Don't Count Your Blessings Before They Are Hatched

Wouldn't that be wonderful. To have your blessings in front of you, like eggs, and to know they are likely to hatch, like the eggs, and be nice little bonuses for you. Fancy noting that there were six blessings in the basket and knowing that even if only half of them hatched, you would experience three Good Things happening to you.

My blessings/eggs are in the form of 16 Year Old Son moving to live in London with my excellent sister in law while he attends college in September. If this blessing/egg hatches, he will show her his good side all the time, and put into practice all the watching he has done, of me doing the washing, cooking, shopping, tidying and hoovering and show her he knows how it is done. If it doesn't hatch, he will fix her with a cold stare and tell her where she is going wrong and even though it is fairly hopeless that she should ever go right, give her some stern pointers as to what to at least try before it is too late.

If it goes right, 16 Year Old Son will say What Fun This Academic Work Is And Gosh There Is So Much I Have To Learn with a friendly and modest expression on his kindly face. If it goes wrong, he will announce with fury that There Is No Need For Me To Go To College, I Know Everything And I Am The Ruler Of The Universe.

I, being his mother, want the best for him. He will leave our little seaside town (where he knows for a fact that everyone is inbred and racist and ugly) and, he says, never come back. (But don't rent his room out, because it's his.) He will go to London where everyone is clever, interesting, worth knowing. Where he will be understood and loved and there will be endless new people to tell what to do. Being a mother to this wonderful young man means that I am Wrong, Old, Wrong Again and Sometimes Quite Nice. It means that whatever he wants, whatever he dreams of doing, never happened to me. All the fun, exploration, ambition and need to escape that he so passionatly wants, was never my experience at 16. So I am taking a step back and giving him to his aunt, who is possibly the best person on this earth for him at the moment, and hoping all those fascinating friends he finds will really have that elusive quality that no one in West Sussex has. I am hoping that the Learning that his London College offers him is really different to the Learning down here in West Sussex. That going back to London, from where he moved when he was 11 years old, will take up where he feels he left off.

Here, in this big house, I will have 12 Year Old Son and Me. And the hamster (who for some reason is still alive. It is so old and has so much food and drink and fresh sawdust it probably has defied its genes and is going to go for the hamster equivalent of 113). And Alan will come and stay. I can't wait.