Small

Fun fact.

In 2018, when Harry and Meghan got married, the Lorraine show did a feature on what Mark Heyes, the fashion expert, thought the Royal Family would be wearing to the wedding. The day before the ceremony, they did a live special featuring lookalikes, as he styled them as they might be for the occasion.

At the time a friend of Benjy’s from preschool’s godmother (convoluted much?) was involved in the production of the show and it turns out that official child lookalikes are expensive, so she was hoping that her goddaughter could be enticed to appear as Princess Charlotte with the promise of some Haribo in the dressing room and probably keeping one of the outfits from the show. And did she have a small blonde friend who might make a Prince George?

Which is how Benjy ended up dressed in a linen suit from M&S, which Mark Heyes crudely hacked off with a pair of scissors just below the knee to tuck into a pair of knee high socks moments before he went back on set, holding the hand of a dubious Prince William lookalike waving a Union Jack while confetti cannons fired.

The Kate lookalike was amazing with the kids, looked eerily like the real Princess, and was a genuinely lovely person. We had a lot of fun with her backstage, and the result was that despite knowing I had been chatting with someone called Naomi who actually had a northern accent, I felt like I knew Kate. That’s how good of a lookalike she was.

However, thinking I know her when I evidently don’t is not why I have been unexpectedly shaken by the news today that Kate has cancer.

It’s because every news article about it lists underneath the names and ages of her children: Prince George, 10, Princess Charlotte, 8, and Prince Louis, 5.

And those are the exact ages that my kids were when we had to sit down and tell them that their dad had cancer. Boy, girl, boy. 10, 8, 5.

At the time, it was just something we were living. It was playing the hand we’d been dealt. It was reading up on how you tell kids their parent is going to die and trying to remember it all when you are looking your actual kids in the eye and their dad is so upset that he becomes unable to talk midway through. Everything says be simple, factual, allow them to ask questions.

“Is Daddy going to get better from the cancer?”
“No, I’m really sorry, there isn’t any medicine the doctors can give him that can make him better. Daddy is going to die from the cancer.”

I have a friend at school whose eldest child is the same age as my youngest, and her subsequent two have the same age gap as mine. Two years, then three years. And so hers are currently the same age as mine were when everything went to shit. And every time I look at her youngest one, going off into reception with his backpack that’s almost as big as he is, in his brother’s hand-downs, I think: “he’s so small.” Because mine aren’t, anymore.

But they were once. And my smallest was that small when we told him his dad was going to die. At the time it was just our life. Looking back, they were so little. Backpack down to the knees little. And their dad was dead.

During counselling last year, my counsellor suggested to me that perhaps I hadn’t allowed myself to fully realise the enormity of what we had been through as a family, that the trauma we had experienced losing Steve to cancer and then our support network to lockdown was bigger than I was perhaps acknowledging, because I had been so consumed by powering through as a necessity. That I had maybe seen it all as smaller than it actually was. Because when you are in it, you can’t really look at how big it is, because it will crush you.

She probably had a point.

I’m taking myself far far away from social media tonight because everyone, of course, wants to make their opinion on the diagnosis known. Everyone’s an expert. The fact she was thrown under the bus about the photo when they knew she had cancer. The fact William isn’t sitting next to her holding her hand in the video. Making news about when things are said and the way things are said and how things are said.

Removing the expletives that are definitely in the version in my head, I want to ask all these experts if they have ever had to sit down with a 10, 8 and 5 year old and explain to them what cancer is and where in their parent’s body it currently exists. I want to ask them if they have ever had to be the one to speak that fear into the lives of their children, to watch that darkening and cloud come over their tiny faces, to see three child react totally differently and not be able to be everything each of them needs concurrently and second guessing every word out of your mouth that breaks their hearts a little bit more. I want to ask them if they have had to know how it feels to be the one holding everything together but not the one that the disease is happening to, so not the worst off and it not being your story to tell, or your decisions to make, but it absolutely affecting every single thought and part of your life but feeling like you should be grateful it’s not you even though anything that happens to them impacts everything about you to an infinite degree.

I can guarantee that those that are casting more judgement have not.

Maybe, she didn’t care what anyone was saying about the photo. Maybe, she needed time with saying the words out loud without her voice cracking on the “c” one every time. Maybe, she wanted to be the one telling what was happening to her. Maybe, it’s easier for her to not have his pain next to her because having him alongside would make her more emotional and she just needs to get through what she has to say. Maybe, she wants one of them with the kids at all times and she needed to know he was with the children while she talked to the camera because that’s what they need right now. Maybe, this is the only way they know how because they don’t know what they are doing and there’s no guidebook and even if there was you would still have to find your own way through it because there’s no right way, only your way.

When today started, I wasn’t expecting to be cast back to that day in January 2019 that I told my kids a truth I wish I never had to. I wasn’t expecting to think: “but her kids are so small” (or as a douchenozzle on social media before my brain kicked in and told me to turn it off suggested: “still quite young” – FIVE, really?) and remember how small mine were when we had those conversations.

I liked having in common that my kid had once been dressed as her kid. Having this in common? Not so much.

If there is anything today that is the next right thing it is surely to remember to be kind. To people we will never meet, but who are going through something awful. To the man who grew out of the teenager who had to follow his mother’s coffin in front of the world and is now having to grapple with the cancer of his remaining parent and the other parent of his small children, as the world looks on and judges his every move, when it is her story to tell in the way that she wants to. To everyone we come across because we don’t know what it is that has made them feel small, but it can be things like this, and just being kind can make everything less awful. Because people can be small, but they can be carrying something absolutely massive. And when you get judged for how you carry something you never asked to pick up in the first place and that is so heavy that your whole self has changed from the weight, that judgement breaks you a little bit more than you were already broken.

I’m glad that Kate’s medical team are positive. I hope and pray for a full recovery for her. We never had any conversations about cancer that had any suggestion of hope in them, so our experience is definitely not theirs.

But there are stories that you hear that take you back to moments of yours that you almost can’t believe were your life. And today has brought one of those stories.

Cancer happened to us when our children were properly small.

Cancer happened to us and me feel small. Helpless to support my husband in something that only he was going through. Helpless to keep things going. Helpless to be in two places at once for what he needed and what the children needed. Helpless to have the right words, to answer the questions in a way that was appropriate, to make space for the big emotions.

And it was just what happened.

It happens to a lot of people. Even ones who live in palaces.

I guess today has just reminded me, as I think how chuffing terrible it is for this to be happening to them, that this happened to us. And it was chuffing terrible for it to happen to us, too. And sometimes how big of a thing it was, when we were so small, is something that just comes up and reminds me of the counsellor asking, do you realise how big it was?

I’m not sure.

I feel small tonight. And I feel sad for those small people that my children were at 10, 8 and 5, and for the small people that hers are, too.