For my Daughter

Dear my beautiful daughter - 2.7.25

I don’t know the shape of your hands yet, or the sound of your laugh, or the way your eyes will search for mine when you’re tired or scared or wanting to be held.

But I already love you in a way that has rearranged the entire architecture of my life.

I have loved you across nine long years of not yet.

Nine years of hoping and breaking, gluing myself back together and hoping again.

Nine years of watching empty space as if it might grow into you if I stared long enough.

People think longing is passive.

It isn’t. It’s a full-time job.

It’s a heartbeat you listen to in the dark when no one else knows you’re awake.

It’s loving someone you haven’t even met more fiercely than some people love the ones they hold every day.

My girl,

there were nights I whispered your name into a room you weren’t in yet.

There were days I talked to you in the car as if you were strapped safely in the backseat

listening to me hum.

There were moments I felt you in the quietest parts of me, not as a fantasy, not as a wish, but as a truth I haven’t lived into yet.

I want you to know something before you ever take your first breath:

You were never an accident. You were never a “maybe.” You were never a backup plan.

You were chosen long before you were possible.

You were the reason I kept fighting for a body that kept giving me “not yet” instead of “here she is.”

You were the reason I softened again even when life had taught me to stay hard.

You are the love I refused to give up on even when people told me to “be realistic,”

even when doctors spoke in numbers instead of possibility, even when my own chest felt heavy with disappointment I couldn’t speak out loud.

My girl, I need you to know this:

I didn’t wait for you. I prepared for you. So intentionally.

Every time I started another day, another month, another health battle, another year without you, I have been carving space inside me for the day you arrive.

I don’t know when you will come. But I know you will.

I feel it the way I feel my own pulse.

And when you finally make your way earthside

whether by birth, or science, or miracle, or a path I haven’t imagined yet,

I will hold you in my arms that have known both grief and glory

and realise that every moment of waiting was part of how I learned to be the mother you deserve.

You are not late. You are on your way.

And I will keep the light on for you every single day until the moment

you find your way home to me.

I already love you with all of my being,

And when you are born, more than you will ever understand.

I love you my darling girl,

Mum xx