A sense of wonder and a six year old

The Lozenge is six. He celebrated with a Minions party and his world turned blue and yellow for the day while he entertained a clutch of school friends, a mere 25 small ladies and gentlemen, at home.

The cake was gratefully received, and I avoided for another year, an expensive shop-bought, polystyrene-tasting number. Though it took me most of a day to make and my hands were blue for the rest of the week.

When I was one,
I had just begun.
When I was two,
I was nearly new.
When I was three,
I was hardly me.
When I was four,
I was not much more.
When I was five,
I was just alive.
But now I am six,
I'm as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six
now and forever.

AA Milne clearly spotted something special about six.

In the fabulous film Boyhood by Richard Linklater, the opening scene is of a six year old boy, lying in the grass staring at the clouds. The Lozenge has reached this chapter, and now I see a boy with absolutely no baby or toddler left in him, the essence of the person he is destined to be emerging quite clearly in this age of innocence.

Maybe the age of six is when patterns in a child's head become a little bit visible to an outsider. Like you can feel them trying to make sense to the world; of life and how things work, searching for clarity. And marvelling as some knots unravel before them.

Maybe the age of six is the first true age of wonder.

I took the Lozenge, Rashimi and a couple of friends out for a birthday dinner and at the end of the evening, we climbed into our bashed up Nissan after plates of chicken nuggets and a pile of cinnamon twists covered in sparklers.

The night air was cool as I started the engine and as we drove down the familiar seam road dividing West and East Jerusalem. I opened the cranky sun roof just for fun. The little group of friends cooed and sighed at the stars above us, and then it began to rain. 'No! Don't close the roof Mummy! We want to feel the rain on our faces and see the sky'. And in the rear view mirror I saw the small faces gazing up, transfixed. The Lozenge's Swedish friend said: 'This is the most awesome car in the woooorld!' And later as I pulled the duvet over the Lozenge and kissed him goodnight he said to me all in one breath as he drifted off: 'When-can-I-be-six-again-and-have-dinner-in-a-restaurant-with-my -friends-and-drive-home-in-the-darkness-with-the-roof-open-and-see-the-stars?WhenMummyWhen?'

With the recent troubles in Jerusalem I've been collecting the boys on foot from school to avoid public transport and traffic jams. Walking rather than driving provides more avenues for conversation as the pace is slow and considered with the Pea in a pram and two tired dwarfs dragging their feet after a busy day. I love this walk. We all get to see things that interest us. For me it's the buildings and the people: An Ethiopian church, Holman Hunt's House, a Synagogue, Ultra-orthodox men scurrying by, side-locks swinging, and then at the bottom of  Hanevim (Prophets) street, after a gentle downhill slope, to your right, you get a glimpse of the Dome of the Rock - shining gold on the furthest horizon, framed by palm trees, and a tiny peek of the less spangly Al Aqsa Mosque. It stirs me though I am not a Muslim. It amazes me that in this land, where so much has been destroyed in the name of God, so, also, have these beautiful things been created.

As I gazed at the dome, the boys kicked stones along with their trainers as boys do and the Lozenge shooed away a street cat. 'These cats are not nice, and they smell when they're dead Mummy.' (Referring to the rotting feline corpse we had near our garage last year). But they don't smell when they're alive, do they? So why are they smelly when they die? And us too - we're not smelly now, but do we smell when we're dead?

A conversation followed about death and decomposition as we crossed the same seam road, and into our Arab East Jerusalem neighbourhood.

'Great Granny was buried under the earth, becuase we went to see the place where she is in Scotland didn't we. Did she decompose like the cat?'

The Lozenge shuddered. 'I don't want to decompose.'

 'But it is quite cool that I'd make the flowers grow.'

'And I don't want you to die Mummy,' said Rashimi.

'Can people still hear when they die?' asked the Lozenge.

'No because our ears are also busy decomposing and making themselves into plant food'.

On the other end of the timeline of life lies the Pea, and since she arrived I've noticed how no one can speak to a baby in a language that isn't their own. Our house has been a revolving door of visiting nationalities since the Pea joined our family. From Bethlehem to Babel she has travelled. We've been inundated with gifts and gestures - a warm Iranian quiche delivered to our door by a glamorous Iranian friend; on the Pea's wall hangs a Hail Mary in Spanish and on her shelf a tiny golden Jerusalem cross on a chain from a Palestinian friend. In her 10 weeks of life she's heard: Armenian, Basque, Catalan, Spanish, Farsi, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, French, Hebrew, Sinhalese from St Grace and plenty of Arabic: Jordanian, Palestinian and Egyptian dialects. I love how my Swedish friends sound out her name 'Pee-a-trah', and it seems her name is the same in every language. Everyone wants to visit when you have a baby in the house, and everyone talks to you in the street. It's like you have a small, breathing charm in tow. Everyone wants to share in the wonder and their mother-tongues come from the bottom of their souls. We all explain it differently but the wonder is shared.

I'm now in my den, the Pea, pea-cefully sleeping, and I'm listening to Bach.  Maybe you know you're a grown up when you appreciate birdsong and Bach. It's music that makes you stop and not do anything so you have space to listen. I remember my Grandfather sitting alone in a sunlit room in North Wales for much of a morning, just listening to Bach. His huge long fingers, like the BFG's it seemed to me, tapping occasionally on the arm of the chair.

I remember the CD was the Goldberg Variations by Glenn Gould. It was called: 'A Sense of Wonder'.

A friend put me onto a beautiful podcast which I listened to yesterday: 'Composing a Life' with Mary Catherine Bateson, the daughter of the anthropologists Gregory Bateman and Margaret Mead.

Every word is gold, but one of her clearest truths, so applicable to our lives in this holy city filled with misunderstanding and hatred, is this same notion of wonder.

She says: 'To me the starting place is the sense of wonder. And that can take you into science, it can take you into art. Other human beings are amazing and beautiful. The natural world around us -- the more we study it the more fascinating and intricate and elegant it turns out to be...
Look. Just look. Realise how beautiful it is, how complicated it is. The wonder of creation...
I got interested in the sense of wonder, because I spent a year of high school in Israel and then I came back and decided I wanted to learn about Islam and I studied Arabic. So I thought I should be doing something to address the Islamophobia, hostility and prejudice that has grown up after 9/11. The way I went about it, was to say: What is it that makes me as a Christian, empathise with a Muslim. At what point are we together? And what struck me is that what actually all three of the religions that come from Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam - what we all have in common, is the sense of wonder that leads to praise. That is to say, when you go from wonder to a religious context, a shared worship, something like that, it takes the form of praise. And in spite of the huge differences in other aspects of the traditions: the different set of rules, expectations, behaviours. Praise is central in all of them.'

Wonder must be the sacred we can share.

Especially with a six year old.

From decomposition. To domes.

Marshmallow land

The Pea is back in bed after being awake for an hour and a half and there is silence. Peace that is, other than the drone and the helicopter overhead; and the continual text messages informing of stabbing attacks in Hebron or Jenin, and skirmishes of Palestinians against the ever trigger happy Israeli Security Forces.

The Pea and I are at home alone together for the first time since she arrived. Our house has been filled with people and whilst these have been the happiest of months, I'm relishing the solitude and the feeling of independence. This morning I feel as though the storm of the beginnings of a human trajetory has passed, giving way to gently lapping waves against the sides of our little boat of life. Our keel feels steadier, the rudder set gently in place and we sail forwards.

St Grace has gone to collect her husband who will be coming to work here in Jerusalem. After nearly 2 years living in our house, she will move out and live with him in a small lodging with his new employer - conveniently just across the valley from where we live.

I've learned so much from St Grace over this time, despite the inevitable and occasional pinch points due to co-existence. She's tolerant and quick to laugh. She lives and she loves with a fullness of spirit. She's been so happy since the Pea arrived, calling her Pinki - a Sri Lankan name she loves. 'She is our first girl,' she laughed. St Grace has only ever cared for boys: her own son, now 13; our dwarfs; and one other boy before us. She crocheted a little dress for the Pea which we will keep for ever.

As she left our house for the bus to the border into Jordan, to return in two days for a new life here with her husband, she said goodbye to us. She touched the Pea's cheek. 'Good bye Pinki. I will see you in two days.' St Grace's eyes filled with tears. I will never know all the depths to that woman and how much she suffered from leaving her own child at only 2 years of age. But what I do know is the sadness and struggle of it all has not left a shred of bitterness behind in her. Her strong faith has helped her work things through. 'That Holy Sepulchre has answered many of your prayers, hasn't it Grace,' I joked to her the other day. She shook her head, laughing, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. 'We ask for things, we ask again, we try to do good. And then we wait. Wait for the answers.' she said.

I'm looking forward to her being back, and working with us in a slightly different capacity. With a bit of extra space between us, we can appreciate each other even more, like when you move back from a painting in a gallery to wonder at it more wholly.

***

The first few weeks with a new baby is like living in marshmallow land: everything is soft, sweet and squishy, with the moments melding languidly into each other making me wonder what we did with our time. Each anecdote and action is in danger of being immediately forgotten as the body takes over from the head, and locks into provision mode until the baby is about 3 months old when some clarity and angles appear from the mallowy madness. I think a production cycle is almost exactly a year - 9 months in the making, and 3 more to rejoin the wheel on which other non-hormonal humans spin.

The interesting thing about having a third child, as Rashimi pointed out, is that 'The Pea is all of our baby'. Not just J's and mine. And the beauty of having multiple kinder is you get to observe as well as participate, while the small strands of relationships begin to form between ourselves like a tiny web - our threads linking to each other and back and on towards a different human in the family. The web is more complex and the dwarfs thoughts and actions towards their small sister are intriguing and funny.

The Lozenge had drawn a picture of 'Petra and the Planets' and stuck it on the door in time for her arrival home. The small, and the infinitesimally enormous, combined on one purple bit of paper stuck to her new bedroom, formerly the dwarf zone, with 'mathking tape' without which the Lozenge does not spin happily in his own personal orbit.

With each new child, the level of chaos and lack of control creeps down a notch. The new normal is now a new level of chaos, I thought as I hurried from delivering the dwarfs at school to give the Pea some more immunisations, her little body like a sack of new potatoes dangling around my front in a hastily hitched sling, her small purple mottled calves sticking out like frogs legs, causing bemused looks from Palestinian passers by who do not carry their children in this way.

The night before, I'd threaded Rashimi into a spiderman suit while feeding the Pea and operating the TV control with the other hand for the Lozenge, and Rashimi observed: 'Wow, Mummy, that is cool. You can feed the baby and put on my thpiderman suit at the same time. You're just like Mr Clever!' He's right. I often find myself carrying the Pea, still feeding, on her cushion around my waist while I go to answer the door or reach for the phone. Like the lady with the ice cream tray around her waist at the theatre. There's no limit to what you'll try to avoid screaming Peas or histrionic dwarfs. Life becomes a constant conquest for calm. And life for those first few weeks and months is purely about milk, which is also reflected in our conversations.

I'm not a natural milk cow and I complained to J one day somewhat tearfully that the Pea would have starved to death by now if we were in the wild. Or we'd have been eaten by an animal because I had to sit there for so long feeding, for her to get enough. Even with the third child the 'breastapo' breast feeding warriors can make you feel bad about using formula milk. But fortunately if you're married to a man, only one of you will be surfing on hormones. J replied calmly: 'But the great thing is, we're not in the wild Luce, and we can use the formula milk when we don't have quite enough,' giving me a huge hug.

And the constant feeding allows room for dwarf observations, who are never far away. They miss nothing.

While playing with a little friend who has no brothers or sisters yet, Rashimi explained: 'Did you know, Dylan? That milk cometh out of Mummy'th boobies?' he enquired of his friend who was staring with interest as the Pea had her fourth meal of the day.

'Yeah,' continued the Lozenge, 'she's just like a cow.'

'And a cow. That can talk!' marvelled Rashimi putting a final piece of Lego on the garage they were building.

Later that day the dwarfs flanked me, their hot breath near to the Pea's face, their hands, which looked so enormous compared to hers, leaning on our bodies. 'Do babieth have bones?' mused Rashimi kneading the Pea's legs, while the Lozenge whipped out one of the pads from my bra and said: 'Mummy, what'th this?' putting it on his head, while Rashimi did the same with the other. They sat there either side of me with the white pads on their heads.  'They look like those hats that men wear on the street! But their oneth are black!' referring to the Jewish kippa hats we see every day.

As he left for school one morning, Rashimi asked. 'Mummy, is it alright if I can see your boobies?'

'If you don't ask, you don't get,' laughed J, helping them zip up their back packs and heading out the door.

We wondered if this would be one of Rashimi's stock chat up lines later in life.

Hopefully that one rather than another one we overheard at school: 'Did you know that dogs sniff each other's bottomth becauthe they really want to say hello to each other, but they can't talk.'

On the whole, the dwarfs seem unperturbed by the diminutive newcomer. And they don't seem resentful of how much time I've been locked down, feeding. Although the crying of the Pea does upset them and occasionally spurs them into rather effective action. At one point of fever pitch, they both crouched by her car seat rocking it enthusiastically back and forth, the Lozenge singing Jingle Bells on the kazoo, Rashimi on the castanets, and both musical boxes throwing out a clashing harmony of Brahms and Swan Lake. Some gentle snoring emanated from the car seat in a matter of minutes. This baby seems to love noise. And both dwarfs love rushing into her room to re-insert the dummy. Perhaps smelling of Nutella not baby milk is a help.

And the existence of a girl about the place is also educational. They often bathe the three of them together and the Lozenge picked up the Pea by the legs and had a good look at her bottom. 'So she doesn't have a willy,' he remarked. 'So does the wee and the poo come out of the same place like a pigeon?'

The order of things changes with each new chick in the nest, and in some ways the older ones become more independent as a result.  The Lozenge had his first day out to the beach with his lovely Swedish friend.

He took a sketch book in his backpack and they had lunch in Ikea, aka 'the blue and yellow shop'. As his brother drew out in his friend's car, Rashimi sighed: 'I miss Lauwie.' They hadn't spent a day apart since January.

I feel like the time in marshmallow land is drawing to a close. I have more energy for other bits of creative activity, and my brain seems like it is creeping back into the lead again, leaving the body a close second. In some ways it reminds me of reaching the end of making a TV or film production: I am thankful for the space, but in a little corner of myself, I miss the frenetic action of the set and the adrenalin and excitement it gives.

This is war

'This is war now,' says the Niham, Palestinian health worker to me as she prepares to prick the Pea's dough-like thigh with a vaccination shot. 'Life here for us is unbearable and we are afraid. Afraid for everything.'

Our East Jerusalem neighbourhood has changed over the last couple of weeks. It's littered with hurriedly assembled checkpoints of cement roadblocks, groups of border police and soldiers and the ubiquitous blue and white Israeli flags, for extra salt in the Palestinian wound. Although our area is administered by Israel, it is still officially Palestine - and houses the Old City and contentious Haram e Sharif, or Temple Mount, the third most holy place for Muslims, their sovereignty of which is continuously threatened.

I collected the dwarfs from school and on the way back, we passed at least three groups of Israeli border police - heavily armed in flack jackets, carrying out impromptu searches on skinny Palestinian youths. The young men, most with the de rigeur hair cut with shaved sides and a strip of hair on top like a racoon, were standing with their hands raised, shirts lifted to reveal a naked torso. The dwarves gawped as I snarled under my breath - 'just leave them alone.' I imagined what I would feel if they were my boys. And I also wondered how much more anger these police were stirring up inside the young men - perhaps further radicalising them with every poke and prod.

The atmosphere is tense and you feel like one spark would send it all up again.

As Niham measures the Pea's dimensions she cries: 'Mashallah!' (God willed it!) in relation to her growth curve. 'She is doing well, mashallah!' Although she expressed concern abut the size of the Pea's head which was off the scale compared to local babies. She pointed a biro above the top of the curve on her graph. 42cm - this is veeeeery big! 'How is the father?' asked Niham, enquiring about the size of J's head. 'I'm not sure actually,' I said, laughing. After 12 years you'd have thought I'd know if J had a big head or not. 'Well, maybe she's just got a lot of thoughts in there,' I said. Despite Niham's difficult circumstances she is chatty and friendly to me like everyone we've dealt with in the realm of health since the Pea was born.

Our room in Bethlehem where we stayed for those first two nights during a hot week in August, a clutch of nurses became our regular visitors: Samah (forgiveness); Ahlam (dreams); and Jamila (beautiful). A healthy recipe for life in their essence by the meanings of their names. We were comfortable in the little room which looked out onto a hibiscus bush - the vermillion flowers bursting open at daybreak and folding sleepily at dusk. Just like ourselves. Labaneh, olives, a boiled egg and warm flatbread arrived on a tray at breakfast and during the night if the Pea wailed for longer than a few minutes, Jamila would pop her head around the door: 'Would you like me to take her so you can sleep a little habibti (dear)?'

'How many babies are you looking after tonight?' I asked.

'Just 24!' she laughed.

I went with her down the corridor, a large Bedouin family spilling out of the adjacent room talking excitedly and drinking tea. An older lady cast a bemused expression towards my legs which were bare from the knee down.

I could see, when I saw the rows of Palestinian babies lying under brightly coloured hand knitted blankets, with heads of thick black hair peeking out, why the Pea had caused so much excitement amongst the nurses. She seemed like a shining smooth boulder compared to the other little shaggy haired pebbles around her. Perhaps a kilogram more than the average, and hair dark hair seemed blonde compared to her tiny neighbours.

'Isn't it amazing how each one is so completely different to the other,' I sighed to Jamila looking at the little bodies, gently breathing under their blankets.

'Yes, and they are aaaaaall beautiful,' Jamila said, smiling warmly.

'How many children do you have yourself?' I asked.

'I have no children of my own, so I have all the space in my heart for the babies I look after here.'

Beautiful by name and beautiful by nature.

J spent the first night with the Pea and I, and then collected a duo of exciteable dwarfs and St Grace the following day. We'd phoned home earlier and told the Lozenge he had a baby sister. 'Oh, that'th nithe!' he'd said. From an adult that would have sounded so trite. Yet this comment came from the depths of the Lozenge himself - we could hear that.

Mum arrived that afternoon and came for dinner and a glass of sherry in our little room. I hoped the alcoholic wafts didn't disturb any of our neighbours.

The atmosphere in our house has changed almost immediately for the presence of the Pea. I had wondered before we brought her back home, if the dwarfs would feel threatened or bored by the demands for constant feeding and lulling her to sleep. But back home the dwarves proved themselves to be enthusiastic mannies. They sang and stroked and swaddled her, leaning their full weight on her tiny body as they bent to kiss her. 'She smells nithe!' said Rashimi, with a slight Arab lilt to the way he pronounced,' Smell'. Like the way he says 'littel' and 'tabel'. 'And Mummy, I want her to stay small for ever and ever.'

That evening I'd watched the dwarfs playing with a matryoshka doll as I fed the Pea on the sofa. Rashimi's nut brown, sticky hands pulled the little dolls apart revealing one doll inside another and then another inside that one. It was like an onion, I thought, as you peel off the outer layer to reveal another almost identical but smaller one within. And it struck me that the matrioshka could be the symbol of a matriarchy - the female line. I looked at the Pea snuffling at my chest and remembered that she has all her eggs in her body already. And I've had mine since birth, and Mum had hers, and so on. We women are the matryoshka themselves. Smaller buds of bodies within each other's bodies.

So it's no wonder that for having an, albeit tiny, female presence about, the dynamic and balance of our little family has changed for ever.

Later that night, J and I lay mulling over our brand new order of things, the Pea lying between us. 'I've never been in bed with two girls before,' he said as he fell asleep.

Sleeping lion and small lioness

Cubs contemplating one another