Raising Margaret, Peter and little Anne in a house that was never quiet, and the long good years.
We had three children inside five years, which I do not recommend to anyone and would not change for the world. Margaret first, serious from the day she was born, then Peter, who never walked anywhere he could run, and then little Anne, who arrived in a hurry and has been in a hurry ever since.
The house was never quiet. There were shoes on the stairs and homework on the kitchen table and someone always shouting up to someone else. I worked my shifts around Tom's, so that one of us was nearly always home, which meant that for years we were like two people passing on a platform, a kiss and a handover and gone. We were tired in a way I can hardly describe now. But they were good years, the best, though you do not always know it while you are inside them.
Sunday was the day we were all together. I would do a roast, and we would sit down properly, and Tom would ask each of them in turn what they had done that week and actually listen to the answer. I have come to believe that is the most important thing you can do for a child, just to ask, and then to listen as though the answer were the only thing in the world. They knew they could tell us anything at that table. Most of the time they told us nothing important, but they knew that they could, and that is the point.
Children do not stay. That is the whole design of them. One by one they went, to work and to study and to lives of their own, and the house got quieter, and then it got very quiet indeed. I missed the noise so much it surprised me. But they came back, with people of their own, and then with children of their own, and the noise came with them, and I learned that a house empties and fills like a tide. You only have to wait for it to turn.