Temporary? Insanity

I cannot stop wondering who you will be. Once here, you will spend much of your life asking yourself that same question (if you’re anything like your soul searching mama anyway). As I await your arrival my mind is bursting with such questions. Some are simple and mundane. What colour will your hair and eyes be? Will you be worryingly thin like Emma was or full of dimples and rolls like Becca? Will your name seem right once we whisper it in your presence? Will you sleep as your sisters never seemed to? How will you like to be held? How will it feel to have the weight of you in my arms and feel your little breaths as you snuggle against my chest?

I wonder so much more than that. I wonder who you will be. I wonder what expressions I will someday see dance across your little face. I wonder what will delight you and what will make you afraid. I wonder if you will be joyful and exuberant or quiet and contemplative or something in between. I wonder what mix of characteristics will meld together to make you, not Emma, not Becca, but Claira. I wonder if I will remember to seek to know you as you are and not compare.

I know already that I love you and will come to love you more in heart stretching ways. I have had so much time already to love you in. Perhaps that is one reason for the path this pregnancy has taken. Why I have had to lie here alone so many weeks and days, contemplating the life that is you. Perhaps this time has been a gift and not the punishment it sometimes seemed. I have been given time in which to welcome you, apart from the hustle and bustle of real life and motherhood. Transplanted to this other life where you have been my main concern. Perhaps we both needed that, you and I.

And who will the “we” of us be? How will we love? Who will I be to you? What will we teach each other?

We will spend your life answering these questions. And I hope we will answer them together. That I will be kind enough, open enough, loving enough, that you will want me to join you on this journey. For a time, anyway. For a time. But no time, no limit to my love. Whatever my faults and foibles as a mother, please know that.

Love always,

Your Mum