Those goodbyes were the hardest. Sundays were the best, when I would stop by the cafe and bring in a full English breakfast. Mandi’s order: two sausages, two hash browns, beans, mushrooms and an egg. I was fairly sure this was the only time she’d eat properly in the week.
I used to vary the route home from time to time, taking a left off the A140 down some randomly selected country lane, just to break the monotony of the journey. Once, I was venting some frustration and taking it out on the car – and the brakes caught fire and failed completely approaching at full chat, a blind junction I didn’t recognise. Thank god nothing was crossing my path…
Dad had acquired an old Mercedes 230CE by this point, and we did it up together. Privately I think he’d showed compassion here, and wanted me to have something more substantial than my little Mini to make the journey in – so he gave it to me, and some of my friends christened it the Buff Ting! It was white, a big coupe with some polished alloy wheels – it looked the part and quickly became my second home.
I remember the rawness of it all. Doing everything for the first time, but in the context of the hospital so far away from home with sounds and the smell of cleaning materials that is peculiar to hospitals, if I pick it up now it still takes me right back. I remember when we nearly lost Archie – we were informed by some men in suits that he wouldn’t make the night, and if he did – he certainly wouldn’t make it through the following day. Charging up to hospital when you get ‘that’ phone call.
I remember Christmas – Archie’s first. The time we were allowed home was so scant, but they did let us out on Christmas Day. We were allowed out for the day, and made the mistake of trying to fit everyone in, trying to make sure we saw everyone throughout the day before making the journey back up to Norwich. We ended up with about an hour each, in too many peoples houses, juggling messy stoma bag changes with quick bites of turkey, before pointing north once more feeling more exhausted and unfulfilled than usual.
That was something I had to learn: pleasing too many people eventually pleases no-one. Too often, I’d got my priorities wrong there when naturally it should always have been Mandi and Arch. Like I say, I let myself off the hook a little, but the lesson stayed with me. It caused too much stress in what was already a crucible – with my time again? I’d have done it differently. I still get it wrong now from time to time, but I’m still a work in progress!
Most of all, I remember picking him up from the hospital for the ‘last time’. In a borrowed Rolls Royce Silver Shadow II, doing 100mph over the Orwell Bridge, with a beam on my face like a man united with his family after a full year. A real marker in the sand that didn’t end our medical journey, but did close a chapter on our lives and begin a new one, with all the pomp and ceremony I could muster.
Archie may have grown the most physically, but Mandi and I arrived home that day almost unrecognisable from a year previously.
Epilogue
I’m laying in bed, it’s 11.30pm. Three beautiful children, one beautiful marriage, with calloused hands, an aching back but a full heart. The house is peaceful at last, and all I can hear is the gentle breathing of my wife, and the occasional shuffling of the bed covers from my children’s bedroom.
Having children young isn’t to me about swapping shots of Sambuca for nappy bags, clubbing for ‘pass the parcel’ or any of that. It’s been about trials, self-doubt, sacrifice and discovery, condensed into fewer years than convention usually makes room for. It’s about sink-or-swim, about yes, growing up sooner than you should, but embracing the rich rewards that come from investing in your budding family and running with it.
My hands resemble my father’s these days. It’s striking sometimes, how my physique does too. I’m softer, gentler, more tolerant. I have the same drive to succeed, mixed with my Mum’s soft heart and kindness. I’ve diluted it all down with some of my own quirks, and done my best not to become embittered. Mostly, as I lay here now, I’m full of warmth and gratitude.
And tiredness.
Goodnight.
Leave a Reply