Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
There was a hard, shaped chair, covered with fake green leather.
It’s not fashionable to have dreams for your children. You can’t say you want them to be doctors, lawyers, to be just like yourself. You even risk judgment if you say you are hoping for a boy or a girl. It only seems acceptable now to wish for happy and healthy – that’s the key phrase. “As long as it’s happy and healthy”. That’s what every pregnant woman beams. That’s all that society allows.
But what if you end up with a child who isn’t healthy, or isn’t happy? Or where the answer isn’t clear?
There in the waiting room I gazed at my son. Did he have the same potential for a happy, healthy life, as any other child? Or was there some kind of time bomb inside him, in his genetic or neurological coding, that limited his potential for health and happiness.
These are not questions I thought I would have to face when I was 30 and trying for a baby.
So there we were waiting for the answer. Me and Felix, aged 7 and flipping through a Captain Underpants book. He was very used to medical waiting rooms.
Was he happy? Yes, mostly, except for the language difficulties and learning problems and social issues and anxiety and moodiness and meltdowns above and beyond what anyone would consider normal surely, surely, for a child of his age.
Was he healthy? Well sort of, except for the allergies and the asthma and the constant tiredness and ongoing need for medical interventions during his short life, each one seemingly unrelated. Surely this couldn’t all be bad luck. And finally a doctor who said yes, he does seem to have a lot going on. This doesn’t seem quite right. Let’s run some tests.
And in the years after Felix’s birth and with the slow dawning realisation that something wasn’t quite right, my marriage fell apart. Felix’s father knew the appointment was happening but said I should go by myself.
This wasn’t what I pictured, not at all, when I was 30 and trying for a baby. I didn’t know any more what I had pictured; but it wasn’t this.
Felix’s grubby school shirt seemed like the only real thing in that waiting room. I kept it in focus, breathing slowly.
And then the doctor called Felix’s name, and Felix closed his book, and we went into the office to find out the test results.