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My daughter turns 8 this week, which seems impossible as she was only born 2 years ago. She’s a funny and fiery girl and it goes without saying that she has my heart in a vice and the vice is squeezed as tight as it will go, but she still keeps turning. If you’re read my book you’ll know what she loves her mum and gives her hugs and kisses, but isn’t affectionate with anyone else, most annoyingly including me. We show our love in other ways - by drawing pictures of me falling into lava mainly - and she knows that my valued currency is humour and so treats me with the contempt that most women I’ve loved have held me in. She popped up unexpectedly at the end of tonight’s snooker to give me Hell through the medium of a rabbit. She’s ace.
As much as it has hurt to rarely hug my own daughter (sometimes she’ll sit on my knee or lie next to me or draws pictures of us holding hands or her on my shoulders) I have been very respectful of her choices.
But in the last week or two her standoffishness has thawed. A couple of times I asked for a hug and she’s been happy to oblige. She even told me that she loved me. Not as much as she loves her mum, obviously, though she felt the need to point that out, in spite of it being so obvious. She held my hand all the way back from football today, even though she only needed to do so to cross the road.
And I am so grateful for these crumbs of love that they fill me with more joy than I could imagine. She’s played a blinder. Though to be fair, my son couldn’t be more liberal with his hugs and kisses (like father like son) and yet the inevitability doesn’t make them any less joyous. Feast or famine, the love of your own children - not necessarily a given, especially in the difficult years to come - is the sweetest of things.
Phoebe is looking forward to being a Tweenager and I have to get ready for the many changes that will come as she gets older and fierier and even more sarcastic and independent. I don’t think I will come out of it well, but I am so looking forward to finding out what kind of people both these kids will be as they get older. I can imagine Phoebe as a teenager, though it’s utterly impossible to think of Ernie as anything but a five year old. They are a pair of crackers and I feel privileged to get to spend this time with them, especially when, two years ago I was thinking I might only have a few months with them.
A fine 160th frame of self-playing snooker tonight (in all the usual places on Wednesday) plus all the 8.03 football scores and a prediction of the score by some puppets. I used to be on the TV.
