All grown up with no need for a cot

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London - The stair gates have gone. The bottles have been recycled and this week ‘baby Mabel’ is now in a big bed. Our ten-year-old cot has been dismantled for the fourth and final time. The day after it went I walked into the room where the cot once stood and was paralysed with sadness. Its absence made me feel as if my heart would burst. I could almost hear the whooshing of time, speeding forwards like a rollercoaster on its downward journey and gathering us all up in its wake. “No more babies,” Mr Candy had said matter-of-factly as he packed up the cot. As ever, he was being efficient and I was being emotional. I ran my hand over the bitten end of the worn wood remembering how my son would chew the cot in fury. “Out, out, out,” he’d call until he was big enough to slip over the top, slide down the stairs on his tummy and squirm his way into my bed. He’d wriggle his warm soft, podgy body so close I could feel his breath on the back of my neck.

I never returned him to his room (Supernanny would have dropped me points for that).

Parenting, it seems to me, is a series of ridiculously emotional lasts and firsts, every milestone is maternally and mentally exhausting.

The realisation I will never have any more babies hit me as I re-arranged Mabel’s toys. It’s the end of an era and for a millisecond I also felt a twinge of grief.

The day the cot went, my eldest, ten, was printing out pictures for her end-of-term year book.

In September she moves to senior school. She will be allowed to get the bus home they say in the letters. I dread the thought. How can that be? Surely I just swapped her pull-ups for knickers? Didn’t we just take her to Peppa Pig World?

Time hasn’t just raced past, it feels like it’s been stolen.

Mabel, two, is happy in the big bed with a bizarre spongy “sidester”, as she calls it, keeping her from falling out. She’s in the bottom bunk and her brother, six, is “up-a-top” as she says.

In the mornings, I find her squirrelled under the duvet like a well-fed hibernating dormouse or flopped in the middle, starfish-shaped, face down like a drunken teenager. She managed to get out once during her lunchtime nap, appearing next to us as we watched telly in our lounge. “I’m wide awake,” she announced before changing the channel from The Great British Bake-Off repeats (my son’s favourite) to Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

And so it begins. Her gradually gathering more control and me slowly losing it.

The more I grow into her, the more she grows out of me.

Everywhere I go time is marked out in front of me, the diary being driven by the speedy sprouting of my miniatures (I swear to God that I put them to bed and the next morning their feet have gone up a size and they need a haircut).

And at Mabel’s Friday music class I am by far the oldest mum in the room.

Having had her at 43, the other mums are all with their first off-spring and regard me with suspicion. Yet when I pick up my eldest from school later that day I am among peers as I had her at 33.

This weekend I am about to potty-train a bossy, moody toddler at the same time as I attempt to explain, or clarify, the facts of life to a bossy moody “pre-teen”.

I hope I don’t confuse the moment, weary as I am after ten years of interrupted sleep. As I am mourning the loss of my last baby’s babyhood I am, as usual, interrupted by my son, who has an uncanny knack of intruding on every poignant moment (in the same way he never knocks when I am in the loo).

“If I sit on my hand for half the day will it fall off?” he asks.

“No,” I say.

“I am telling Gracie she’s wrong then,” he replies. “One more thing,” he asks, “Do worms bleed? You don’t need to know why — just answer the question.”

I roll my eyes and head for the garden. I have been asked this twice before so I know the answer. - Daily Mail

* LORRAINE CANDY is editor-in-chief of ELLE.