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Looking Through Old Photos
My mother came over from Australia and spent Christmas with us. It was a magical time, the first time she had ever met Angus, and the first time she'd seen Tamsin since Easter 1994. The children had a wonderful time, getting to know Grandma, and it's helped to make the move to Australia (probably in May) seem more real. One night, the children safely tucked up in bed, we were looking through boxes of old photos. When we moved house a couple of months ago, the photos got rather muddled up, and I spent an hour putting packets of photos into boxes, roughly categorized. There were two boxes of photos pre-children (I look younger in those! And better dressed!) There were two boxes of photos post-children, which I divided roughly into a box taken before Angus was born, and a box taken since his birth. My mum and I were looking through the box of photos taken just of Tamsin. It was the first time I'd looked at the photos for quite a while. They had been tucked away under Tamsin's bed for a couple of years and I suppose it had been too much effort to dig them out. We'd had a number of photo collages on the wall in our old house, so I saw them every day, but I had not bothered to look at the photos en masse, so to speak. It was a strange experience. Those of you with only one child probably cannot imagine the changes that occur when you have others. It's not so much to physical differences, though of course they dominate your day-to-day life. How to juggle two, often conflicting, sets of needs; wash twice as many children's clothes; make sure that they both have stimulating activities when required, often at opposite ends of town! (I don't drive, this can be a pain at times!) But the mental, emotional differences are more profound, when you stop to think about them. I remembered a time when Tamsin wasn't the big girl, the schoolgirl, the one who was old enough to know better. (And starting to say things that your mother said, that you always vowed you wouldn't, is another story altogether!) I've got so used to Angus being the baby, that I'd forgotten what it was like when Tamsin was the baby, and the only one in the house, at that. We spent a happy evening going through that box of photos, dating back to the moment of Tamsin's birth. (That's a photo I'd always had up on the wall, so that wasn't too much of a shock!) The very last photos in the box were of the first few days after Angus was born. Seeing photographic evidence of my baby changing into a big sister and being supplanted made me feel rather tearful! The truth is, you seem to be biologically programmed to regard the older one as a galumphing pest for the few first months of a new baby's life. It's a horrible thing to remember, but I suppose it ensures the survival of the species. The older one is strong enough to cope with it, biologically speaking, and you can devote your efforts to caring for the new, weak one. I think it starts to happen when you think about having another baby. (Of course, not everyone plans their families with quite a military precision that I did!) The minute you start to plan exactly when would be a good time to start trying for another baby, you are consigning the first child to a new role. Ultimately I am sure that having siblings is more enriching than being an only child (please don't write in and complain about that, this is only my humble opinion!) but I suspect it is a hard row to hoe for the poor child at first. Tamsin was two-and-a-half, almost to the day, when I started feeling sick with my second pregnancy. (Fortunately, it was Boxing Day and I had cooked Christmas dinner the day before without any problems!) I felt lousy for ten weeks, and I know she suffered. For the first few weeks she did at least get plenty of rather addled attention, as Graham was at home recovering from an operation - at least she had two ill parents around to share her care, not just one! But I know that things changed for her then, as I felt too sick to take her out to as many activities as we had been used to doing, and I couldn't do as much with her at home. The morning sickness faded, but was replaced with a litany of other 'minor' pregnancy complications, including a deep-seated ear infection which made me feel sick for several weeks at the exact time of my pregnancy when I should have felt at my best! I struggled on, but I know that she must have noticed the difference. The only consolation I have is that nine months is such a long time to a toddler that she must at some point have accepted that this is all there is. And then I go away for a few days and come home carrying a bundle that takes up all my attention for months! Why do we inflict this mental torture on our precious babies! I'm sure if something comparable was carried out on prisoners of war, it would be banned by the Geneva Convention. And then, of course, you settle into the new routine, and you forget that anything else has ever happened. It was a real shock, looking back over those photos, and remembering life with Tamsin when she was an only child. It made me think of the many wonderful memories I have of that time, and the faint feeling of regret I had when I knew that I really did want another baby, but that things would never be quite the same again. I went to bed that night feeling a little tearful inside, but loving both of my children even more than before - if that's possible!
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