Letter To A 28/29 Month Old – Last Letter To An Only Child

Dear Ameli,

I’m a few weeks late with your 28 month letter – so late, in fact, that it’s nearer to a 29 month letter now, but I really wanted to write to you one more time as an only child. I suppose technically you haven’t been an only child for almost nine months now, but you’re just not aware of it yet. While Daddy and I have been making space in the home and our lives, hearts and thinking for this new baby, you’ve been blissfully unaware of how everything in your world is about to change.

While we’ve been doing everything we can to prepare you, not only for the birth, but by including the baby into our conversations, and referring to him/her whenever we could, and you’ve been kissing and cuddling my belly and helping prepare wardrobe and clothes and so on, I just don’t think you have the faintest idea of what’s about to happen to your life.

I am having very mixed feelings on the whole thing, myself. My feelings about the baby are firmly in place.  I can’t wait to add to our family and I’m really looking forward to the birth of this child. I’m looking forward to the birth and the having… but with the new comes change, and saying goodbye to the old, and the old is you and me. The old is the attachment between us. The old is my heart being solidly wrapped around you.

I find it hard to imagine that my heart can be stretched further. Becoming your mama has changed me so much that I barely recognise the ‘self’ I used to be. I feel so disconnected from the ‘her’ in my life before you.  This is the new reality, this is the new me… and I wouldn’t give it up.  Don’t get me wrong. My life before motherhood was fantastic, but I didn’t know what I was missing. I didn’t know that life could feel like this. And right now, I can’t imagine a love that can be this great for two children, but I am assured by many that it is. And I take solace in the wisdom of the women and mothers who have gone before.

Perhaps. But I can still try, right? I can still parent equally, despite the headstart in love that I have for you. Despite the lead you have in experiences, and in the wonderment and joy you’ve given me. Know this – I will love the baby, and s/he will become as wrapped by my heart as you did and are.It is my hope that you will have peace in retrospect, that in years to come you won’t have regrets over things you’ve done or felt or said with regard to your sibling. It is my hope that you two will know love and kinship, and that you’ll find in each other the other half of a whole.  Are these too lofty goals? Am I hoping for the impossible? Perhaps.

But you will always be my first born and I will always love you as my first born and our journey of newness will never end. Your first will always be my first, and your place in my heart is so deeply wrought, nothing will ever replace that.  Add to it, definitely, and baby’s firsts will be my firsts with a second child too, and while baby is born, the mother to two children is born, but neither of your places in my heart and my life are threatened by the other.

We’ve trusted nature to conceive you, to carry you, to birth you. We’ve let nature lead in raising you and we’ve trusted primal instinct (and a lot of research) in getting you this far, so lets trust together now in nature, and instinct, a bit more research and a whole lot of Divine intervention to make this transition a smooth one for us .

Ya Olo Ora, my baby girl. It means always and forever.

Mama