His Royal Highness

Two days before my son turned a year old I was sitting in a hotel room. My boyfriend was rehearsing for a concert somewhere nearby and the baby was with his grandmother. I drunkenly ordered room service and ate it in bed, cross-legged, in a robe. I took a little nap. I was free to do these things. It’s funny for us to imagine our child as a tiny dictator, gesturing towards things that he wants and turning his head sharply if offered something that doesn’t bring him pleasure. “Does it pleaseth the king?” We ask. Ha ha ha.

For his birthday I wasn’t going to buy him anything, just make and decorate a cake. Oh, I would sew him a fabric crown, too, I decided, and embroider his initial on it and then every year he could wear it on his birthday and blow out his candles. That’s the type of mother I thought I would be.

I spent three consecutive days trying to work out how to make the crown. I never learned how to use a sewing machine but I reasoned that I could hand sew this. I measured his head (47cm), traced and cut out the shape of the crown in green velvet (scraps left over from curtains I bought on eBay a few years ago) and burgundy corduroy (a £2 skirt from the charity shop in town). I sewed the shapes together, turned them inside out. The stitches bulged. The two bits of fabric were slightly different shapes. I unpicked and tried again. It still didn’t work. I couldn’t understand why. “Find some instructions online,” my partner urged me, “Look up how to do it.” Look up how to do something, instead of blindly setting off full of misguided confidence in my own ability, finding out that I’m not immediately good at something and therefore casting it aside forever? Couldn’t be me, as they say.

We all three of us were hit by a terrible virus, meaning that I didn’t have the energy to make and decorate a cake. The Very Hungry Caterpillar silicone mould that I bought stayed in its tote bag cocoon. No crown, no cake. We staggered as far as the Co-op to buy a cupcake with multicoloured sprinkles on it. A strangely sad birthday - but the baby didn’t notice, since he had a cupcake all to himself, and a yellow balloon. No cards.

He did get a present, in the end: a wooden play kitchen that I got for twenty quid in the sale. I had fun putting it together while he slept; screwing all the parts together was easy and satisfying. He bangs the pots and pans arounds, opens and closes the oven door. He loves the kitchen, and I love observing him standing at it, as if involved in a form of work that I am familiar with. Of course, he has no idea what he is supposed to be doing. “It needs seasoning,” I say, shaking the little pepper shaker over a rubber broccoli, and putting it in the pan. He stares at me, bewildered, faintly pleased, or impassive. He takes the metal sink and throws it against the floor, babbling away to himself. No words yet, but all the sounds, all the intonation, of a language. I’m all ears. I record the noises he makes and repeat them back to him. “Mummy,” I say, wanting to be included in the conversation.

This Christmas was better than last. I was a week postpartum and everything was fizzing with a frightening new sensation that I had no words for. A friend of David’s told me I looked happy and relaxed, I remember, and I thanked him, so disassociated that I felt like I was floating in my own amniotic fluid. We ate Christmas dinner over the baby’s head because he wouldn’t be put down.

He took his first steps just before the year ended. He can stack his wooden strawberry by himself, but if he is tired and gets frustrated he throws the pieces across the floor and cries. He is learning to be naughty, doing things that he knows he shouldn’t do and staring at me for a reaction. I chase after him when he opens the door and lets himself into the hallway. If I don’t get up straight away he waits just outside the door for me to come, and then screams with delight and crawls away, laughing at his own chutzpah. “You’re so naughty,” I say. “Naughty baby.” I pick him up and spin him around. My king.