The precious gift of being able to miss.

I love all of my children with a white hot love. I remember my first night with my first-born. A difficult but successful birth - a baby who lived. I was high on motherhood and morphine so those early hours are blurred but, as dawn rolled into the room, I remember watching my tiny son in his plastic bassinet and thinking, "I would kill for you." It was a foregone conclusion that I would have died for him. That choice was made the minute I knew I was pregnant. But having him there, next to me, my mama-tiger was roaring, prowling - ready to fight. White-hot love. Fortunately, I have never had need to test that strong, primal feeling but it is still there - for all four of my babies.

Many of us with rainbow babies have written about the fact that we, probably, would never have had both babies, if our dead child had lived. That is almost certainly true for us - although when I said so to Dave, he said that maybe Toby would have been my "stamped feet" baby - the "let's have one more" child. Or, as my sister calls it, my "Oops-a-daisy baby". Maybe, we were always meant to have him somehow. Look at him - he's gorgeous. So alive. How could he not ever have been? How could I not love him with every last atom of my being ? ... and yet, if I hadn't had him, I wouldn't have known him to miss him. I find that so strange and unsettling.

When Emma first died, both Dave and I questioned the adage "It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." Some days were so hard and so painful and so raw that we wondered if it might have been better not to have had our third child. If we had never known her, we would not have been able to miss her with such gut-wrenching profundity. But that thought was fleeting. More often I recognised that her being in my life was -and is- a precious gift. To be able to miss her every day is my connection to her, my opportunity to mother her. A testament to the deep, abiding adoration I have for my tiny, beautiful baby girl.