I was thinking about Isaac’s being 40 on Monday, and lines from Evangeline Paterson’s poem A Wish for my Children were hovering in my head -
May you not
skin your knees. May you
not catch your fingers
in car doors. May
your hearts not break.
….and I thought – oh well, at least I don’t have to worry about minor injuries, these days. And then Isaac rang up from San Francisco (when he should have been asleep) to say he didn’t want me to see his tweets and to wonder what was happening and to worry, so he was ringing up to tell me he had broken his thumb. Here are the tweets – to be read from the bottom upwards cos that’s how it works.
I hate his being so far away anyway, but when he has hurt himself I hate it even more. He may be 40, he may have an important job at Twitter, he may be a father of two,
I still want to give him a hug when he’s hurt himself. Not that Wendy can’t do it just as sweetly, but I am his mother, and (as I said in a piece once) “Whatever their offspring's pain - whether it be a trapped finger or a mangled heart - a mother always wishes she could bear it for them.”
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