Meetings and Partings
and singing to my baby on his day of birth
It was my little boy’s second birthday yesterday and I have a story to tell….
Where did a year even go? It does not seem like that long since we celebrated his first year!
I was just going over some photos from the day he was born and sadly there follows a gap of nearly two weeks of no more baby photos…
I have no photos of him as a 2 day old, a 3 day old or 4, 5 or 6.
I’ve no photos nor real memory of him as a 7 day old either, nor an 8 day old, or 9. I shall explain why later but first the nice bit…
The day before he was born (and he came a couple of weeks early, like all my older children) his father and I had a trip out to visit a local historical site.
Hardwick Hall sits in all it’s Elizabethan glory at the top of a hill, overlooking fine views of Derbyshire (though the landscape is now sadly sliced in two by the M1 motorway).
I have a great affinity for that place and the story of Bess of Hardwick. She was the second most rich and powerful woman in the land at the time, after the Queen (Elizabeth 1). But rather than visit the hall that day we went to look at the ice house further down the hill and by some fishing lakes.
To get there you can either walk a short distance from the wonderful old Hardwick Inn (where we went for food afterwards - our last meal as just the two of us) or you can park even closer in the main car park. That’s what we did - by this point I could barely walk!
This pregnancy, my fourth but our first baby together, had been very special but equally taxing - I was guzzling Gaviscon by the gallon (well, ok, by the bottle) as I had the most horrible heartburn for the last two months.
Anyway this is not the place for such boring pregnancy talk!! Who really cares about that stuff?! The point is - the baby was very nearly cooked and I was so, so looking forward to meeting him (yes, we found out he was a boy. Nothing else good came from having a scan by the way. I would definitely NOT recommend such pointless medical procedures).
The reason for visiting the ice house was to look for a good place to sing and to try out the acoustics there. The ice house tunnel proved to be an INCREDIBLE place. How I wish I could have gone further down the tunnel and into the ice house itself. Alas, there was a locked metal gate and, besides, there was also a huge drop and lots of water - almost like a well.
Perhaps I didn’t explain properly - many of these big old stately homes had an ice house in their grounds near to a body of water. In the winter they could find chunks of ice to keep it cold and then store all their meat and dairy produce. It also kept pretty cool in the summer too.
Here’s me attempting to sing but being rudely interrupted by one of my dogs. Lucius (the grey one) just can’t help himself!
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We took the baby back there in the summer and did it again (above).
And here is another example of the acoustics when my sister played the Ocarina there.
The whole time I was singing there was a little robin that kept hanging around, like robins do. He was sitting above my head perched on a hawthorn tree. You may just be able to see him.
We called our son Robin and he was born the very next day - Oh what a beautiful, joyous and easy, also pretty much painless, birth it was. One push and BOOM. I was in shock. But there he was and we were so happy.
Over the next days and weeks a robin kept visiting us and I saw this very much as message from Spirit, from our baby. Because something AWFUL and cruel happened - we were separated . I was kept from seeing my new-born son.
This time 2 years ago I was returning from the hospital WITHOUT my baby and didn’t see him again for over a week.
Ten days to be precise…….