Six years ago my girls were born, weighing 6 lbs 2oz and 6 lbs 14 oz, in the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford. They arrived in the morning, after a longer than expected labour that tipped us out of February 28th and into the novelty of the 29th. I looked down into the sleeping faces of two tiny babies, and then up into the kind eyes of the midwife, and I silently told her there had been a terrible mistake. These weren’t my babies.
Looking back, it is easy to see how it happened. How impossible it seemed, after the trauma of my first set of twins, that I could ever leave the hospital with two living, breathing babies. What better defence mechanism for a mother already so broken by grief, and so convinced that it lay once again around the corner, than to build a wall around her heart to prevent it from breaking even more?
I can see all that now. Back then, I saw nothing. I felt nothing. Just a terrifying detachment that dragged me through the weeks that followed, with nothing to distinguish one day to another. I watched myself laugh and smile and care for three children, as though watching a woman on television playing the part of a mother. I broke slowly. Silently. Invisibly.
This morning I watched my daughters open their presents, and my heart swelled in my chest until I could hardly breathe. The love I feel for them is so real I can see it; smell it; taste it. It consumes me. The love of a mother isn’t always instant, but once it is born it never dies.