The Best Valentines Day present…. Ever!.

There’s a lot of talk about visualisation and making things happen, and feeling the positivity and faking it ‘til you’re making it, and although I’m not renowned for having a glass-half-full, there WAS a time when I actually believed it could be if I wanted it hard enough.
 

My heart-shaped gift aged 9

 I knew I wanted to be married before I was thirty.  I ju-ust scraped through that one.  Hmm, maybe ‘scraped’ is the wrong word to use, considering it ended up a bit on the injured side after a few years (‘injured’ not being in any way an operative word, you understand.  I’m being metaphorical and figurative, which I am.  A lot). And, aided in no small part by my mother’s incessant guilt-trip that she was “married and had two kids by the time she was ‘my age’” I also knew that I wanted to start having children before I was 32. At the latest.

That year I’d had hideous food poisoning at the end of January and I’d even had the doctor OUT to me, it’d got so bad.  I’d been so wracked with the sicking-up and not being able to eat anything that I’d actually been bleeding from both ends (I know, tmi…) and it turned out I had the same Streptococcal thingy that the Queen had also had.  It’s the circles we moved in, I think.

Anyway, a few days after ‘things’ were calming down, I was still off work and I was in my familiar ‘recovery’ position (i.e. on the sofa, feet on pouffe and GMTV on telly).  And I had this image.  In fact it was stronger than an image; I actually ‘felt’ this small human curled over my back like an over-enthusiastic shoulder pad, her little body breathing in and out and the weight of her warming up the top of my neck.

That was the moment I knew it was time to have my daughter.  She was ready.  I was ready.  It was going to happen even though I’d never, in my entire life displayed any signs of maternal instincts whatsoever.  In fact up until then children scared me and I’d always gone out of my way to avoid them.

And after the question of “Is there anything I can get you?” returned this monumental decision,  I managed to convince my husband that we’d probably be ‘trying’ for a child for a good few years – it took my mother nearly six to conceive me -  I think he visualised himself launching headlong into a condom-free-sex fest of near-decade proportions. So I guess he had every right to look a little po-faced when I announced I was pregnant after a fortnight of ‘trying’.

Which had happened on Valentines night.  And I knew this because when we… um… ‘celebrated’ my Birthday only 8 days later, it “felt” different.  And I knew I was pregnant even then. 

And even though I went through the entire pregnancy calling my massive belly ‘Harry’ and buying blue babygro’s (mainly to placate the shell-shocked father-to-be) I knew she was a girl.  I knew she’d be beautiful, I knew that she would become the best friend I’d ever have and I would be eternally proud of her.

Happy Valentines/Conception Day my gorgeous girl x