Yet another milestone

So much of this blog has ended up being about reaching impossible milestones which is something I could never have predicted and would certainly never dared to imagine when I began writing.
It feels a bit weird to be quoting my own blog but really it is the very best way to show how utterly extraordinary today feels. Way back in January 2015, the night before my eldest nephew turned 18 , I wrote the following –

“He is the oldest of my fine selection of eight nephews and nieces but being the first he was the one who made me an auntie for the first time and to this day he still calls me Aunty Lucy. Like his delightful brothers he is an absolute treasure – everything you could want your boy to be and in that I have two little boys I look to him and his younger brother to see a glimpse of how my two might turn out. What I hate, is that I know that it’s so unlikely that I will get to see my beautiful boys see this particular milestone. So whilst I cannot wait to celebrate with my nephew tomorrow, tonight I am struck down with the bittersweet sadness that seems to rise up at every significant occasion. I cannot bear that I will not see either of my boys turn from boys to adults. I so desperately want to see how they will be. ..”

Well today, my Oscar is 18.

When I reread the post about my nephew’s impending 18th it slightly broke my heart. Since my little boy was 7 I have lived with what I thought was the certainty that I wouldn’t be there to see him grow up. I can vividly remember just desperately wanting to know how he’d look, what he’d be like whilst knowing that not only would I not see it but that my cancer and my dying could only shape his life in a damaging and traumatic way. This is a simply awful thing to experience. I don’t really have the words to describe how relieved, grateful and just incredibly happy I am to still be here.

Funnily when I think about how he was when he was little compared to the adult he is today it is rather lovely to see how much of him was so evident even way back then.

Here are just a few things that stood out.

His total inability to develop sensible sleep patterns has remained pretty much consistent. On our first night at home with Oscar, Andy and I ended calling the hospital suggesting there must be something wrong with him as we thought babies were supposed to sleep for 20 hours a day and ours had managed about two….. You can imagine how they laughed! Things improved a little but he never really believed in sleeping at night and Andy and I both had many a night pacing round for hours and hours in early hours trying to persuade him that it was nighttime. These days you’re more likely to find him asleep during the day and often hear him pacing around in the early hours with his totally dysfunctional body clock! Looking through old photos of him I realised that a ridiculous number of the pictures show him fast asleep – often in the middle of the day and often in odd places – just outside his bedroom, in amongst the content of his dressing up box, half on half off his bed!

Up until Oscar was nearly 2 and a half (and 3 days before I had Max), he came to work with me a couple of days each week. Oscar and I, pushchair in hand, would navigate the joys of busy tubes and grumpy commuters heading from Walthamstow to Notting Hill where he, and often my boss’s Labrador, ‘helped’ me manage the Lucy B. Campbell Gallery. Looking back now it seems like a madness but my boss was wonderfully accommodating, financially it made sense and best of all I was lucky enough spend lots of time with him. These days he’s less likely to shout at people on the tube for taking ‘mummy’s seat’ – the end one where I could park the pushchair next to me and is on the whole a quiet, thoughtful young man but he remains, really lovely company.

He has never been the biggest fan of school but nonetheless has done brilliantly well and thankfully has found that 6th form life suits him far better than previous school years. Even during the years of school that he endured rather than enjoyed he showed an enthusiasm and talent for writing that led to a small ‘book’ of his being added to his primary school library and now his writing has turned into screen writing and all that talent that bubbled away when he was younger is being turned into screen plays and short films and hopefully a career.

I could write endlessly about Oscar – he is kind, creative, funny, clever but really all I want to say is how ridiculously proud I am of him and how grateful I am that I am getting to see who will be…

Now, when will he wake up so I can wish him Happy Birthday!