This Boy

One cold winter morning I’m out in the field, surrounded by grassy-breathed sheep, checking tension on the barbed wire fence. My mobile buzzes in my pocket, frozen fingers fumbling and numb. “There’s this boy,” they announce. I check the calendar: nine months of paper-based gestation.

‘What a lovely coincidence’ people say later, ‘an adoption taking exactly nine months’. I smile and nod, but actually it didn’t feel lovely, it felt like cycling full pelt down our precipitous hill without knowing what was waiting at the bottom.

A final assessment panel is hastily convened in an over-heated beige conference room. My glasses fog as we enter from the frozen car park. A dizzying number of strangers review our lives in myopic detail. ‘It was written in the stars’ says our normally prosaic adoption social worker to the question ‘why this boy?’. A surprisingly poetic statement given the intense medical, psychological and financial grilling she’d given us months before. I didn’t realise it was all in the hands of the planets. I think of the silver moon that rose over our dark hill last night and I wipe my glasses with the remnants of a snot-stiffened tissue.

This boy. After he arrived at our winter-deep farm, the medical reports were hefty yet inconclusive. Problems with in-utero development; early hospitalisation; sensory processing disorder; aversion to touch; aversion to food. And the unsayable question in our minds – aversion to love? By the time the first vulnerable crocuses and snowdrops were bravely poking through the ice speckled soil, we (and he) had grown tired of the medical prodding. And how did naming it help? His brain was wired up differently, only we knew the achingly painful daily detail of that. So, as the first wave of feisty daffodils arrived we closed the files and opened our hearts. How does that feel? What can I do to make it better? May I hold your hand?

This boy. This unpredictably crazy whirlwind of fear and joy. Who flew violently from my instinctive urge to gather him in and hold him. Who taught me to wait, and be oh so patient. Who one day, after many months, sitting on the sofa, just gently leans in to my side. The faintest butterfly pressure, tight muscles still ready to flee, but even so, that tiny shoulder purposely pressed against my arm. I hold my breath, joy caught tight in my throat, tears pricking at my eyes. I sit still and witness the beauty of that fluttering primal desire for human touch quietly emerge.

And today, this morning, four years later, I’m kneeling before him, helping him zip up his coat for school. It’s been a battle of early waking, tantrums, wrong trousers and itchy socks so far and I’m guiltily looking forward to handing him over to someone else for just a few hours. We finally get the zip done up to his satisfaction. Then, just like the fast-moving weather that blows over this remote valley, the clouds that often hamper his interactions with the world scutter away. He looks at me with a smile so huge it washes his face in pure sunshine, and giggles ‘do you want a kiss Mummy?’

I whisper ‘yes please’ and he pushes his face at me so hard I almost overbalance. I grab wildly for the chair next to me, and he plants that beautiful baby mouth firmly on mine with a comical smacking noise as we windmill backwards in a heap on the carpet. The grin gets even wider and he throws back his head and laughs. And so do I, oh my darling, so do I.

-Candy Bedworth

Candy’s remote, rain soaked farmhouse clings to a steep-sided valley in rural Wales. She raises cats, chickens, and children with varying degrees of success. Art, literature, and Lakrids licorice save her sanity on a daily basis.