Do we talk, enough, about mateship among boys?

A first-night gathering of uni students in a freshly rented share-house warehouse in a city too far away. Excitement and larks. A ladder, a skylight, a roof. A fall. An early morning phone call that will never be forgotten. “Mum, I’m in hospital. I almost died. I’m about to have an operation.” Then the addendum: “My phone is almost out of juice.”

What? How? When? Scrabbling to wake The Chap then holding each other tight in a city too far away, clutching each other with the phone on speaker. The volume of history we have with this boy, our first born, a part of us, the body we’ve known through 21 years of footy fractures and meningitis scares and split lips and cut chins; the history of childhood accidents mapped out in a physicality we knew so well, as parents. Our beautiful boy, what now.

I wake his brother, 19 months younger, who springs from his pillow with a guttural cry of anguish and ownership – “My brother!” This is the practical one. He texts the flatmates whose numbers he has to fill in the jigsaw pieces of the scant news we’ve got. Is his brother still on the family’s medical insurance? My face a blank.

The day unfolds with details slowly coming in. Our boy’s wrist had caught the metal rim of the ladder as he fell through a skylight and the skin had peeled away. Nerve, tendon damage. He’d also dislocated a shoulder and the kids at the scene were so focused on this agonising injury that they didn’t at first realise the seriousness of the hand situation with copious blood loss. Until they did. And staunched the bleeding themselves.

Could we get to him in time for the operation? “You can’t come inside,” our boy told us on his dying phone, “because of the Covid situation. Just wait. I can handle it.” Then the throwaway, “They say I’ll lose hand function.” His devastation, that he wouldn’t be able to do his shifts in the kitchen of the fast food joint that pays for the rent on the warehouse. My devastation, that he’s a beautiful piano player whose music I beg for when he’s home, as my “medicine”.

Just before the operation he texts “Going in now” with a thumbs-up emoji. Meanwhile, our wildly beating love, through all the harrowing waiting, waiting, for news. Alongside the flatmates, lads he’s known since Year 7 who aren’t allowed in the ambulance but head to the hospital with a bag of supplies including a phone charger; this beautiful band of brothers who’ve just dealt with a catastrophic wound they’ve never seen before.

And now. The scar will be big and there’ll be a helluva story to tell for all the drinks in all the bars to come. Meanwhile, there’s boundless gratitude for the paramedics who came mercifully quickly, the compassionate nurses at Royal Melbourne Hospital and its gobsmackingly brilliant surgeons who operated for a very long time – and saved our boy’s hand. Yes, I’ve been thanking God a lot.

And there’s gratitude for all the beautiful kids on their first night together in that share house. Do we talk, enough, about mateship among boys? The loyalty, tenderness, laughs; the alchemy of support that can exist within those tight bands of brothers, groups that seem so much less complicated than tricky, drama-filled girl gangs. The mateship of men forged from both my boys’ school days is the greatest gift they took from those times. It’s a love I cherish, as a mother.

All these boys have been in a fulcrum between childhood and adulthood over the last few years as we parents have watched on, hearts in mouth, hoping for the best. And on that first night in their new home they grew up. Magnificently. Together. And saved the life of one of their own. They didn’t need parents. They got my boy through, as men. The gratitude for that, and the letting go.