My partner’s feeling sad.
Her co-worker, mum to a pair of teenagers, cautions that we’ve a mere two or three years left of non-coercive cuddles with our own children. After that, if her experience is anything to go by, they’re likely to be pushing us away, wriggling free from our embraces, demanding their personal space and uncramped style, too old for all that.
Our son and daughter are seven and nearly nine, and their presence in our lives has put a rocket under time, scorched time’s very buttocks. Those years will pass in an eye-blink.
It’s something a parent quickly takes for granted, holding their child. Other than the feeding, changing, rocking, lullaby delivery and supervision of mandatory “tummy time”, it’s pretty much all you can do with babies - hold them. The new parent gets a lot of cuddles. And the oxytocin hits I took from all that cuddling were worth every milky vomit-stain on every shoulder of every single jumper I owned. That’s the stuff of your “baby bubble” right there: oxytocin, the feelgood hormone that every hug mainlines.
Displays of affection at school drop-off are out of the question; these days she skips away before we reach the gate, and never looks back
Of course, there are times when holding that baby can be a drag: at three in the morning when it’s somehow your turn to get up again; at the supermarket when you’ve forgotten the pram; when its toddler sibling is pulling at your trouser-leg and wailing, the dinner’s burning and you really need the toilet, to recall a few. But you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, the oxytocin with the relentless drudgery, I guess.
We’ve maintained a pretty cuddly domestic scene until now. Apart from the ritual bedtime tuck-ins and scraped knee consolations, there are unbidden squeezes and impulse nuzzles aplenty around here. And we’re thankful for that. The kids drive us around the twist on a daily basis, but the cuddles have been a tolerable trade-off.
The office doomsayer’s warning rings true, though. There is change in the air. Our daughter turns nine next month, and already she’s getting worldly and self-conscious on us, working at eye-rolls and shoulder-shrugs, trying on attitudes for style. Displays of affection at school drop-off are out of the question; these days she skips away before we reach the gate, and never looks back.
The writer, avoiding a hug from his mother. Source: Supplied
Maybe that’s what parenting boils down to. A long and winding, joyous and eviscerating process of letting go: from womb through birth canal and delivery, cradle to school-gates, from family hearth through the badlands of adolescence and out into a capricious world. Again and again, we have to let them go, and every time it hurts.
We know we’re lucky - lucky to have children, that they’re growing up at all so that we can feel sad about it, that they’re the kind of kids who have welcomed our embraces until now
My partner’s feeling sad, sitting on the sofa, thinking about the kids getting older and growing away from us. So am I. So we have a cuddle. We know we’re lucky - lucky to have children, that they’re growing up at all so that we can feel sad about it, that they’re the kind of kids who have welcomed our embraces until now.
The boy, especially, has been crazy for the snuggles. He used to dive under our covers first thing in the morning to put the squeeze on us, but that’s a treat that’s getting rarer. Maybe his affectionate nature will delay the dreaded cuddle-recoil response, but someday, for sure, puberty’s going to trump it, and he’ll give us the cringing shoulder, too.
There’s a family snapshot somewhere - probably in an album in a drawer in my stepfather’s house on the other side of the world - of me and my mum, who’s been gone for more than a decade.
I’m about eleven, which would make her thirty-nine. I’m in a Starsky and Hutch t-shirt and she’s in a blouse, or at least that’s the way I see it now. She’s trying to pull me in, but I’m pushing her away, a slightly theatrical grimace on my face. Hers is turned away from the camera, but I think, and I hope, that she’s laughing.
Three-and-a-half decades on from that photo, what wouldn’t I give to hold her, and be held by her, just one more time?
Life is short and getting shorter, and cuddling our kids and parents is the good stuff, about the best it has to offer.
Those of us lucky enough to have the option should get on with it. We’re never going to look back and think we did too much.
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