Firsts, Lasts, and Photographs

sounds like a Lionel Ritchie song, doesn't it?

Work has been crazy recently, and I have been feeling sick again, which might be a bit of a reaction to being so busy. Still, I don’t want to complain. I’m 16 weeks pregnant, farting as freely and unapologetically as Jackson Lamb, keeping Ritz crackers in business, and generally feeling very lucky and very happy that the baby is well. Joab is happy too, and my children are all in good spirits at the same time for once. Life couldn’t really be better. I will obviously tell you when it doesn’t feel like this, but for now, I’ll take it.

I’m more like Jackson Lamb than I’d like to admit

I was going to write about names, but decided that I probably need to think more about what to say, other than that any potential name I mention to Joab or my kids as an option for our unborn child is met with “You’re joking, right?” 

I will quickly mention What’s in a Name, a beautiful book written by my friend Sheela that’s part memoir, part retelling of others’ stories, and the significance of names. It’s about identity, culture, and belonging (or rather, not belonging). Anyway, it’s out in paperback now and I highly recommend it. Check out the black and white photograph on the cover, of Sheela when she was a small child with her parents in India, I think. I spoke with Sheela about the initial cover her publishers put forward. It was bad, a stock image from Canva, so unimaginative that it might have dissuaded people from picking the book up. I’m so glad Sheela pushed back and designed her own cover, with a family photo that represented a story from the inside. It made me think about how I will never get bored of looking at photos of people. 

Great cover for a great book

I took a photo of my elder son by our front door last week, just before he left for his first day at a conservatoire. No uniform anymore. He looked good in an old western-style baby blue needle-cord shirt that had once belonged to Joab, along with jeans he’d found on Vinted. I was happy for him because this was his first ever day of studying his most loved thing, all the time: music. His confident smile expressed none of the nerves he told me he was feeling. I cannot predict what the next four years will be like for him, but one thing I can say with certainty is this: It will all go so quickly. 

My younger son refuses to have his photo taken. I hope this is a phase. I remember it well, so I can empathise – that period of extreme self-consciousness during adolescence. When I look at any photos of me from that time, I can see the lengths I went to in an attempt to conceal something, whether that was a zit, my fang incisors, my frizzy fringe, or my mottled legs. Now, I make a conscious effort to show up in photos. If I don’t like what I see, which is most of the time, I don’t dwell on it. I’d rather have photos of all sorts of moments in life with me in them, than not at all.

I sent the photo of my elder son to my best-mum-friends WhatsApp group, where others had posted a selection of ‘first day of term’ photos  over the years. We predictably commented on how tiny our children once were. How big their uniform had seemed. How adult and giant they appear now. I like that I’ve been good friends with the same mums for the past twenty years: we still look at each other and see who we were when we first met. Since then, we’ve gone through a series of changes – from haircuts to jobs, to husbands and addresses. Yet to each other, we are pretty much unchanged. There is comfort in that. 

And although I do look back, and think, could I just spend an hour of that day with that person again, I like where I am now. But I do want to be able to remember how it felt to be in a certain phase, and I think that photographs can be a brilliant aid for this. I have a pinboard in my kitchen with a mish mash of photos, a culmination of decades and different families, friends and animals – mine, and Joab’s.

Often, when I work at the kitchen table, I glance over at one particular photo of me with my dad, on his Honda 1100R motorbike. I tell you the model now – eleven hundred r – because the makes and models of my father’s cars and motorbikes took on such a significance in my childhood. I memorised engine sizes and manufacture dates to impress him. In this photo below I am wearing my favourite red Clarks double-buckle shoes. I look a bit uncertain. I think my mum had insisted on this photo, because she wanted proof that my dad really did love me. Even then, she knew he found it hard to express his feelings clearly and seriously. So, this was her way of capturing a moment that, in later, more difficult years, showed that my dad cared. And it has worked, as I look at it so often, with a lot of affection for the both of us.

Was that the first time I sat on my dad’s motorbike? Maybe. Firsts can be more easy to predict than lasts. With lasts, we often don’t even know we will never do ‘that thing’ or see ‘that person’ again. Lasts are often characterised by a cruel unpredictability,  and often it is only with hindsight that we are able to see them as something we have lost. Of course, when we learn that something was a last, we might have evidence of that moment. I have many photos of me and my then-husband and our children on a summer holiday in Upstate New York eight years ago, when we were still together. None of us knew that would be the last holiday we took as a family, before me and my husband divorced. I’m glad I have evidence that we had moments of real happiness. That’s important to me, and my children. That’s why I say: take more photographs. Print them out. You never know how they’ll mark a moment that you didn’t even know was a last, until later. 

I’ll end on a Substack post my sister sent me a few days ago. After I’d read it I immediately sent it to a friend. I thought of all of us sitting in our respective homes, sobbing.

It will most probably move you to tears. But if you haven’t the time or inclination to click on a link, the gist is this: a young woman got pregnant out of wedlock in her teens. She was given 10 days with her newborn son, and nearing the time when she had to give him up for adoption, she sketched him. 

If she’d had a camera, she might have taken a photograph. But she had a pencil and some paper, so she sketched her son instead. She sensed it would be the last time she would see him, and she didn’t want to forget him.

Aside from the story, and what happened in the end (you’ll have to read the Substack if you want to know that) isn’t this the most perfect little sketch of a newborn you’ve ever seen?