What's 30 years or so?

This is the day, 30 years ago, that I sat in a hospital bed, confused, bemused, besotted... At 1:49am on August 10th 1981 I gave birth to JC. Some 6 weeks premature, very small even for that gestation & with a fighter's strength he hung on to life with a determination belied by his size. He was delivered naturally, suddenly and still in the amniotic sac. The nurses wrapped him up in a warm blanket and then silver foil. They held him out to show me with the words "here's your son, you probably won't see him again". These are not words you want to hear when you've just given birth to your first child. These are actually words you just never want to hear.

They were wrong though.

The unmentionable...

It's my birthday today. I'm 47. Time, I think, to start counting backwards to be sure I avoid the big Five Ooooohhhhhh.

Many of my birthdays have been average, even sad. My Eighteenth was the day I found out I was pregnant, my twenty first came only two months after my eldest son died. My Thirtieth was a massive joke. Husband was supposed to take me out for dinner but he couldn't leave work (as in he couldn't and still can't relinquish control) and then one of the drivers from the company he worked for managed to "invite" himself to stay the night in our spare room and intended to come to dinner with us. This was a nice enough man but he was not a scintillating conversationalist and he was not who I wanted around on my birthday. In the end my husband sent this driver and another employee over to our place to have dinner with me while he worked. We had pizza... It sucked...