... like:
The family who followed my son and I into his trampolining class, last week. Daddy, little boy, little girl and mummy - proudly pushing 10 day old baby girl. Baby girls will always give me a pang. It was the briefest of pangs because she was gorgeous and sweet and DIFFERENT. Not my baby. That makes a difference these days. What hurt for longer - what still hurts - was the hungry look in my son's eyes. He's seven. It's not fair.
...like:
Coming across her name as I'm marking exam papers - or your baby's name. Because, even though the exam scripts I'm marking are from 11 year olds - giving them first dibs on the names really, I still consider those names OUR names, chosen with care for the babies we love so profoundly. I have to be careful not to overmark all the Emmas I encounter - not to give them extra marks for simply giving me the pleasure of seeing her name written in girlish scrawl.
... like:
Taking Toby "swimming" (dandling him in slightly warm water for all of five minutes, whilst he ponders it all very seriously - as is his wont - before he considers my skimpier than normal attire an open invitation for a snack and attempts to dive bomb my breasts!)
I take him out of the pool, wrap him in a towel and feed him. Milked up and exhausted, he falls asleep in my arms and I'm BACK, back in the hospital room when the midwives handed her to us. She was wrapped in a towel, her hair was still curly-wet fuzz from amniotic fluid and her sweet little mouth was a little slack - not from milkdrunkeness - but from death. I don't see her in him so often these days. He is almost 18 pounds with the cheeks and the thighs to match. He is so alive and so substantial and so very much himself but, in that moment, she was there too. Which is good and painful and confusing, all at once.
