Thaddeus celebrates his twenty-fourth birthday today, two days after mine. It seems like only yesterday I was collecting the memorabilia to present to my precious son on his twenty-first birthday.
I went to great effort over the years keeping scrap books, first teeth, locks of hair, newspaper clippings, their first silky hairbrush, first singlet, their newborn hospital bracelets… hell, I even kept the pregnancy tests I used to discover each of their impending presences in the world… much to the shock and rising alarm of my sister Sam.
“What are you going to bring out next, Pinky? An umbilical cord? A foreskin?” she shrieked incredulously at Thaddeus’ twenty first gathering.
I still had scrapbooks of every congratulatory card we'd received at his birth, every christening card, a newspaper from the day he was born and his favourite Cabbage Patch doll which he disconcertingly named, ‘Teacher’.
“Does ‘Teacher’ ever talk to you?” I’d ask the pensive three and a half year old uneasily, as he played with the sinister looking toy.
The menacing expression on the doll’s face reminded me of Chucky and I was more than happy to finally smother it in a plastic bag and put it in a suitcase for seventeen years when he outgrew it.
I presented these lovingly accumulated physical memories to Thaddeus with joy and hoped he would treasure them.
I’m not a hoarder by nature. I constantly throw away things I haven’t used for six months… always discovering I need them the VERY next day.
These remembrances of my childrens’ early years however, have been squirrelled away in plastic boxes under my bed for twenty-four years now. I'd never told the kids what I was doing. I wanted it to be a surprise.
Poking around the cupboard in the spare room this morning I found all of these things I’d so proudly produced for Thaddeus three years ago abandoned at the back corner of a shelf in a barely ever accessed room.
I’m going to keep them now. I’ve just realised, they’re my memories… not his.
Happy birthday my first born son. I love you xxxx
