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Day 96

Twenty-eight years ago this very minute, I was in the car circling Shepherd's Bush roundabout on the way to the hospital, and I had my very first contraction. I mentioned this in passing to my flatmate at the wheel and he damned nearly crashed the car. So my son Joe's life was almost over before it had even begun.

Yes, it is Joe's birthday, my first born, the child who taught me how to be a mother first, a grown-up second, and a child all over again, bless him. No longer my baby, he is tall and stringy like his father but dark-haired and hazel-eyed like me, and someone who is often described as 'walking to the beat of his own drum' like I don't know who.

It sinks in now, if I let it - I have been a mother for twenty-eight years! There was a time when that prospect was so daunting, when I had no clue if what I was doing was right or wrong, if I was up to the task at all. How would I manage when he was a teenager if I couldn't even get him to ride on a bus as a toddler? (Same way as it turned out - grab him by the braces and ignore all the screaming).

Joe used to draw cats. And robots. And sometimes cats in capes flying over the heads of robots. He weighed so little I could pick him up with one hand until he was six. He had huge eyes in a tiny little Oliver Twist face. When he hit the age when boys and girls went their separate ways in the school playground, girls still invited him over to play. "I don't care if I get teased, " one little moppet once said, "he's kind and I like him". Good for you, Laura.

He always had the most alarming imagination. When the teachers played clap-around-the-circle games at school, Joe was the most inventive at being the one in the middle, doing something for every one else to copy. New every time, the teachers said, unlike anybody else.

His favourite Christmas presents were cardboard boxes, sellotape, string, and old yogurt pots. He went through a phase of traumatising our cats by making cat traps that were terrifyingly effective. Once, when he was seven and a friend of mine came to visit with his new baby daughter, Joe requested a box "to make a surprise present for the little baby". Try and imagine, if you will, the look on my friend's face, when Joe proudly produced a well constructed and working model of a guillotine - baby sized!

In more recent years, that imagination has been put to good use filming weird videos with his friend Andy, whose passion as a film-maker is phenomenal. You can catch Joe on You-tube doing 'The Mighty Wow'. Don't ask, just go and look, because really, there is no explanation that I can think of that comes close to explaining either of them.

He's coming round this evening. I'm going to make him a cake. And give him a telly for his new flat.

And remember that I made him, but he made me, too.

Happy birthday, Joe, Love from Mum. xxx