Dearest Alicia,
Welcome to this mad, beautiful world that is planet earth. You were long awaited.
It was 3a.m. yesterday when we got the first clue that you may be on your way. Your mother was in the early stages of contractions but the hospital thought them not advanced enough to justify keeping us there and sent us home again with a recommendation that we get as much sleep as we can. By 9a.m. we had returned and both of us jumped straight into the birthing pool which is where we stayed until you arrived and popped up to the surface, cork like, some four hours later. We promptly introduced ourselves, dried off and your mother was ready to leave an hour later. Looking back now it was all quite surreal.
Your mother was brilliant yesterday and made child birth look kind of easy. I guessed she would because underneath the beautiful exterior is a tough lady with her fair share of mettle. You see she's from a nation of peoples that in the last 100 years have experienced and survived revolution, two great wars, at least one crazed despot leader and the misery of communism. These are events that shape a nation, its people and their very character. They gave your mother some of her stoicism, her steely grit and determination in life - qualities she has passed to you I'm sure.
Your mother is a special lady and will be a great mum I know. She started taking good care of you long before yesterday. She exercised everyday and attended Yoga for pregnant women weekly. She ate really good food and walked the beaches of the North Antrim coast every weekend to get you the best slugs of air possible. Many mornings at 6a.m. as I served her freshly squeezed organic carrot juice I caught her playing you some Prokovief, Shoshtakovich or Rachmaninov on her Iphone. By the way she's also taken you to so much live music in the past nine months that if you turn out to have no rhythm at all you have only your father to blame.
Your Mother and I make a great team. She is one of just a few people on planet earth who truly gets me. She knows exactly when to give me space and when to give me a good handbagging. The fact that I've had little of the latter may be more to do with the expense of her designer handbags than my good behaviour. But let me tell you she'll soon sus you too. So no tricks hey? Already I've noticed that she looks different.It's like your coming into this world has somehow fulfilled or completed her as a woman. Pre your arrival she was happy but now I see in her eyes a level of contentment that I have never seen before.
When I first held you yesterday I wanted to explain to you everything about my almost 50 years on planet earth, how you came to be in my arms and how your mother came to be with me. I wanted to tell you how we found each and fell in love or how I proposed to your mum on the top of a mountain in a howling winter blizzard in the dead of night. But there will be time for that later. Lots of time.
For now let me tell you that you'll soon realise we're not what you may describe as conventional parents. We're both a good bit older than most parents of young babies. But we hope this is your good news for it should mean we wont make the glaring mistakes we both would have made as parents in our 20s. We will make mistakes, be sure of this. But we can only hope they will be few and small enough for you to forgive us later on.
If lady luck has been good to you that you have come to us now and not twenty years ago she has been kind to you in other ways too. Statistically, you're still more likely than not to arrive in a part of the world which has a high infant mortality rate, or a really poor health service or where you can't afford to go to school or where you have every chance of regularly going to bed hungry. But you didn't. You landed here in Northern Ireland in a great hospital with fabulous schools and with well, so much food that stats also tell us that a third of it is wasted annually.
Gradually, as you get older you'll learn about our families Alicia. You'll find out that your great Grandmother in Moscow died just last year aged 96 and that she was deaf and signed for most of her life. You'll work out soon enough that your Babushka is a clever lady and worked until just last month on Sputnik Satellites. She's a distant descendant of the great Russian scientist Lomonosov did you know which means you are also.You'll love your Dedushka too. He'll introduce you to simple living in his dacha and give you your best chance of understanding the importance of keeping yourself grounded, living off the land and appreciating everything nature has to offer. He'll show you just how many dishes you can do with wild mushrooms and teach you that there aint much in life you can't pickle.
On your Dad's side you'll learn about how your great grandpa built almost all the roads worth talking about in the county of Cheshire, how your Grandpa went to sea at just 16 and sailed the globe many times and how your gran has clairvoyant qualities. She's detected ghosts in many houses including one we once lived in Devon. Spooky hey?
When your Sad was just a few years older than you are now he and his family used to travel from that same spooky house in Devon to Chester or Guernsey to see our Grandparents during the holidays. These were big journeys in those days which required either a long trip up a series of new motorways in a Ford Cortina or a flight in a noisy Viscount propeller airplane to the Channel Islands. Your dad's excitement was almost beyond containment. Your aunty's too. For you there'll be trips to Devon, but also to Anglesey and to Moscow. Yes Moscow. You can expect lots of trips to stay with your Babuska and Dedushka in their summer dacha in your early years. Lucky you.
Since you arrived both your mother and I have become aware of an almost primordial need to care for you, protect you and keep you from harm. This comes from your complete helplessness and vulnerability I'm sure. But I think it is also because your parents have traveled a lot and seen a lot too. Perhaps even too much. Whilst we've been lucky enough to grace such wonderful and luxurious places as Lake Como, Sri Lanka and the Maldives between us we've also seen the grinding poverty that exists in this world in Africa, Latin America and many places in between. A few years ago I was with your oldest cousin David in Malawi. We visited a family just outside our local village. They had lost their only bread winner the father. He hadn't died. He had just walked off and abandoned his wife and four children leaving them feeling unwanted, unloved and very hungry. They told us they had last had something to eat three days before. When their mother was asked when she expected to eat again her only reply was a shrug of her shoulders. Sometimes I try to forget memories like this because they feel like a burden that's too heavy to carry at times. Often though, I chastise myself for even countenancing the idea and think it better to go to bed hungry as a form of self counselling and dealing with the guilt of never really knowing what it's like to have nothing; absolutely nothing. On the TV we hear all sorts of reports about the abuse of children by their elders, about wars and the pain and suffering they cause to the most innocent of all people : children. You've dropped onto this planet into a marvelous place amongst great people. But as a race Alicia you should know that we are deeply deeply flawed and capable of all sorts of bad things. Hidden among our wonderful achievements in technology, health care and transport is an underworld of greed, hate and speciesism that causes terrible pain suffering, death and war. May be its this that gives your mother and I this overwhelming desire to protect you.
Also since you arrived I've spent a good while wondering what the world will be like for you in say ten years time or twenty or thirty. I can't help but do it because when I was not much older than you the world was so different to how it is today. When I was 12 I tried so hard to find a pen friend in your mother's old country the Soviet Union. But contact with anyone the other side of the Iron Curtain was next to impossible, travel there was difficult and at all times restricted and monitored. When just 17 I did make it behind the Iron Curtain to Leningrad. I was followed in and who knows followed out too. When I tried to strike up conversation with a man I met at the ballet in the Marinsky theatre my potential friend apologised but explained that he couldn't speak to me because he feared we were being watched.
Today Alicia, I speak to your Grandparents in Moscow by Skype from the kitchen whilst preparing dinner every week and subject to the grant of a visa, which is almost automatic, we're free to jump on a plane and visit Russia any time we want. This is just one example of the many changes that have happened in my lifetime so who knows what will happen in yours....
Finally, we have a fluffy friend we need to tell you about Alicia. Soon we plan to introduce you to Remmi a friend's beautiful dog who lives in the neighbourhood. He's a gorgeous labrador retriever. He's become a great friend of ours, almost part of our family your might say as he's shared many of our walks with us over the past nine months on the Antrim coast or in the hills of Donegal. Remmi shows us unbounded affection, loyalty and unconditional love. These are qualities that we aim to show you for the rest of your life.Your Mum and I have already committed to love you unconditionally. We plan to tell you we love you every day.That's our promise and much more too.
Alicia welcome to this mad, beautiful world that is planet earth.
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