All of Me

epilogue

"Hi, baby! Are you having fun down here with your brother and sister?" she asks, wearing the most infectious smile. The Mom I see in front of me now and the one she was when we moved here are two different people. Gone are her tired eyes and thin limbs, her tears and her fainting. Her nights may be restless once more, but for an entirely different reason. It isn't grief that keeps her up at night, but her son.

Jasper was a surprise. To put it lightly.

Mom thought she was going through the menopause for months. She was sad about it, and dreading the side effects she had read about. She put her weight gain down to the fact that she was trying to gain weight and in the midst of wedding planning, she didn't think too much about it. It was only a week after she and Tad got married that she realized she was pregnant, already six months along.

That was when she went into panic mode, worrying that something would go wrong, that it had been twenty years since she'd last been pregnant, that forty-six was too old to have a baby. But for all her fussing, she refused all the tests. She didn't want to know if anything was wrong. It wouldn't change anything, she said, so there was no point, but it might have saved her three months of stress.

Jasper was born perfectly healthy on the twenty-second of June. He and Mom stayed in the hospital for a few days, in a private room that Kris insisted on paying for, and Mom was in no state to argue that. It was such a weird day, to go from eating breakfast with her, with such a small bump that I was sure the doctor was wrong about Jasper's due date, to having a brother by dinnertime.

We were on the beach when she went into labor. She was convinced that it would be another week or so – she had her mind set on the thirtieth – and she wanted to be distracted as she wound closer to her due date. Gray and I were floating in the lake and Tad was napping when Mom's waters broke and she lost the page of the book she was reading. She was insistent that she had plenty of time, that we didn't need to rush to the hospital only to sit around for ten hours.

Tad disagreed. That was the firmest I've ever seen him, when he told Mom that he didn't want to take any chances, so the four of us bundled into the car and Jasper made it pretty clear he wasn't going to wait around. We were only there for a couple of hours before he screamed his way into the world.

There was a surreal moment when Gray and I were playing endless rounds of snap in the waiting room to distract ourselves, and then Tad was there, red-eyed and crying. My first thought was that something had gone wrong, a hundred awful scenarios racing through my mind in the time it took him to tell us to come and meet our brother.

Mom was exhausted, hair scraped off her sweaty forehead. She cried when we came in; I cried when I saw Jasper for the first time, when Tad leant over Mom and kissed her, when he told her how strong she was and how proud he was.

He has said that a lot in the past four weeks, the soft words always accompanied by a gentle smile, a murmur in her ear; a hand on her waist and a kiss. He also said I told you so a fair few times, tutting at her for not wanting to head straight to the maternity wing.

It's hard to believe a whole month has passed since then, a month of nights disturbed by a crying baby and the creaking floorboards that signal someone trying to shush him. Since Tad and Gray officially moved in at the start of the year and sold their house in February – to a sweet old couple who mind their own business except to coo over Jasper – there's been no haven next door to escape to for a bit of peace and quiet.

Mom sits down to feed Jasper and when Tad comes through the front door with breakfast, he makes a beeline for them, pressing Jasper between his chest and Mom's when he kisses her. Only after he's greeted them, nuzzling his face in Jasper's hair, does he even seem to notice Gray and me. He and Mom are both in a baby bubble at the moment.