For a while when liam was growing up i read books of any kind thinking i could give him a head start at life when he could understand things by teaching him what’d taken me years to learn in a short while. He would skip all my trial and error. However, that doesn’t work, kids will inevitably learn that things are hot, only by touching a boiling pot, as the saying goes. In the end it’s far more important for me to be someone he can compare scars with.

I point to his head when he’s sitting up in bed with me. He asks me why i’m pointing at his head and i say his brain is in there. His first instinct is to try and reach it by putting a finger in his nose. I laugh and tell him the brain is a sponge, and it soaks up all the information it can at an early age. But if you take it out of the water it dries up. My mother gets a much more clinical explanation for my asking questions. I tell her i was just asking a question because the brain is full of synapses and the sum of what you’ve learned is contained in the connections. That’s not good enough though, the brain isn’t satisfied knowing what it knows. There’s always a synapse with extra space to branch out. She doesn’t understand. I tell her it’s like spiders making their webs bigger. She says i should clean out the cobwebs.

I tell Liam, before he knows it he will have grown into a tall and strong man. & your mind will marvel at the power your body can exert over things. The world will bend and break for you, my son. And you would have forgotten what it is to be soft had it not been for the millions of receptors in your fingertips. They will never tire of the feeling of gliding weightless over things. Combing your hair as my mother did mine when i was young.