I love the way we are both looking in astonishment at my son. It shows the unwavering support she gave me when he was born
This picture of my mother, me and my eldest son, Theo, was taken the morning after he was born in May 2002, in University College Hospital, London.
There are a lot of things I love about it. I love the fact my mother is exquisitely dressed – she’s wearing her pearls! She always looked very elegant at this time in her life and enjoyed clothes (we bought that suit on a day out together). I love the composition too – our three dark heads, faces in profile and the way our three hands are aligned. I love the miracle of my son’s intricate little shell of an ear, the nose (his dad’s) and lips (mine) still visible now in his 23-year-old face.
There are other things you can’t see that I love about it too. My mother and father – long separated but still close – had raced each other in deadly earnest down the corridor and across the ward to get to our bedside first and meet their first grandchild; she won, of course. That makes me laugh, but also makes me feel fiercely loved. I also can’t quite see, but absolutely remember, the full body relief I felt when she arrived. I had an easy birth, but it was followed by a rough, restless night in a ward full of babies who tag-teamed their screaming. I recall staggering, leaking alarmingly, to the loo, and alternating between trying to feed this angry, hairy enigma and haggardly eyeballing a lifetime of responsibility in the odd moments he slept. Then there she was: the cavalry. This picture marks probably the first moment I fully exhaled in 12 hours.
