Letter to my baby

Dear Audrey,

It's your 2nd birthday today, and I'm writing this while watching you sleep, waiting for you to wake up and have breakfast and presents and all of the fun things we have planned.

This time two years ago, I was also waiting. I was sat in a hospital waiting room and I knew I'd be meeting you that day. I was very scared, so scared I felt sick and my hands were shaking when I tried to write you a letter. I knitted instead, a little green dress for you. I couldn't imagine you wearing it. I couldn't yet imagine you at all, even when they scanned you and I saw your beautiful squished up face pressing into my rib cage.

You were born at 10.20am and I'll never forget that moment as long as I live. It didn't feel like the moment I became a mother - I had already felt like a mother for months as I struggled through a very difficult pregnancy and felt every movement you made inside my swollen body. But it did feel like an entirely new kind of love, an entirely new kind of emotion all together.

I had been worried that I wouldn't get that, that bonding rush. That instant flood of love. I really needn't have worried. It took a few moments before I could see you, as I was lying down on the operating table unable to move, and the nurses had you behind me. I kept pleading with your dad "can you see her? can you see her?" It must only have been a minute or two but it felt like forever before the midwives handed you to your dad, and he showed you to me. He held you against my chest, close to my face while I struggled to be able to support you.

I had thought you would have fair hair, or no hair, as both your dad and I had really blonde hair when we were little. But you had a shock of very dark brown hair and eyes the colour of mushrooms when you blinked up at me, unfocused and amazed.

The moment of your birth is such a sacred time for me now. A time when those moments when I touched your impossibly tiny hands and cried and told you over and over how much I loved you in front of your dad and that theatre full of strangers are vivid in my mind. The moments when you made me a mother.

Our bond was instant and beautiful and has only grown since then. Now you're big enough to fling your arms round me for a hug, to sit on my knee and read stories, to hold my hand while we walk outside. It's hard to believe sometimes that my big girl was that tiny baby with the mushroom coloured eyes and tiny, grasping starfish hands. The one I felt move inside me all those months.

And it's funny, but as long as I keep hold of those moments - as long as I remember how much I love you - parenting becomes so much more straightforward than it can sometimes seem. I love you. We're in this together.

And now you're waking up, so it's time to go.

Have a wonderful day, birthday girl!

I love you forever and ever.

Mum x